Greetings from the White House

 

"Greetings from the White House"  Fabric Postcard  6" x 4.2",  Hand embroidery,  fusible applique, machine quilted.   Created for Project Quilting Season 12 challenge "Fussy Cut"  

The challenge this week is "Fussy Cut",  which in quilting means to carefully cut fabric so that a particular motif is centered in part of a block.    Here is a traditional sample:

Another version of fussy cut is to carefully cut around an image to applique it onto another piece of fabric, a technique called "broderie perse".  

I started this challenge on January 17th, just 3 days before the inauguration of  Joe Biden as our 46th president, I knew that I wanted to CUT the current occupant OUT of the White House. 

So I started with an embroidery of the White House: 

(and yes, for those who know me well, there are 2 shades of gray floss because I started with a small bit of gray and ran out!) 

Next I found a clip art image of a man falling, and redrew it to look like 45,  cut him out as a black silouette then placed him on his signature ridiculous hair. 

I placed him at the base of the White House, as if he was falling or being kicked out.  

I used Steam-a-Seam II fusible, which is slightly sticky before it is ironed down, allowing for rearranging these elements during design phase. 

Since I plan to make a series of these "Greetings from..." postcards, I printed the words in various fonts using Spoonflower services. 

The dark blue shapes are there to provide value contrast for the letters "The White House".

I've also fussy cut a US Flag from this piece of fabric. 
The flag is a little too large, but its what I had on hand. 

When selecting that dark blue, I found this piece of fabric, and realized it looked like the fireworks, that exploded over the capital the night of the inauguration, January 20th.  So I prepared a small piece, then fussy cut fireworks to place above the White House. 

I used a grunge white fabric for the letters, to look like white marble.

Here is the layout before quilting. 

I quilted through this piece and the Timtex so its stiff like a postcard.   Then added cardstock to the back before finishing the edge with a zigzag. 

When photographing I realized the top of the letters HOU were lost against the white banner, so I simply drew in a blue border with a pen. I wouldn't do this on a quilt that was going to be washed, but this is a postcard!

- - - 

After the election in November 2020, with the drumbeat of the conspiracy theorists, stoked by #45, there was some concern that he would not actually leave on January 20th.  The insurrection on January 6th made it clear that there were enough people following this line of un-reasoning that the peaceful transition of power was not guaranteed.   In the end, he left with a grudge by not attending the inauguration of the next administration.  Good riddance! 

The people of the United States, using the peaceful power of the vote, cut a wannabe tyrant out of our government.  I worry about all his followers. I hope that we can somehow regain a shared understanding of facts.  But I don't see that path today. 

More than ever, peace, 

Paula 

 

 

Keep the Birds in the Air

"Keep Birds in the Air"  12" x 8.5"   Machine pieced, and fusible applique,  Hand embroidery,  pulled thread 'feather', machine quilted.       

Completed on 2/23/2020 for Project Quilting challenge "Birds in the Air"


The lady's hat industry in the late 1800's caused or nearly caused the extinction of multiple beautiful bird species.  In 1896,  the near extinction of the Snowy Egret caused some high society women to petition for legislation to stop the killing.  This lead to the Migratory Bird Act.

more information at this article at Smithsonian Magazine:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-two-women-ended-the-deadly-feather-trade-23187277/


Now about this project:

The challenge requirement was to use this traditional quilt block: 

There are many ways to set this and use it, and of course, I wanted to find a political message for my project.  I thought about birds, and had recently heard a podcast about the black market trade for particular bird feathers - in this case they are being used for fishing lures, but the real decimation of our bird populations happened because of ladies hats. 

I started with some images of lady's hats like these:

I traced off a hat shape, then added the quilt block behind.    Notice that the "Birds in the Air" blocks change color when forming the hat (brown and tan)  than when they are in the background (blue and white) 

Next I pieced the larger triangles of the block and created a background that looked like this - again, notice placement of brown/tan  vs blue/white: 

I knew I didn't have the patience or the precise sewing skills to piece all the tiny triangles, and I've been enjoying using Lite Steam-a-Seam 2,  so I started laying in all the small triangles and then the contours of hat like this: 

Once that was all done, the hat was not really visible, so I embroidered an outline and then started embroidering the feathers.  After 3 days.  the resulting feather was SO unsatisfying that I decided to take it out.  But here is it (as promised) for posterity: 

                             

Going, going.... 

