Page 31 of 125

An Afternoon with Roxanne Lasky

June 17, 2016 / jeanne / 4 Comments

I’ve long admired and adored the work of Roxanne Lasky from afar. Knowing that she lives in the vicinity, a couple of days ago, as we barreled down the road headed to Hilton Head Island, I sent her a facebook message asking if there was a fabric store or quilt exhibit I needed to see while we are here. Her response? “You’re passing right by us. Stop by. Lorie McCown is here, and we have wine.”

Now it didn’t work out for me to get over there in time to meet Lorie, but I did spent an hour and a half with Roxanne, her engineer Stu, and Miss Nellie at their beautiful home yesterday, and what a treat that was! I hadn’t been there 30 minutes when we were talking with ease about topics even the best of friends usually avoid – things like organized religion and spirituality. There are few things I enjoy more than meeting other cloth workers, seeing their studio, hearing their stories . . .

As far as art goes, Roxanne has done it all.

She’s sculpted

and painted

hooked rugs,
made traditional quilts,
owned a fabric store,
and done longarm quilting.

Honoring what beckons to her,
she found her way to houses

RoxanneLaskyJacketCloseup1

and art quilts.
Intuitive stitching, she calls it.

Roxanne makes jackets
that showcase her intuitive stitching.

This piece, that hangs in the bedroom,
is a collage of cloths she’s bundled,
rusted, and dyed, transforming
them all in one way or another.
She and Lori sometimes do collaborative pieces.
Their current collaboration is
on an indigo-dyed doily.
They’ve just begun,
and already it’s a sumptuous piece.

Roxanne is working on a series about
the erosion of memory
and in particular, Alzheimers.
In these pieces, Roxanne stitches
good memories of her mother
along with the sadness of remembering
her mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s
and her fear of developing Alzheimer’s herself.

RoxanneLaskyTheOtherOz1
Having grown up poor,
when her mother married
and found herself with enough pin money
that she no longer had to buy
somebody else’s cast-off shoes,
she indulged in her love of high heels.
New high heels.
This piece is called The Other Oz.
(Roxanne is as good at naming pieces
as she is at conjuring and stitching them.)
As you might imagine,
she finds it necessary to take
frequent breaks from the memory series,
stitching other, unrelated themes.

RoxanneLaskysTotems
This piece is her personal totem,
filled with things that
speak to her.
Things like
dresses, feathers, and birds.

A former special ed teacher and
an early contributor to The 70273 Project,
and, Roxanne recently met a fella who regaled her
with stories about his son
who has Down’s Syndrome and autism,
and she was so moved, she vows
to make a block dedicated to his son.

After a morning of thrift store shopping
with The Engineer and my mother
(I’ll show and tell you more tomorrow)
and getting to call Roxanne Lasky “Sugar” to her face,,
the sun set on what I’d be hard pressed to call
anything but A Mighty Fine Day.

Hearting Orlando

June 13, 2016 / jeanne / 1 Comment

On the lake,

some folks ski

Tubing
some go tubing.

Beach

and some stay on the beach.

MotorboatSpeeding

Some like to go fast,
while others like to putter along the edge of the lake,
looking at docks and houses.

CigarBoat

Some folks have cigar boats

kayak

some prefer kayaks

Pontoon
some like pontoon boats,
booze barges, my mother-in-law called them.

Biscuit2

Some folks leave their pets at home,
while others bring their Corgis.

On the lake,
we float over each other’s waves
and say not Dammit
but Wheee!

On the water,
we show consideration for each other
and obey certain rules of etiquette
to keep us all safe
while allowing us to enjoy the water
as we will,
each in our own way.

HeartCloud

For the life of me,
I don’t see why we can’t
live together on land
as we do on water.

Week 17 in Review (June 6-12, 2016)

June 13, 2016 / jeanne / 1 Comment

I’ve heard from people in 72 different countries now, and I have 1405 blocks in my possession. Thank y’all! Our Kitty Sorgen has set a goal of 2000 blocks in hand by July 4, so who’ll help us reach that goal? (Please leave a comment here or in the Facebook group.) I commit to make 100 blocks by June 26, 2016 – in 2 weeks – which is about the last date you can mail your blocks to be sure I receive them by July 4. Actually I need to receive them by July 3 because the post office is closed on July 4. Actually I need to receive them by July 2 because July 3 is a Sunday, and the post office is closed that day, too. How about this: please allow 7-10 days for your blocks to get to me.

