Cheater Cloth Quilt

My version of cheater cloth--a whole-cloth quilt of my hand-dyed cotton stitched along the design lines then bound. A styling blanket for a sweet young thing--my friend Oliver.

BTW, I did take a week off from my sketch a day--just too much going on--but I'm back. Here are some recent sketches:

In case you couldn't tell, the bottom one is my TV when it's off. :-)

Unproductive productivity

Had a busy week with the kids although it was hectic at home. Spent a day in beautiful Northampton, MA (above is the view of the back of the main drag--I think it's even more interesting than the building fronts), did an architecture program at Wistariahurst in Holyoke, had a sleepover with three extra kids (amid newly painted walls and an impassable kitchen) that included the new Spiderwick movie (which was quite well-done, although, as one of our young critics said, "They got everything wrong!), a blizzard, and games with friends (I highly recommend Lost Cities if you like a good, quick--less than 1/2 an hour--two-person game).

Poor kids--they had a lot of fun but too little sleep. Combined with the chaos in our house that really brought home the reality of the move for them. They've been a little fragile this weekend, but looks like they're on their way back up. Catching up on sleep was the best medicine, along with lots of hugs and talking.

Ah, the joys of compartmentalization

Went away for a lovely, relaxing weekend of good friends, good fun, good food, and good (at least on their part) conversation with our friends (and tons of snow--just look at it all!) last weekend. There was yoga and strong coffee, loads of fun kids, calm music, sanctioned coloring on the walls, a new (to us) game called Niagara, and a recently un-snowed hot tub. There was also a gorgeous full moon making fascinating shadows and the warm glow of kitchen windows on the snow (below).

Everything was great--so great I literally forgot all about the rest of my life currently, which is, I suppose, what a really great vacation does for you. When I say "forgot," however, I really mean forgot. Like it didn't even cross my mind until I was getting out of the car that the next morning four guys were arriving to paint all the trim as well as the dining room, the kitchen, the hall and the bathroom ceiling. OY! I almost turned right around to drive the three hours back to our friends'!

Instead Bob steadied me and we raised all sorts of dust and used all sorts of muscles moving furniture to the middle of rooms, clearing off surfaces, packing up boxes, etc., so that when the guys arrived we could turn over the house to paint and mayhem, capped off on Tuesday by the guys, who were highly competent in every other way, leaving the refrigerator unplugged.

Small Pleasures

So both my beloved sewing machines were packed away for a month.

During that time we have been emptying the house by the boatload, Freecycling and carting off to Goodwill furniture, toys, clothes, old computers, etc., in an effort to make our house look roomy and perfect despite the fact that we still live here. All in the service of getting the best price on this end so we end up with a lovely home with a great studio space in Kingsport or Johnson City, TN, where we will move at the end of June.

Well, let me tell you, a month is a very long time, and I was in serious sewing withdrawal. Such serious withdrawal that very simple things I generally despise, like mending my youngest's fabric headband and pants and my oldest's favorite skirt, gave me a fix. And making one of the two Round Robin projects currently on my plate nearly sent me into raptures.

There is something intensely liberating about having the sewing machine up. Available is nice, but up means at any moment I could sit down and take off. The potential is so great. And it seems my brain is hard-wired to that availability. With the sewing machine in its case and the table put away I was totally focused on the practical and the mundane and was feeling very disconnected from my creativity. But since putting my machine back up (even though I've had very little time to use it) I am awash with ideas, with possibilities that need to be reality.

Potential.

I even started what I hope will be a new series of small quilts called "Words to Live By." I began with a wonderful photo of my friend Anoushka and created an abstract image:

When it is done this will be entitled "Insight Joy."

Sketch-a-day

Week 1: Complete! (more or less).

I left out my one totally unsuccessful sketch, but I learned from it when NOT to use brush pens.

Didn't sketch on Tuesday because my meeting with the Belchertown Cultural Council filled my sketch niche that day. (The BCC is one of 329 local cultural councils in Massachusetts. We get to approve--or decline--small grants funded by the Massachusetts Cultural Council that make cultural activities more accessible to Belchertown residents.)

In a trade-off, however, I did choose a more challenging subject (at least for me) for Wednesday, and worked on it today as well:

So, on a scale of:

"I'd rather poke my eye out with the pencil"
+
|
|
|
|
|
+
"I *heart* sketching,"

I'm hovering between "It's sort of satisfying to draw something recognizable" and "It actually does get easier (almost) every time," so it seems to be working

On another note:

"Night Life" (see the "Thinking Outside the Frame" post) is now for sale at the Fiber Art Center for $465. If you like it, call them and buy it!

