Showing posts with label doodling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label doodling. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 20, 2022

Phone Call

 

Quilt No. 141
January 2022

You never know where a mere drawing will take you.  In this case it took this quilt all the way to Quilt Canada’s National Juried Show 2022.

I like to doodle while I’m talking on the phone.  Since my rational brain is taken up by conversation, the doodles I make are far more varied than the ones I actually “think” about. After I’d amassed quite a few of these during my Tuesday night phone calls with my sister, I thought it might be interesting to see if I could cobble them together into a cohesive whole. I also thought this might be a good subject for the guild’s challenge - to do a monochromatic quilt.  That’s a quilt that’s made from one colour and its variations. These two criteria proved to be ridiculously challenging, akin to climbing Everest in bedroom slippers and a tiara.

First came the design, where I took all the doodles I wanted to use and, using tracing paper, fitted them together onto a large sheet of grid paper. I kept moving the outline shapes around. I also kept adjusting them into recognizable objects.  What can I say – in my mind anything abstract is simply an exercise in modifying it into a “real” object.  So, things morphed, and an apple and a globe and several other doodles from the first design did not make the cut as it evolved to include a dragon, an armadillo, a black fish, a school of fish, a snake, an alien, and even an embryo.  How all these items are connected is a story yet to be revealed. Even to me.

The monochromatic part did not work out, as I had begun using fabric that varied in colour gradation from pink to purple.  It worked so well for this design that I just gave in to it and turned my monochromatic efforts to another quilt, My Mother’s Cats.

To bring this quilt to life, it required an intense amount of detailed stitching, with satin stitching around many of the shapes and minutely spaced machine quilting over the entire surface.  A three-dimensional flower was finally crafted after numerous attempts, giving the quilt a much-needed focus. I filed all the failed flower attempts with my bedroom slippers and tiara, in the Probably Never Box.


Monday, March 27, 2017

Finding Mankind

Quilt No. 118
March 2017

This is one for the doodle addicted.  You know who you are.  You embarrass yourself at meetings as the doodle that began as a few innocent marks in the margin of your notes becomes cultivated into pages of swirls and triangles and leaves with veins and warts.  Harry Potter is defeating a Lord of the Rings dragon, and both are wearing top hats.  Suddenly, you snap back to reality in a quiet room.  All the faces around the meeting table are now turned to the bloom on your page.  The question the chairperson has directed at your deaf and doodling ears is a complete unknown.  You dredge up your best all-situation answer - “It could be possible.”  I’ve learned this the hard way.  Corporations frown on doodling.

The other circumstance that fosters doodling is the telephone call.  Meetings held on the phone are the worst.  At the end I must tease out my notes from the grip of butterflies.  Fish with large eyes muddle the key points and bubbles obscure the phone number of the key person I’ve been assigned to contact.  I’m also a home doodler.   I was talking to my sister on the phone when Finding Mankind found me.  She is unaware of my doodling ways, and I find it best to keep it that way.  At the end of the phone call I look over the doodles and then throw them away.  However, in this particular one I spotted a man.  He was difficult to distinguish from the background, just like mankind cannot easily be extracted from his environment - despite lofty thoughts to the contrary.  In this quilt you must look carefully. Eventually you too will find mankind.