It’s hard to know what to do. I’m a woman who works best with slits and deadlines. Structure. That’s it: I like structure. But this is a Slow Project, a Meditative Project. Laying down those red X’s is a meaningful act that brings up thoughts and feelings from the depths of my soul. To rush that is to lose that.

And yet, if there’s no plan, no finish line, will I live long enough to see all 70,273 blocks?

If you have ideas or suggestions, do tell me.

And . . . I received our first quilt on Friday! Here it is: Quilt 1 of The 70273 Project. It was pieced by Kitty Sorgen and quilted by MJ Kinman. As you can see, each block still bears its identification tag, and because of our comings and goings and the arrival and departure of guests, The Engineer and I won’t be able to make the label for another couple of weeks, and we can’t remove those identification tags until the label is made. Once that’s done, though, I’ll do a Great Reveal post, show you photos of the back, close-ups of the quilting, and list the Makers whose blocks are included. Isn’t it beautiful, y’all?

STICKY NOTE: NEW PROVENANCE FORMS

Oh, one more thing before I forget: some of y’all still haven’t returned your new Provenance Form. If you didn’t receive it in the mail, please let me know and I’ll resend OR download it here and send it back to me. And if it’s more convenience and if you’ll let me know before Sunday, 6/19/2016 (I have a free trial that expires soon, and I can’t afford to pay for the service after that), I can email you one that’s ready for your electronic signature, so you can open, complete, sign, and return. I really need to get those back in asap, so thank y’all for getting them on back to me so we can continue our forward motion.

SaveSave

What I Found Inside Envelope 20

June 10, 2016 / jeanne / 6 Comments

Little Luna, I call her, and I adore her. She’s the teenage daughter of a woman I love – a woman I call Moonglow – and these are her blocks. Little Luna’s, I mean. She shopped for her fabric at thrift stores, and she texted me messages and photos throughout the morning, taking me shopping with her. Here, in her own good words, is what she told me about making them . . .

Sometimes we forget that terrible things are done. When my mom told me about this project, I immediately wanted to conribute. I believe in this, I believe that no one should die by 2 “x”s on a piece of paper. We all have a right to life, even the imperfect and the youngest among us can teach and give to the world. No one should be able to take that from us!

What happened to these people was a monstrocity! The very fact that they just looked at a piece of paper and never looked in the eyes of the person they were sentencing to death shows their lack of humanity. I am infuriated by this. Someone thought “This child can not have a future. XX.”!!!

I chose to cut up soft worn fabric from donated clothes. The fabric was part of someone’s story. The “X’s” could have been an unseen hand ending that tale. Thank you, Miss Jeanne, for letting me help, and for reminding the world that everyone has a story and needs to be seen and honored.

Little Luna

Mail Call for The 70273 Project

June 9, 2016 / jeanne / 1 Comment

Getting heavily-decorated mail tickles me,
The Engineer, and our local post mistresses.
Tickles a lot of other folks along the way, too, I’m guessing.

A flock of beautiful blue birds
brought this package from Australia,
a box filled with – count them – 160 blocks.
Thank you, Glenda Williams!

Beautiful flowers adorn another envelope from Susan Getchell in Florida.

Lee Durbin sent another envelope of blocks,
this one decorated in patriotism, and it sparked
the idea to make five blocks a day over Memorial Day weekend
(which I did and well tell you about soon)
as a way of remembering and appreciating
those who died to prevent atrocities
like the one that murdered the 70273 people
we commemorate with The 70273 Project.

Just seeing Kitty Sorgen’s name on the return address label
makes me smile, so when I turn it over to see this,
it’s like getting a bonus.

Orderly, well-dressed felines
brought this envelope from Marie Johansen.

And this one from Tina Davis was just plain fun.
Included in her envelope was a piece of fabric
and a request for me to sign it
and become part of her signature quilt.