Thinking Outside the Frame

I've begun mounting most of my work and have been very happy with the results, primarily because my local framing shop (Valley Frameworks, Amherst, MA--no website, sorry) is amazing and always up to whatever challenge I set them.

I had trouble with this piece. I hadn't left enough fabric to turn the side edges to the back and didn't want a binding to flatten the edge. I also didn't want to kill the vertical line with a traditional frame. I was at Sharon McCartney's studio and couture designer Andrea Zax asked me the all-important queston: Why don't you just frame it on two sides? An excellent question!

"Night Life"
University of Massachusetts Fine Arts Center and Library
Copyright 2008 Cindi Huss.

Sketch-a-day Pledge

I bit the bullet and am going public with a pledge I made to myself (so that I can't just unmake it) to make a sketch a day until I don't hate it anymore. I nearly broke the pledge yesterday after only a day, so . . .

Mug is graphite stick, hole is brush-tip artist pens, and sushi bowl is golf pencil.

No Pain, No Gain

Cliche, yes. But it's cliche for a reason.

I enjoy working intuitively, and I love abstracts for their ability to directly convey my intent, but I want to be able to work figuratively as well so I am not limited by my skills--or the lack thereof. So I keep pushing, trying to get my head and my hands around new skills.

My friend Pascale and I were talking about sketching the other day. She's a great sketcher and a smashing tapestry artist. Me, not so much with the sketching (and not at all with the tapestries), but I have to develop the will to go there.

I told her how I surprised myself with the sketch in the "Inspiration in Strange Places" post. I didn't do such a bad job, even though I wasn't actually trying too hard. (Perhaps that's why it wasn't bad.)

She assured me that I'd be able to repeat my success. I was dubious but hopeful. I'm sure she didn't think I'd take the "repeat" part of her statement literally, but . . .

I did the first sketch with a ball-point pen. I did this one with an 8B artist's pencil. Other than the fact that I can't draw a straight line to save my life, it's not bad again. Even has some believable "reflections." I plan to do one in brush-tip pens from the sketch rather than from the photo. I think it will be interesting to see if that "abstracts" it a little.

So this confirms the advice my friend Gwyned gives her students all the time--pick the thing you fear the most or like the least and do it--it's the thing you'll learn the most from.

Brrrrrrr!

"The Bather" by Andrew DeVries
Coolidge Park, Northampton, MA

Never had much use for butternut squash . . .

. . . but these are great!

Monday was Martin Luther King day, so the kids were home, and it was the one day this week that we all felt fabulous. The youngest had a friend over and I got inspired to try the recipe for these little delights and they went over really well. My youngest dubbed them "muffcakes" because they're muffins but good enough to be cupcakes. Plus they have icing, so there you go.

Then the week went downhill for the kids (who both ended up with strep), particularly my oldest (who developed an allergy to her medicine, which resulted in--so far-- two days of bodywide hives).

So I've been in domestic goddess mode (have no expectation of getting any art work done, but have been cooking and tidying and taking care of the children). It's actually been very revitalizing for me, a nice pause to think and reflect, but oh the poor kids!

Anyhow, made a second batch of these muffins yesterday because one butternut squash is enough for two batches--but mostly because they're really yummy! Hey--waste not, want not!

So, the muffcakes are really Jamie Oliver's "butternut squash muffins with a frosty top." This recipe is definitely a keeper. I did have to make a couple of modifications because my kitchen isn't outfitted the way his is and I use American measures (previously known as English 'til they went all metric--not that there's anything wrong with that):

1. 400 g squash is about a pound, 350 g. brown sugar is about .875 pounds, 300 g. flour is about .75 pounds, and 175 ml of oil is about 2/3 c. At least those are the equivalents I used and it worked out fine.
2. I buzzed the butternut in the food processor but had to break out the mixer for the rest because it wouldn't all fit in my processor.
3. I had no extra virgin olive oil, so I used canola oil instead.
4. I had neither lemons nor clementines nor vanilla pods on hand so I made a thinned-down version of brown butter icing instead (recipe below). It's very nice and doesn't overwhelm the surprisingly delicate flavor of the muffcakes.

