Though the aircraft has now landed, I don’t want to unfasten my seat belt-not yet. I am no stranger to an occasional list in my gait, due to the side effects from my meds, but this hesitation has nothing to do with staggering.
Simply put, the glow from the inferno which has consumed me for five days, is too sweet to relinquish yet. I am still radiating from my unparalleled success, in creating something for Gluten-Free Mama of an artistic nature; I simply want time to stand still while I live in the moment.
I once told my sister JT that if a week ever went by without me posting on my blog, hard times must be involved. Therefore, this past week-sans writing-is a pleasant change from the norm, as if there were ever a norm, in that the gap in the writing was due to positive influences.
When I use the phrase above, “unparalleled success,” I refer not to art which society would deem worthy, but to my own goal, which was to tickle Gluten-Free Mama’s fancy, something I have been preoccupied with since 1981. More than that, however, was the personal joy I experienced at being able to do something genuinely artistic, a joy only once before attained in my 65 years.
I achieved this joy by sculpting a rabbit out of clay, back in the summer of 1993, using a picture from some unimportant source. Taken out of context, it all sounds pretty mundane, but I am the guy whose idea of producing art while growing up, was to duplicate maps of existing countries, continents or counties. I drew maps because they were the only thing I could draw that came out looking the way I wanted them to.
A sketch of a dog should not look like a blotchy replica of a porcupine, or maybe a possum. The jury is hung up and asking for permission to adjourn to the bar. In any case my illustrations did not look like dogs. My horses were deformed dinosaurs; my cows were curdled and my cats were rats.
When it came to using my hands to sketch or paint, fergeddit. And yet, halfway across the country, while engaged in an Art-Connects workshop at the University of New Mexico, art truly connected for me. I would confide in you that I wept, were it not for the sheer embarrassment of being so easily moved.
A rabbit? Nonetheless, I had accomplished something that had eluded me for the first 40 years of existence. I had awakened the right side of my brain.
Now, assisting me in this process over the past week, was black lime, a strain of indica that we grow on-farm. I use it exclusively when I work the soil with the pitchfork, to help deal with discomfort. Like all pain meds, black lime has side effects. In addition to helping deal with discomfort, primarily from back issues leaning over my work, black lime provides fortification in the creative process.
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| The pattern I chose |
Figuring I was going to need all the help I could get, I went so far as to twist up a couple of phatties before I even googled “log-cabin quilt patterns.” Originally I was thinking of something considerably simpler, but when I explained that to herself, GF Mama mentioned casually that what she would really like, was more of the wood-play I had engaged in, when the two of us were doing the finish-work on the dining room in 2010.
I had repurposed about forty feet of 2-by-6 redwood, previously employed as eaves on the original cabin, and ripped it into inch-and-a-half-wide, by three/eighths-of-an-inch-thick strips. I had then used these strips to decorate the inside of the bay window, that stretched three-fourth’s of the way across the north-facing wall of our dining room.
What I had to work with this time around, was pine siding that I stripped off from behind a set of cabinets that had been in place for 35 years. I had a like-quantity of redwood that been acquired in exactly the same fashion, that was originally on the exterior of our 16-by-20 cabin.
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| Figuring it out-the redwood all runs the same way. |
As both a Virgo and a possessor of a Great Depression mentality, when it comes to reusing materials, I was already on-course for astro-plane mode. When options included a task of Herculean proportions, with corresponding rewards, astro-planing went to a new level: It bounced writing right off the chart, when it comes to taking the right side of the brain out for a stroll.
Examining the different options for log-cabin quilt patterns took exactly one “press return,” for one pattern to seize my attention. I spent from 10:30, when I got up one evening, until almost two in the A of M, examining the first pattern I encountered. After doing some [exclusively] mental calisthenics, to figure out a materials list, I came up with:
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| 9, 7.5, 6 and 4.5 inches long |
96 pieces of wood, 1-1/2 inch wide by 9 inches long, 48 pine and 48 redwood
96 pieces of wood, 1-1/2 inch wide by 7 1/2 inches long, 48 pine and 48 redwood
96 pieces of wood, 1-1/2 inch wide by 6 inches long, 48 pine and 48 redwood
96 pieces of 1-1/2 inch wide by 4 1/2 inches long, wood, 48 pine and 48 redwood
96 pieces of 1-1/2 inch wide by 3 inches long, wood, 48 pine and 48 redwood
96 pieces of 1-1/2 inch wide by 1 1/2 inches long, wood, 48 pine and 48 redwood
That’s 576 pieces of wood.
I was completely off in my calculations, naturally, actually needing 144, nine-inch pieces of wood, and only 64 of each of the rest, but who’s keeping track, anyway? Not this retired language arts teacher, that’s for sure. I will be honest though, if I looked at that picture of the pattern I used, long enough, I could have come up with dozens of materials lists, all of them different. The colors all seemed to blend into one another.
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| The shorties |
I will also say that once I started laying out the whole thing on a four-foot by eight-foot piece of plywood, it took me four hours to figure out what direction I wanted to take. There are infinite numbers of ways the pieces could have been assembled in a pleasing manner; the key was to choose one and run with it.
With Gluten-Free Mama house-sitting in Willits, and gone for an entire week, I not only took the right side of my brain out for a walk, I let it off the leash. Those days were 16 hours-plus, each one, but fueled by a knowledge that what I was working on, would be something I could truly leave behind as a legacy.
You see, GF Mama doesn't quilt anymore, so I figured I would try my hand at it.
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| One log-cabin quilt, installed |
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