Albers' Bluest Blue

In a previous post (Inspired by... Josef Albers), I wrote about my first encounter with the work of German born visual artist Josef Albers. Albers' work on color, particularly in his book Interaction of Color, emphasizes color's relativity and instability, capacity to decive, ability to evoke different readings in different contexts. Intensity, placement, boundaries, recurrence, and extent all influence how a color is perceived and how it interacts with other colors in a composition. Albers wants his audience to learn to see how colors can act and relate to one another. His method "places practice before theory," and aims to cultivate sight that is closely linked with imagination and fantasy.

My Homage to Albers: Bluest Blue

I am eager to learn from Albers for my own work as a quilter. The first of Albers' practical exercises I chose to quilt is an exercise in color intensity, specifically in perceiving brightness (Interaction of Color pp. 16-17). Albers' years as a teacher taught him that it is a relatively easy matter to train a group of artists to perceive light and dark gradations uniformly. But when it comes to brightness? It's not so simple.

We each have different preferences, different tastes, and colors we just don't like. Our preferences change with mood, or with stages in life. A color we can't stand one year, we may fall in love with once we begin to truly understand how it works, how it interacts, what depths and heights it is capable of (browns, anyone?).

Albers sought to cultivate this understanding by having students sort "all possible shades and tints within a hue" and then choose the hue they considered "most typical": reddest red, yellowest yellow. The study I chose to reproduce is Albers' rendition of an exercise in choosing "the bluest blue."

Josef Albers' exercise in color intensity - brightness: "the bluest blue"

My quilt, pictured above, doesn't reproduce Albers' tints and shades exactly, but I tried to replicate them as closely as I could with the colors I had in my stash.

Albers states, somewhat enigmatically, that "the most typical hue...is placed within the group accordingly." That is, we're supposed to be able to spot it based on its prominence within the composition. My eye - in Albers' composition and in my quilt, is drawn to the third blue from the bottom. Is it a coincidence that looks like Duke blue to me?

improvised quilt back

For the quilt back, I used scraps from the blues used on the front of the quilt along with a variety of whites and off-whites, including scraps from the background fabric I used for the quilt top. I improvised the piecing to create a modern composition that re-scrambles Albers' sorted tints and shades. My off-grid composition was pieced in five columns of uneven widths. These widths were largely determined by the size of the scrap I was using, a wonderful constraint that minimized planning and let serendipity rule the results.

detail of echo quilting on quilt back

For the quilting, I echoed the blocks on the front of the quilt. I used the upper feed dog on my walking foot as a guide for spacing the echo-lines. This method yielded quilting lines that are roughly 1/4" apart. I absolutely love the textured effect from the dense quilting (see detail of quilt back). That said, the quilting was a labor-intensive process requiring many hours to complete. The dimensions of this quilt were 51" x 60". It would have been difficult to complete wrangle a larger quilt using this method on my home machine.

In my next post I'll share a work in progress (aka "how I fell in love with browns"). In the meantime, happy quilting, crafting, reading, painting, dancing, writing, digging, building. And enjoy this beautiful spring day!

Punctuation

I am a volunteer Crisis Line Advocate for the Durham Crisis Response Center. This means answering calls from individuals who are seeking help in situations of domestic violence or after experiencing sexual assault. A recent shift left me without words. The callers had described horrific situations, and I felt I needed a nap to release some of the tension. But as I lay in bed, I could not sleep. Instead, my mind kept picturing a single image - a giant exclamation point. Sometimes in the face of brutality and intimidation, that's the best I've got. But then I want to do something.

The giant exclamation point turned into an idea for a quilt (detail on left). My nap was over before it began, and I raced downstairs to start sketching and cutting.

In case you worry that I neglected my needed self-care in this time of stress, a clinical study by Dr. Robert Reiner, commissioned by the Home Sewing Association, found that sewing is more relaxing than reading a newspaper, playing cards, or painting. We get in our flow, cortisol goes down, dopamine goes up. Without it, I'm a total stresscase. I used to get relief from running and kickboxing, but I've been rehabbing a knee and glute injury for many months now. Sewing it is.