Gone! 

What I really wanted was a large white feather,  so I appliqued then machine quilted this feather, and it was almost right: 

On Sunday morning, drinking my coffee before binding the quilt, I saw an online tutorial for making fabric feathers, and I was thinking, 'man!  my sister would love those'.   Then I headed to my sewing machine to wrap up the quilt - because the post was due in an hour.  But those feathers!!   

I tried doing it, but didn't have the right fabric.  I resigned myself to just binding this and finishing and then it HAPPENED. 

The right fabric poked its head out of the piles I have sitting on the side of my cutting table  (my VERY  neat, VERY  organized, VERY ………  oh who am I kidding .... the mess I have all over my sewing space )    So I did some quick fabric feathers,  sewed them down, and voila!   FEATHERS! 

We are abusing our natural environment. We rape the land, the sea, the animals for our venal purposes and resist out of comfort, misguided sense of superiority, stubbornness, inertia any attempts to curb our consumption.   The land suffers.  The sea suffers.  Animals suffer - some all the way into extinction,  some to brink.   People suffer too.  We formed democracies to pull us out of the cruelty that is monarchy and yet are failing to truly consider our neighbors' pain in our life. 

Its just a hat.  Put something else on your head that doesn't cause such pain. 

Those feathers belong on the birds in the air.  Shoot them with a camera. 

Plastic bag bans are not going to kill us.  Start carrying a reusable bag.  Its LITERALLY the least we can do.  

Lets do more. 

Peace, 

Paula 

Heartless

"Heartless" - manipulated fabric, hand embroidery, machine quilted.  8"x8" .  Completed on February 9, 2020  for Project Quilting "Put a Heart on It" challenge. 

I first imagined this as a whole body, with the heart ripped out, and then every drawing just cropped closer and closer to this chest piece.  

I drew a heart on this heavy cotton fabric, cut it out and basted in 4 layers of red fabric behind it.    After clipping the red fabric, I pulled back one layer slice at a time, securing it with embroidery floss.  I wanted to give it a look like the heart was ripped out (or just exploded out.) 

I machine quilted some of the cruel statements by this president:  "knock the crap out of him", "blood coming from her everywhere", "close the border",  "people are stupid",  "I like people who weren't captured".  We won't soon forget these statements because of all the art being made to capture it and preserve it for the future. 

I created a shirt collar and then this out of proportion long red tie which I tacked in place. 

The cruelty is the point with the monster in the White House, and frankly all those who stand by and say nothing.  The GOP is complicit in this evil and at this point all we can do is vote them ALL out in November.  I'm so sorry for all who will be harmed in the intervening months.  

I am an unapologetic liberal Democrat.  

Peace, 
Paula 

Liar Liar

 "Liar Liar",  Large wool pants, hand embroidered, extra long red tie, custom measuring tape to read the chart data.  Created for CUNY Graduate Center Data Visualization class, December 2019. 

The current occupant of the White House lies.  All. The. Time.  This is so far beyond 'politics as usual.'  When he was inaugurated in January 2017, the Washington Post started tracking his lies in their Fact Checker Database and as of October 2019 he has lied over 13,000 times.  In comparison Obama factually lied 18 times in 8 years.   I'm not talking about exaggerations.  These are factual lies.  Trump lies more in a single day than Obama lied in 8 years.  Here is the link, read for yourself: 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/

I'm in a class this semester titled Fundamentals of Data Visualization ( for a Master's degree)  and most of the work is done using a tool called Tableau.  But I'm a textile artist, so I have to do it this way. 

First I collected the data off the 
Washington Post site.  Although I asked for a downloadable file, I was not able to get that, so I manually recorded monthly data (32 months) in the various categories recorded at WaPo. 

Next I entered this data into Excel, then combined the categories into 4 - because I learned in my class that less is more.  