Sometimes I open envelopes to find jewelry on the inside –
like this uplifting note from Susan Guild

and this one from Samantha Kendig

and this exciting news from MJ Kinman.

Then there’s this creative postcard
from the talented one known as Della Monk.
It really doesn’t have any relation to The 70273 Project,
but it’s so much fun, there’s no way I could leave it out.

No matter how your blocks get to me,
I thank y’all for being part of
The 70273 Project
and making it such an enjoyable
and worthwhile endeavor.

Walking Diary

June 9, 2016 / jeanne / 1 Comment

The Engineer: Do you see the Rainbow Trout?

The Artist: Not yet, but would you just look at that heart and
that exclamation point sunning themselves right beside each other!

Then whoosh – in that snap of a moment,
I have my way into the piece I’m writing.
And I have my segue.

I declare: walking is as necessary to writing
as inhaling is to breathing.

A Cold Molasses Kind of Day

June 8, 2016 / jeanne / 2 Comments

Two nights with little (last night) or no (the night before last) sleep caught up with me today. The reason for the sleepless night is that my bedtime reading was a first-person account of the Holocaust, and her stories were even more horrifying than anything I’ve seen, read, or heard to date. By the time I gave myself permission to close the book, it was too late. The images and feelings were stirred and refused to be quieted. 48 hours later, they are still with me – especially imagining how The 70273 we commemorate must have been treated. I am not one to play ostrich and bury my head in the sand, finding that a dangerous act that paves way for atrocities, but I can now understand better than ever why some people make such choices.

Though there’s much to do, I decided there was nothing to do but move slowly through today and punctuate the afternoon with a nap.

So I first ironed the red fabric that Tami Kemberling donated to The 70273 Project.
Ironing flat pieces is much easier than ironing clothes.

Then I stitched a bit on a tenured Work In Progress,
a piece in The Rinse Cycle: Pivotal Epiphanies in a Woman’s Life series,
and marveled at how much I like the wrong side of pieces
sometimes more than I like the right side.
In high school, I made my dress for the senior prom
(Yes, I had that much personality)
and I horrified my mother and her friends
by choosing to make the wrong side of the fabric
the right side.
Only Ms Johnson thought it a daring and brilliant move
on my part.
In return, I found her a daring and brilliant woman.

Then I stitched a bit on the Storm at Sea quilt
I’m making for my boy, Kipp.
It is the never-ending quilt, to be sure
because I did the Jeanne thing
and opted to hand stitch each block individually
instead of quilting straight rows across.
I tried the straight across approach and felt it disrupted the magic
of this pattern, so I ripped it all out,
took a deep breath
and started again.
It takes about 12 hours to quilt an entire block.
Every now and then I count the blocks waiting to be quilted
and formulate a plan for reaching the finish line –
1 block finished on Monday and Tuesday;
2 blocks finished on Wednesday and Thursday;
3 blocks finished on Friday and Saturday:
and so on till I know what day I will be finished.
Then I take a day (or ten) off
and must devise a new plan.
My current targeted deadline is Christmas.
I might make that.
Might.

The Engineer, who refuses to take naps
and sometimes (thought not today, thankfully)
it seems he decides that nobody else will nap either,
busied himself rearranging the deck furniture,
bringing some furniture up from the lower deck
to find a new home on the upper deck
and presumably carting other pieces
down to the lower deck.
Both decks are rather small,
so I dread going outside tomorrow
to find (yet another) space that has that
just-moved-in look.
The Engineer doesn’t nap
and I don’t tolerate clutter well (at all).
Even after all these years, though,
we find a way to compromise
and live together with respect for
each other without completely abdicating our own selves.
We’ve become experts at choosing
which hills we’re willing to die on
and which hills to let go.
Some days that’s easer than others.
Every day it’s at the top of the list of things love must do.

Week 16 in Review (May 30 – June 5, 2016)

June 6, 2016 / jeanne / 4 Comments

It’s been a busy week, though not all the busyness is in The 70273 Project corner.

BLOCK COUNT
I now have 1342 blocks in my hands – up 126 from last week. This is great – fantastic, even – and if we’re gonna meet Kitty Sorgen’s goal of 2000 blocks in my hands by 7/4/2016, we’re gonna’ have to keep up the pace and maybe even step it up a little bit because we have to allow travel time for the blocks to get from you to me.