I decided to design the quilt in black and white, and cut a pile of 6" squares from each. Some I would leave blank, to represent the missing words. On others, I would center a single punctuation mark. I began with the basics - exclamation point, question mark, comma, period, colon, semicolon. I expanded my scope to include quotation marks and apostrophes, brackets and parentheses, en dash and em dash, ampersand and ellipsis. With a nod to the digital age, I included the hashtag, at-sign, forward slash, AND back slash.  A caret and asterisk (thank you Origen) for editing. But now I had run out of marks.

I arranged my empty squares and punctuation marks in a tentative layout on the "design-sofa" (I don't have a design-wall, so I use the couch) and called my son in to consult. His first reaction was that he wanted this quilt. He is a young writer, and a grammar nerd to boot. How could I say no? His second reaction was that there was too much empty space. We needed more punctuation. Where would we get it? Where else? The internet.

A bit of speed-googling led us to into a world of nuanced excitement. The ElRey mark, proposed by one Ellen Susan, conveys roughly half the force of an exclamation point. It is named for Ellen's dog, who "was a master at communicating feeling with graceful understatement." So if you, a person of dignity and restraint, abhor the overuse of the exclamation point in texts and emails, but nonetheless wish to convey your moderate enthusiasm, this one is for you.

If you lack enthusiasm and instead trade in sarcasm, irony, or uncertainty, there are marks for you as well. My renderings appear below. Counterclockwise from upper left are: 1) Alcanter de Brahm's irony mark; 2) Herve Bazin's doubt point, introduced in his 1966 book Plumons l'oiseau; 3) Card Chronicle's "don't take that too seriously" mark; and 4) the patented SarcMark, to make sure people know you meant the opposite of what you said, and not in a nice way.

These marks completed our quest for punctuation. For the border, I used pandas, in honor of my favorite punctuation book, Eats, Shoots, and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. The book's title is based on a grammatical joke:

"A panda bear walks into a bar and orders a sandwich. The waiter brings him the sandwich. The panda bear eats it, pulls out a pistol, kills the waiter, and gets up and starts to walk out. 

The bartender yells for him to stop. The panda bear asks, "What do you want?" The bartender replies, "First you come in here, order food, kill my waiter, then try to go without paying for your food." 

The panda bear turns around and says, "Hey! I'm a Panda. Look it up!" The bartender goes into the back room and looks up panda bear in the encyclopedia, which read: "Panda: a bear-like marsupial originating in Asian regions. Known largely for it's stark black and white coloring. Eats shoots and leaves."

Incidentally, overabundant commas have been known to induce violent behavior in college professors as well.

Birds join the pandas in the upper right corner of the quilt, in honor of Bazan and because birds are punctuation in flight. Together, the pandas and birds form a giant right bracket.

Punctuation quilt top

My son wanted black for the quilt back, but I didn't have quite enough. I used the black that I had along with white scraps from the quilt top and other black and white prints from the scrap bucket. I pieced improvisationally, which is my favorite way to work.

improv backing

For the quilting, I chose cursive writing. Using a white thread that alternately disappears and reasserts itself against the white and black background, I wrote out the first lines of one of my son's literary compositions, "Mute." The piece is an emo-magical-realist vignette about a young man who has ripped out his own voicebox. Though he narrates in the first person, he expresses his deep pain at his inability to speak what he feels. "Mute" symbolizes my son's own frustration at how hard it is to put thoughts and feelings into words when they spin so fast and far. It was a perfect pairing with my own speechlessness with which this quilt began.

cursive quilting

Ampersand, frozen

 If you think you noticed some ink blotches on the quilt top, you are correct. I prewashed all my fabrics, but made one critical mistake. I appliqued the ampersand from vintage 1930's trim, and did not think to prewash it. When I washed the finished quilt, the ampersand bled profusely. #%$^@!

The quilt went in the freezer while I took a trip to the store to get dye-catcher sheets and special detergents. Seven washes later, some, but not all, of the ink came out. The sarc and irony marks took a beating in the process. But my son, God bless him, likes it just as it is. He says the ink blotches remind him of the imperfection of writing. And maybe it's ironic - or just appropriate - that the irony mark still can't get the respect it deserves.

Carolina Blues

Carolina Blues quilt top

For a recent quilt guild meeting, we were told to bring a small quilt sandwich on which to practice hand quilting. To prepare something quick, I sat down one evening with a pile of fabric strings - those long skinny strips of fabric that get trimmed away at the end of a project - and started sewing them together. Then I started cutting the pieced strings into 10" squares. On a whim, I cut those squares into quarter triangles, and began experimenting with ways to put them back together.