I worked with the data in Tableau, creating a stacked bar chart and I wanted it to look like flames.  Although I knew I needed Yellow, Orange and Red colors, I had to refer to a piece of flame clip art to get the colors right: 

Then I had to create a scale to transfer the stacked bar chart into centimeters of embroidery stitches.   I tooked the highest and the lowest data lines (October 2018 and February 2017) to make sure they would fit on the pants and look reasonable.   My scale is 15 lies per centimeter.  I used formulas in Excel to create my pattern: 

I found these pants at a local Salvation Army Thrift Shop, looking for pin-striped men's suit pants in as large a size as possible.  The pin stripes helped keep my data lined up and also gave it that old-timey businessman look.  I started embroidering on a Saturday evening, and this project was due in class 12 days later.  

Floss colors to get this to look like flames:

Marking the data lines using tailor's chalk and centimeters on a ruler:   

Chain Stitching in the 4 colors.  The wavy lines are random as I wanted to keep on the right side of the pin stripe at the top and bottom of the line.    

Adding the month abbreviations to the hem.  (oops- what happened to MAR?)  There was lots of unstitching going on. 

Here is the legend, where you can see how all the categories from WaPo are grouped and translated into the 4 colors I stitched.    (Note:  My data goes from Feb 2017 to October 2019 - the Washington Post continues to update this database, so it is possible there are more categories now.) 

 I stitched the title of the piece on the waist band, and this hangs using 2 hangers, drawing attention to the waist size.   I also made the extra long red tie, which if I get a chance to hang this again and photograph it, should be sort of waving off to one side, rather than hanging down between the pant legs   (OR, if I can make that tie again i would make it twice as long, so it puddles on the floor) 

This tie is in response to class feedback where one classmate wasn't sure who 'he' is.  So following the lead of so many editorial cartoonists, I use the super long red tie as shorthand to indicate that this is Trump, like this: 

In Tableau, the graphing software, outlier data can be annotated with a call out text box.  Since so many people wanted to know what happened in October 2018 to generate so many lies, I created this 'price tag' shaped text box, that connects via a string and is stored in the pocket. 

"Midterm Elections - 1189 lies" 

That's nearly 40 factual lies each day in the month of October, 2018.

No wonder we are fatigued.

The final element created with this piece is the lies measuring tape.  I considered including a regular tape measure with the pants, but my scale is 15 lies per centimenter, which is hard for the audience to interact with.  (How many lies is 13 centimeters??)   

So instead I created a scale in excel, which I carefully sized so that the 30 lie tickmark would be at the 2cm mark on a ruler. 

I printed this in sections using inkjet printer fabric, then constructed a 1500 lies long tape measure: 

Visitors to the piece are encouraged to measure any line they wish to discover how many lies in that category he made in that month. 

Also, in proper data viz scholarship fashion, the tape measure includes my data source, the Washington Post web site. 

We are all tired of the lies and the shame this liar has brought to our institutions and reputation around the world.  At the time of this posting the Democrats are impeaching this President, however its clear the GOP in the Senate will acquit him.  Shameful.   We will have to vote him out in November 2020.  Vote them all out.  All those senators who normalized this level of dishonesty.  I can remember disagreeing about policy with voters who supported the other side of the aisle.  But I can't remember a time that felt like this - where one side lies so blatantly, and its casually accepted.     

Liar Liar Pants on Fire ! 

We won't forget. 

  

Executive Time

Fabric 'ransom' note. Letters cut from various fabric, glued, then machine quilted into place.  Size: 11"x 6".  Completed on March 4, 2019.

"Trapped at Boarder.... send cash, covfefe, hamberders and blondes!"  

This piece was created for the Project Quilting week 5 challenge: Abecedarius. 

Although I like doing handwork, and especially embroidered words, I knew that the tight timeline to achieve this challenge meant doing something a little different.  I had the idea to do a collage-style ransom note, for someone trapped with a request for chocolate (because I knew I had fabric with the word chocolate on it.)  But my friend Kimberly pushed me towards doing a political piece, and even suggested some of the final phrases. 

First, I gathered some fabric from my stash that has words on it: 

I started cutting letters out of the fabric:

Then glued each letter on the background: 

Finally I machine quilted around each letter and in waves below each line of text: 

The name "Executive Time" refers to the 'down' time the current occupant of the White House spends watching TV and tweeting each day.  I imagined that he would be writing these kinds of messages during that time.  Its full of his ridiculous misspellings and immature desires. 

I can hardly wait for the end of this era. 

Peace, 

Paula