GEOGRAPHY
As for Sunday night, I’ve heard from people in 70 different countries. Keep spreading the word, y’all.

WRITING
Speaking of getting the word out . . . I penned a guest blog this week, and as soon s it’s published, I’ll sure let y’all know. I’ve also been asked to write a piece for every issue of The Blue Mountain Review (a.k.a. The Blue), which is part of The Southern Collective Experience – isn’t that fun? Clifford wants my first piece to be about The 70273 Project. Other pieces will be about Southern people and places and ways. Y’all stay tuned for more about that, too.

NEW PROVENANCE FORMS
The new Provenance Forms continue to come in by the hand full, so if you haven’t already, please take a minute to complete, sign, and return it so we can continue moving forward.

UPDATE TO PROJECT DIRECTORY IN SIDEBAR
Somebody on Facebook (I’m sorry and embarrassed that I can’t remember who it was, so I can’t let her know that I did it) asked me to include a link to The 70273 Project flyers in the sidebar. Whoever you are – thank you for the suggestion, and consider it done.

QUILT #1 UPDATE
Quilt #1 (pieced by Kitty Sorgen and quilted by MJ Kinman) has been quilted, and MJ and I are now figuring out how to do the labels I want.

OTHER QUILTS
Later this week, I’ll be boxing up more blocks to send to folks who’ve raised their hand to piece and/or quilt a quilt. (That’s why I need to get those new Provenance Forms back in.) I’ve said it before, and I’m saying it again: this project is filled with good, big hearts.

Y’all please keep making blocks and spreading the word cause that’s what it takes. Till next week . . .

SaveSave

How The Engineer Spent His Birthday This Year

June 4, 2016 / jeanne / 2 Comments

Yesterday Morning – 6.3.2016 – on the occasion of The Engineer’s Birthday . . .

The Artist: How do you want to spend your birthday?

The Engineer: I want to take you to that quilt show you just told me about that’s this weekend in Waynesville.

So we took a nice, leisurely drive over to Waynesville, NC

Shady Ladies Self Portraits

And attended the Shady Ladies Quilt Show.

The Old Rice Barn by Evelyn Case

The Old Rice Barn 2 by Evelyn Case

Crabtree Barn by Lisa Heller

The Engineer especially enjoyed the barn quilts

50 Stude by Marilyn Sullivan

and the quilt of the old car
(The quilt is not for sale, but the car is.)

At an even more leisurely pace, I shopped in the boutique, picking up some hand dyed fabric and a couple of other women’s UFO’s (I’m bad to do that) among other things like a quilted eyeglass case for my shiny new sunglasses and a quilted notepad for my pocketbook.

Later in the truck . . .

The Artist: I’m sorry I took my time looking around.

The Engineer: No need to apologize.

The Artist: But it’s your birthday, and I spent a couple of hours of it looking at quilts and shopping. That doesn’t seem right.

The Engineer: It’s really okay. I enjoy watching you look at things that really capture and fascinate you.

Now I ask y’all: Did I pick a good one or what?

(Remember when asked how he wanted to spend the day and he said he wanted to take me to that quilt show? Well, I did hear him mutter under his breath at the end of the sentence: “I’d rather get it out of the way today than to have to dread going tomorrow.”)

But still . . .

We went to eat at one of his favorite restaurants in Waynesville, a place we enjoyed many meals with his dad before he died. They gave The Engineer a free big ole’ scoop of ice cream. (And brought 2 spoons.)

And I came home and backed him that pound cake he likes so much. Even let him eat a lot of the batter (which really isn’t all that unusual, actually).

Happy Birthday, Andy. I really enjoyed your special day, start to finish.

Of course any day spent with you is special-with-a-capital-S.

It’s Her Birthday, and I Got the Gift

June 2, 2016 / jeanne / 2 Comments

Today is Nancy’s birthday,
and don’t you know that
She is The Gift.

the gift of laughter

and love

and reminders of what’s important and what’s not.

of being content with what you have and where you are
instead of looking for That One Special Thing
that will make you happy or make your life Complete.