[ Lost in the Landscape ]

the bamboo-inspired quilt is done!

I’ve posted occa­sion­ally on the progress of the quilt that Linda was stitch­ing to com­mem­o­rate John’s and my wed­ding last sum­mer. Last week the fin­ished quilt made it into my eager hands and I had to share.

The design was inspired by an art quilt by Liz Axford that I’d encoun­tered online, one of her Bam­boo Boo­gie Woo­gie series. And it hap­pened to be one that Linda had actu­ally seen in person.

If you stare at it long enough you can make out the lit­tle bam­boo stems with their joints. It’s nature abstracted, but the nat­ural rhythms still play out in the final quilt.

The back of the quilt fea­tures two inter­twin­ing bam­boo stems made out of fab­ric from two shirts that we liked so much that we’d worn them until they were thread­bare. Isn’t that the most roman­tic detail?

Thanks so much, Linda–We love the quilt and we’ll trea­sure all your love and effort that went into mak­ing it. The quilt will be hang­ing on the wall before the week­end is over!

May 23 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: isn't that the most thoughtful thing? • quilts • weddings | 7 Comments »

the quilt’s progress

I wrote ear­lier about Linda offer­ing to make a wed­ding gift of a quilt for John and me. I got word last week that all the squares were com­pleted, and Sun­day I stopped by to con­sult on their arrangement.

Here’s how the quilt looked in its near-final ver­sion as it was all laid out on her liv­ing room floor. Come on every­one, tell Linda how gor­geous her quilt looks!

Linda likes to live with these arrange­ment deci­sions before stitch­ing things together, and we had fun mov­ing a few blocks around, fine-tuning the arrange­ment. On the table in front of the quilt you can see the rough mockup I did of the quilt after scan­ning the fab­rics and play­ing a morn­ing with Pho­to­shop. It ended up being a great way to pre-imagine how things would look. The blocks are in dif­fer­ent places, but the over­all quilt looks a lot like the early sketch.

The design is based on a quilt by Liz Axford that was exhib­ited in the Quilt Visions quilt show in 2002. Enti­tled “Bam­boo Boogie-Woogie,” that quilt was an abstracted take on bam­boo stems.

Speak­ing of bam­boo, it was an inter­est­ing bit of coin­ci­dence that the night before I’d attended a con­cert by the Hill­crest Wind Ensem­ble, a band that John some­times plays in. The venue was the Neu­ro­sciences Insti­tute in La Jolla, a nice piece of archi­tec­ture by Billy Tsien and Tod WIlliams, with strik­ing land­scap­ing done by the San Diego County firm of Bur­ton Asso­ciates. The grounds fea­ture this amaz­ing long rec­tan­gle filled with golden bam­boo that must be my favorite sin­gle plant­ing of bam­boo any­where. (The plant­ing is even more impres­sive by day, but that’s not when I was there…)

The bam­boo con­nec­tion goes even fur­ther. The archi­tects of the Neu­ro­sciences Insti­tute designed an exhi­bi­tion at the National Build­ing Museum devoted to con­crete as a build­ing mate­r­ial. Part of the space included these forests of steel rein­forc­ing rods, rebar, that are used to strengthen con­crete. At least to my eyes the instal­la­tion bears more than a pass­ing resem­blance to the bam­boo plant­ing at the Neu­ro­sciences Insti­tute. Or am I just delu­sional? (This photo by Frank Oude­man [ source ] )

But back to quilts…

Linda’s house, like the home of many quil­ters, is a one-person quilt show, with lots of great exam­ples of her work. I’m a pretty visual per­son and I can always look at more cool things. It so hap­pened that the Quilt Visions quilt bien­nial was hap­pen­ing up the coast at the Ocean­side Museum of Art. That was an obvi­ous exten­sion to the after­noon if I ever heard of one.

Some museum exhi­bi­tions allow pho­tog­ra­phy in the gal­leries, oth­ers don’t. Unfor­tu­nately this was one of those no pho­tog­ra­phy ones. You’ll have to take my word that the show had a few drop-dead spec­tac­u­lar art quilts, as well as sev­eral that spoke qui­etly and revealed their secrets slowly as you looked ever closer at them.

