Throwback Thursday: Weird Drawings

I found this stack of weird drawings in a folder in my file cabinet today. No idea what year they were made.

This one is my favorite. It looks like little microscopic creatures in motion. One appears to be losing an appendage, another looks like it burst open and is releasing spores.

This one looks like an explosion. All the drawings were done with an Ebony pencil. I like Ebony pencils because they are fairly soft, and you can get a rich dark tone.

I like drawing 'bouncy boxes' sometimes. They don't represent anything in particular, but they appear throughout my sketchbooks going all the way back to the 1980s.

Wordless Wednesday: Bicentennial Hooked Rug from Woodstock, NY

the orange rug

When I saw the orange rug in the installation of my exhibition, "Off the Grid, The Bill Volckening Collection" at the International Quilt Study Center & Museum, I thought, "How did they know??"

###

I'll tell you a little story...

The Peddie School in Hightstown, New Jersey is my high school alma mater. When I tell my West Coast friends about going to a "boarding school" they usually try to offer a few consoling words. Their idea of a boarding school is a home for wayward youth and juvenile delinquents.

I laugh first, explain later.

Peddie is an East Coast prep school, one of the top ten endowed prep schools in the United States. A $100 million dollar gift from Walter Annenberg, Class of 1927, boosted the school's endowment several years ago. Kids who attend Peddie are incredibly fortunate. Boarding student tuition for one year, 2016-2017, was $56,100. Not exactly a place to send kids for poor behavior.

So, now that we've cleared that up...

My senior year roommate in 1983-1984 was a guy from Elyria, Ohio named Tom Sabga. At the beginning of the school year we barely knew each other. By the end of the year we were friends for life. We lived in a small house dorm on the edge of campus called Rivenburg, third floor, center room. It was a privilege to live in one of the small house dorms, usually reserved for upperclassmen.

F.A. Towne, longtime science professor was our dormmaster. He lived on the first floor and cooked breakfast for the boys on Thursdays, his day off. Tom and I lived on the top floor in the smallest room, but it was the coolest. We decorated the walls with hippie tapestries and had old upholstered armchairs. There were antique brass ship lamps among other tchotchkes, and an orange rug from Sears.

When Mom and I went to Sears to look for rugs before the school year, there wasn't much of a selection in our price range. We didn't have a lot of money. Even though I was going to Peddie, my maternal grandparents footed the bill for that. There was an orange rug, and that was about all, but I was lucky to have that. Bare floors wouldn't do!

Our room turned out to be the social headquarters of the dorm that year, and the orange rug saw a lot of shenanigans. By the end of the year, the poor rug was trashed. We probably didn't vacuum it all year. I think we sold it in a garage sale, but I'll never forget it.

###

Before the installation of my exhibition at the International Quilt Study Center & Museum, I had no knowledge of the plan to include a rug and benches. As you can probably imagine, the installation photos with the orange rug made me very happy! Thank you to the museum curators and staff for an idea that was way more thoughtful than they could've ever known.

"Single Girl" as a Baby

Mandy Leins spotted this adorable crib quilt on eBay. I bought it because it's like "Single Girl" as a baby.

"Single Girl" is Denyse Schmidt's modern spin on the traditional Double Wedding Ring quilt pattern. The rings are touching but they're not hitched.

The crib quilt is similar, but the rings are not touching. It looks like it was made in the 50s or 60s, and needs a little TLC. I think there may be four rows, each three rings, since the dimensions are 28" x 53" according to the seller. Coming from Sparks, Nevada. Good eye, Mandy!

Best Use of Color

"Off the Grid: The Bill Volckening Collection" now on display at the
International Quilt Study Center & Museum, Lincoln, Nebraska

I was speechless when I saw these photos of my exhibition "Off the Grid, The Bill Volckening Collection" at the International Quilt Study Center & Museum in Nebraska. The curators, staff and volunteers did an excellent job with the installation and all the other details.

It was hard deciding which quilts were in and which ones were out, but I was happy with the selections. At first, I wasn't sure how the whole space would look. The one time I visited the museum was five years ago.

The orange shag rug and mod benches made me especially happy. So much strong color could make a person weak in the knees. It's good to have an oasis.

I saw a few exhibitions at the International Quilt Study Center & Museum when I first visited in 2012, and lots and lots of photos of their other exhibitions. All of them are beautifully done, but I think we may have taken the prize for Best Use of Color. For information about the exhibition, please visit the International Quilt Study Center & Museum website.

big hearted quilt

It's a good time for a big hearted quilt. That's what this one is. It's big, approximately 96" square, and it's covered with hearts...128 of them, to be exact.

All the hearts are appliqued using a zig-zag stitch. Each one also has a line of hand quilting around the edge. The heart blocks alternate with Nine-Patch blocks, and the Nine-Patches cleverly combine solids and prints.

The maker, or makers evidently had a wonderful sense of humor based on some of the fabrics chosen.  When I saw the Christmas holly and candy cane fabric, I thought of Andrea Balosky who famously used the craziest fabrics she could find.

The quilt came from an eBay seller in Buckeye, Arizona and it is another gem from the 1970s. I could stare at this quilt for a long time. What a nice thing to say about an object covered with hearts!

Vuja De

1970s polyester quilt now showing in the "Off the Grid" exhibition

"Did you ever get the feeling of Vuja De?" Johnny Carson once asked. It was the opposite of Deja Vu, according to Carson; the uncanny feeling that none of it had ever happened before. I always remembered the joke, but never more than today.

1970s polyester quilt now showing in the "Off the Grid" exhibition

The quilts of the 1970s quintessentially capture my childhood. The strange thing is I didn't have handmade quilts as a child. Nobody in our family made quilts. It was 2010 when I first discovered the quilts of the 1970s, and it was like seeing long-lost friends, except we never met before.

1970s polyester quilt from the Volckening Collection

The initial sense of familiarity was with the color. These quilts had a very distinct sense of color. It was really the first generation of fade-resistant American quilts. We were seeing them exactly as their makers and owners saw them.

1970s polyester quilt from the Volckening Collection

For a brief period in time, polyester double knit was the fabric of our lives. Polyester starts as a chemical solution before it is made into a fiber. The solution dyed fabrics, also called dope dyed or spun dyed, were exceptionally colorfast because the dye was added to the chemical solution before the fiber was produced.

1970s polyester quilt from the Volckening Collection

The history of polyester offered some science behind the color, but it didn't explain the new ways quiltmakers used color. Even when a quiltmaker used a traditional design, the end result looked much different compared to earlier examples.

1970s polyester quilt from the Volckening Collection

Color evolution between WWII and the middle 1960s was influenced by a number of factors, from the development of Technicolor and DayGlo to the psychedelic experience. The evolution was seen in television and film, art and fashion, and it was present in the quilts.

1970s polyester quilt from the Volckening Collection

People look at the quilts of the 1970s and see familiar fabrics from garments of the period. They see Uncle Robert's leisure suit or Aunt Donna's mini dress. When I first started looking at the quilts of the 1970s, I saw my formative color experience captured in geometric patchwork. What a thrilling discovery it was.