About brown butter

Brown butter is a Pennsylvania Dutch staple that I learned to make from my husband's family. Apparently also used in fancy French cuisine, but I wouldn't know about that.

The idea is to brown the milk solids. When the butter melts, the milk solids will separate from the ghee. The milk solids are what you would strain out to create clarified butter. However, we're going to leave the solids in to create something even more wonderful!

So, melt your butter.

There is a little extra water in almost any butter, but the cheaper the butter the more water will have to boil off. This will happen with fairly loud largish bubbles.

Swirl your butter around regularly so the solids don't burn. Pretty soon a fine foam will develop and the solids will start to go a bit golden, which might be hard to see because of the foam. Keep swirling.

The butter will start to get a beautiful nutty scent--that's one of the signs you're almost done. Keep swirling. You want the butter to all go golden brown, including the foam, but stopping too soon is better than stopping too late. Plain melted butter is better than burnt butter every time!

Brown butter is killer on green beans, carrots, asparagus, mashed potatoes, and baked seafood. And it makes for a mighty tasty frosting, too.

Brown butter icing (modified for the butternut squash "muffcakes")

Put 1/2 a pound of confectioners sugar in a mixing bowl. Add a splash of vanilla and a pinch of salt.

Brown 1/4 c. of butter in a skillet on medium heat, swirling periodically until done.

Pour brown butter into mixing bowl and begin mixing. Add about 2 to 4 T. milk and mix well to make a thin glaze. (Optional: Add a Tablespoon or two of maple syrup if the spirit moves you.)

Let the frosting set up a bit, give it another good mix, then frost the tops of your 24 muffcakes.

Brown butter icing (original recipe for cakes)

Put 1 lb. confectioner's sugar in a mixing bowl. Add a splash of vanilla and a pinch of salt.

Brown 1/2 c. of butter on medium heat in a pan, swirling periodically until done.

Pour brown butter into mixing bowl and begin mixing. Add 1 T. of milk at a time (up to about 4 T.) and mix well until you get the consistency you want. Frost cooled cake. Generously covers a 2-layer cake, a 9 x 13 cake, or 24 cupcakes.

If you put it out there, they will find it!

Late in December I rec'd an e-mail from a therapist in Oakland, CA asking to use an image of my quilt "Labyrinth" on a direct marketing piece. What a neat surprise! Well, I sent her a contract, she sent me a check, I sent her the image, and the result was lovely. Kudos to her graphic designer.

I've asked several times because I'm dying of curiosity, but she hasn't said how she stumbled across my website, but if you check out her website you can definitely see why the color scheme in this quilt spoke to her!

Inspiration in Strange Places

Currently my whole family (but most notably my youngest and I) are engaged in hiding rubber rats where they will get the best reaction. (The rats, left over from this Halloween, replaced the spider rings, left over from the previous Halloween, we were using.) They've shown up in stacked cups, on the bristles of hairbrushes, on the nozzle of the liquid soap in the bathroom, etc., and I suspect DH has been disappointed at my not wearing my slippers lately.

The other night I read before bed while curled up in a ball because the bed was freezing. When I was done reading I turned out the light and stretched out . . . and found a clammy rubber rat with my feet. In all fairness this was in retaliation for my stuffing one under the lid of the electric toothbrush, so . . .

Since my youngest doesn't read my blog I'll confide my next target--the pocket of her winter coat. Left one in her sneaker this morning that she will have found at school since it snowed and she wore boots on the bus. My oldest is the next target--working on the best way to surprise her when I'm not around.

We are easily entertained, my husband more than any of us. He makes spinners from paper straw wrappers and thinks the little wad of stickum on magazines is a great toy. A couple of months ago I went into the bathroom to find the recently replaced bathtub plug "planted" in the soap dish. It just screamed "Bob was here."

Well, I found the composition oddly compelling. It had light, it had shadow, it had reflections.

Since one of my current goals is to explore light and shadow (a gap in my education and experience) it seemed serendipitous. So I snapped the photo and have begun. Even did a sketch though I usually avoid it. Gave me some great ideas about where to go from here.

I've been enjoying some handwork, as circles are the easiest of all shapes to applique. Very zen.

Meanwhile I'm clearing up after the tornado that was me finishing up an article for American Quilter. Keep your eyes out for it--it's a how-to on two ways to audition your quilting design on paper before you even baste. Once it's been published I'll post it on my website (www.cindihuss.com) with a link here.