It’s the sort of show that will either inspire you to take up quilt­ing or to intim­i­date you into giv­ing up all hope of ever mak­ing any­thing beau­ti­ful out of fab­ric and thread. Even though I have a Y chro­mo­some and quilt­ing isn’t typ­i­cally a guy thing, I think I ended up being inspired. Now, some­one please give me a few months of free time so that I can start up yet another obsession…

And here’s one final pic­ture. The museum was part of a civic cen­ter com­plex designed by the archi­tect Charles Moore. The very com­fort­able, human-scaled build­ings take their design clues from Irv­ing Gill, San Diego’s most dar­ing archi­tect of the early 20th cen­tury. Gill used the Spanish-inspired arches of this region and stripped them down to their essen­tial geom­e­try: tra­di­tion and his­tory meets modernism.

Part of the com­plex is the Ocean­side Pub­lic Library, and here’s the pond in front of it. Sorry, no more bam­boo, but what a ter­rific way to plant palm trees, each on its own lit­tle geo­met­ric island…

November 20 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design | Tags: bamboo • Billie Tsien • Burton Associates • concrete • National Building Museum • Quilt Visions • quilts • Tod Williams | 1 Comment »

botanical fabrics and quilts

One of our fab­u­lous wed­ding presents was the offer to make us a quilt. We could pick the design. We could pick the fab­rics. How gen­er­ous was that?

That got me look­ing at fab­rics in a totally dif­fer­ent way. One of the things I real­ized was how many of the designs had botan­i­cal ori­gins. Here are just a few of the plant-based ones that I found inter­est­ing. Some are fairly real­is­tic, some are so styl­ized that you have to look hard to see the botanical-ness of the inspi­ra­tion. But no mat­ter how abstracted from the orig­i­nal, the gar­den lives on in the fabric.

And after por­ing through all the fab­ric choices there was the issue of the design. There were so many options…traditional quilts, dou­ble wed­ding rings, strip and curves designs, water­color quilts…books and books filled with inter­est­ing designs. And then I ran across the online cat­a­log of the 2002 Quilt Visions quilt exhi­bi­tion at the Ocean­side Museum of Art here in San Diego County.

Liz Axford. Bam­boo Boo­gie Woo­gie I,60″ x 44″, hand-dyed cot­tons, machine pieced, machine quilted. [ source ]

The quilt looked like it wouldn’t be ridicu­lously dif­fi­cult to piece. How­ever, being an art quilt, it had lots of over-the-top labor-intensive details going on with it…stuff that to me looks like there’s hand dye­ing and pos­si­bly hand-printing involved. Unfor­tu­nately, the museum site didn’t list the specifics. And they didn’t even list the artist! I did see the print cat­a­log of this show, and I’ll post the artist as soon as I can research who she was. [Note: Thanks to Linda, I’ve got the cat­a­log in my hands, and I’ve now been able to fill in some of the infor­ma­tion the web­site lacked.] I found it inter­est­ing that the brief writeup in the cat­a­log said that she had been inspired by bam­boo, and that she was a mem­ber of the Inter­na­tional Bam­boo Society–You can really that influ­ence in her design.

For­tu­nately, what I was most inter­ested in was the con­struc­tion method. Commonly-available fab­rics could lend a sense of the orig­i­nal but also take the design into dif­fer­ent ter­ri­tory. I played with dif­fer­ent fab­rics com­bi­na­tions and ended up with a ten­ta­tive first draft selec­tion of thir­teen fab­rics, includ­ing two of the ones pic­tured above. And play­ing with the basic con­struc­tion method and enlarg­ing it I came up with the Pho­to­shopped mockup below.

At this point I’m just play­ing. I sus­pect that almost everyone’s first quilt attempts may not have a lot of sub­tlety to them, and I worry that this is a lit­tle that way. But like I said this is just a work­ing draft that will prob­a­bly change when looked at by a sea­soned quil­ter. What’s fairly easy to do on screen may be ridicu­lously dif­fi­cult in real quilt­ing life. And these are fab­rics thrown together from look­ing at them online. I’m sure that actu­ally select­ing real-life fab­rics will change the result.

But gosh all this is so much fun–You can eas­ily see why quilt­ing is a $3.3 billion-a-year industry!

September 01 2008 | Categories: art • gardening | Tags: botanical designs • fabrics • inspired by nature • quilts | 7 Comments »