The week before Easter, known around the Christian world as Holy Week, is known in Uruguay as Semana Tourismo. Mike and I enjoyed several days’ visit from a very dear friend Dennis, who we’ve known for about 60 years, and his friend, Anne, whom we’d not met before, but took and instant liking to. The weather was perfect, and we had a lot of fun catching up and getting to know Anne, who hadn’t visited South America before, while visiting some favourite places, consuming considerable quantities of Uruguayan wine and meat, and I was impressed that everyone managed to not overdo it on any occasion – and we also drank a lot of tea. Not surprisingly I didn’t do a stitch on my current work, and as I expected, after they left I turned back to it with fresh eyes.
This one is in a series of motifs sitting on distorted grids representing instability in the world around us, which I had tentatively named the Rules Based Disorder. While entering one of them into a call just before Easter, with two weeks of worldwide tarriff-induced chaos already behind us, adding to shipping chaos and talk of canals, security and so on, I suddenly hit on a better, perfect, title, for this series – “Out Of Order”, and I wrote the following statement: For many decades, the concept of rules-based order underpinned our personal, community, national and international networks. In today’s world, however, familial, social, trading and other networks are under social, political, financial, technological and climate change pressures, and some of those systems are now failing, they’re out of order.
I hadn’t quite finished quilting the gold painted squares before our visitors arrived, and was very aware that I still felt a lack of committment to anything for the infill quilting that I knew I’d have to decide on and do to finish this work. The black background needed to be flattened down a bit. Machine quilting in black looked really wrong, out of place, and I had absolutely no appetite for hand quilting in black on black (what I did around each square was quite enough of that!) and machine quilting in any colour would be wrong considering the hand quilted squares.
Why didn’t I just layer it all after printing the gold squares, and then do some quilting in cream/white stitching on those squares? Well that would have depressed the squares giving the opposite effect to what I wanted – which was something suggesting embossing… so to quilt inside those units would have defeated that goal.
These motifs above were stitched in the cream I’d stitched on the gold squares – but it was too bright and overwhelming. The square motif was right (upper right), because it relates to the pattern on the squares, but the thread colour’s wrong. However, I have some fine pale gold thread, which looks just right – visible and toning with the gold squares, while fine enough to definitely lurk quietly in the background.
These auditions of thread and motif including evaluation time, all took several hours over the weekend, but now that I’ve found the right combination, I can just get on with it over the next few days, and I’ll easily have it ready for the photography date I’ve already booked. These days I do my best to plan ahead a bit, to avoid the stress of a last minute rush to some entry deadline; and allowing plenty of time for the photography is part of that planning!