{"id":9195,"date":"2025-01-11T13:57:38","date_gmt":"2025-01-11T18:57:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/?p=9195"},"modified":"2025-01-11T13:57:38","modified_gmt":"2025-01-11T18:57:38","slug":"planning-mode-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/?p=9195","title":{"rendered":"Planning Mode, 3"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>So many ideas, so little time! With several important calls for entry in mind, plus visitors and possibly some travel looming in the middle months of the year, I&#8217;m starting some new works.  It&#8217;s really quiet in the neighbourhood, and many of our friends are along the coast or out of the country &#8211; with regular activities in summer recess. In a recent post I wrote a goal in my current planning: &#8220;<em>These new works need to reflect my current focus on texture and grids of a kind&#8230;&#8221;<\/em> and yesterday I spent quite a bit of time reviewing recent <em>and<\/em> early works <em>plu<\/em>s those all important samples that I never throw away. In the last few years I&#8217;ve photographed them as I went along and often posted them on FB or Instagram. But there are others &#8211; and I&#8217;ll go through the large tote-bag of samples to make sure I didn&#8217;t forget one snippet of an idea to consider.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Another important part of my process is to look through my Pinterest pins.<a href=\"https:\/\/www.pinterest.com\/alisonschwabe1\/grids\/\"> <strong>I have a board labelled &#8216;Grids!&#8217;<\/strong><\/a>, and from those 200+ images I&#8217;ve saved several in a Word document labelled &#8220;Grid Ideas&#8221; The images are cropped to capture just the <em>essence<\/em> of that particular grid idea, which also saves printer ink!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Why grids? <\/strong> A grid layout is perhaps the most prominent infuence in my art from the brief time I spent making traditional patchwork quilts. Next comes my love of pieced fabrics in basic geometric shapes, aka patchwork, and the use of hand stitched textures that I&#8217;ve loved since I was very young. Somewhere I reached understanding that a grid pattern represents order and stability. Ancient mapmakers and surveyors understood the importance of a grid as a framework of reference on direction and distance. Laws and social customs provide important written and spoken frames of reference for groups of people. In today&#8217;s turbulent world long-accepted frames of reference, those international agreements and laws plus rule of law in various countries, collectively known as <em>rules based order<\/em>, have begun disintegrating in some regions. Perhaps I heard someone say it&#8230; or maybe my mind started thinking of a wonky, crooked grid as a sign of <em>&#8216;rules based disorder&#8217;<\/em> &#8230; as recently I&#8217;ve made several small pieces with this title. There will be more off-kilter grids, and I&#8217;m aiming for lines and stitched textures to be messy, too &#8211; because as I wrote on October 24th last: <em>&#8220;A life can be long or short, and it can be a smooth continuum, but it is more likely to be untidy in places, occasionally punctuated by upheavals or mistakes at some points along the way. Fabric marked by stitches is a statement or an exploration of something on the artist&#8217;s mind, and, just like a life, a stitchery can have messy stops, starts and changes of directions, stitches or threads along the way.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Selecting, auditioning and deleting got the word document down to 3 pages which I printed off to take up to my workroom.  Those pages look like this one &#8211; <\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-full is-resized\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"500\" height=\"353\" data-attachment-id=\"9198\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/?attachment_id=9198\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/grid-idea-samples-blog.jpg?fit=500%2C353&amp;ssl=1\" data-orig-size=\"500,353\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;1&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"grid idea samples     blog\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-medium-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/grid-idea-samples-blog.jpg?fit=300%2C212&amp;ssl=1\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/grid-idea-samples-blog.jpg?fit=500%2C353&amp;ssl=1\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/grid-idea-samples-blog.jpg?resize=500%2C353&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-9198\" style=\"width:684px;height:auto\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/grid-idea-samples-blog.jpg?w=500&amp;ssl=1 500w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/grid-idea-samples-blog.jpg?resize=300%2C212&amp;ssl=1 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p>The above  examples uses only images of my own works, but the 3 sheets compiled from my research contains these and several more examples of how others have used the concept of &#8216;grid&#8217; as a <em>layout<\/em>.   It&#8217;s then up to me to work out how I&#8217;m going to use techniques I know and\/or love to combine them into cohesive works.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So many ideas, so little time! With several important calls for entry in mind, plus visitors and possibly some travel looming in the middle months of the year, I&#8217;m starting some new works. It&#8217;s really quiet in the neighbourhood, and many of our friends are along the coast or out of the country &#8211; with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[322,916,915,296],"class_list":["post-9195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-grids","tag-messy-stitching","tag-symbolism-of-order-and-stability","tag-working-in-a-series"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6uxpF-2oj","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9195"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9206,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9195\/revisions\/9206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}