I found that with two 10" squares cut into quarter triangles I could make two different blocks: one a set of nesting squares, above, the other a striated cross, below. My hand quilting, as it turns out, was abysmal. I'll be needing a lot of practice before I go public with that. I ripped out the offending stitches and finished this little trivet, pictured, on the machine.

string piles

In the meantime, I was intrigued by the design, and wanted to see what kind of optical effects would be created by piecing sets of matching and contrasting blocks together in a quilt.

In case you'd like to try it for yourself, I'll share the steps. It's a very easy way to use up odd pieces of fabric. While working with small strings can be time consuming, the actual piecing is a cinch. For those who are experimenting with improvisational quilting, this technique offers a great balance between improv and structure.

For the larger quilt, I thought green might be a bit overpowering, so I decided to work with blues. I live in North Carolina, and my household is divided between Duke and Carolina. So, naturally, the quilt would have to combine broody Duke blue with ebullient Carolina blue. To give definition to the design, I decided to alternate between dark and light strings. The dark strings I chose were shades and tones of blue violet, cerulean, blue, and turquoise. The light strings included pale blues, violets, aquas, and pinks as well as a variety of neutrals in gray, white, off-white, and tan.

In general, strings were between 1" and 2". I preferred the visual effect of narrower strings, but I felt that variety was also important. To reduce waste but leave a comfortable margin of error, I trimmed the strings to around 11" before piecing them. I then pieced them together along their long edges, always starting from the same end. This yields one end that is fairly even and one end that is irregular.

A string-runner?

For lack of a better term, I'll call the resulting stretch of pieced strings a "string-runner." In the process of making this quilt, I made some very long string-runners - ranging from 40" to 100" long. To keep the runner from taking over the table as it grew, I rolled it up like a sushi-mat to the left of my sewing machine.

10" square blocks

When the string runner seemed long enough (i.e., when my back hurt, my pile ran out, and/or I got sick of sewing strings together), I took it over to the ironing board and pressed all the seams in one direction. In my opinion, there are WAY too many seams to press them open at this stage. Later, when piecing the half-square triangles together, it is helpful to finger press the center seams open to reduce bulk at the points.

This looks nothing like grilled cheese, but my choice
of similes suggests that I might be hungry.

After pressing the string runner, I first cut the runner into 10" widths. Then I trim those into 10" square blocks. Next, I cut each block diagonally into fourths, like a grilled cheese sandwich. You can see in the picture on the left that the resulting quarters have two different patterns. If you were to arrange the triangles with the hypotenuse at the top, one pair would have horizontal stripes, and the other pair would have vertical stripes.

Working with two blocks at a time, I swapped out two opposing quarter triangles from one block for two opposing quarter triangles from the other block. This has the result of grouping all the horizontal stripes together in one block and all the vertical stripes together in the other block. After piecing four quarter square triangles together to make each block, as shown on the right, the resulting blocks, like the green ones above, share the same fabrics but have two different patterns.

The next step is to square the blocks. They should each form a 9" square. It's especially important to remove the little sticky-out triangle flags that form off the corners. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you'll know it when you see it! Trimming off the little sticky-out triangle flags (that's the technical terminology, right?) makes the piecing much easier.

This is the tricky block: lots of stretch along the edges

When it's time to piece blocks together into rows, beware: the blocks like the one on the left will want to stretch. The blocks like the one at the top of the picture on the right will not want to stretch. When you piece them to one another, extra care is needed to keep the rows lined up properly and ensure that your points match up from block to block.

There are all kinds of ways to play with these blocks and to let them play with one another. The arrangement I chose, featuring eight rows of nine blocks each, is pictured below and at the top of this post, in two views of the completed quilt top. (The math will tell you that I had nine blocks leftover, and these will probably turn into a mini-quilt).

The alternations of light and dark in the strip piecing allow the nested squares to recede and advance, creating movement and depth. The piecing also creates a diamond grid, allowing the eye to shift between focusing on diamonds, squares, and crosses in a playful optical puzzle.  

If you try out this technique, I hope you will share your creations. Sky's the limit.