What I did today

Yesterday, I finished the perimeters of the Torah Ties.  Today, I started on the backs, by cutting out the 5 battings.  Now I have to determine the placement of the strips on the backs.  I guess tomorrow I will really get started because I am more energetic mornings, I got distracted with other things.  Mainly blogging, ha ha.  I may have an energy spurt in the afternoon.  Maybe not.

Actually, I finished one of the backs.  A little wonkier than I would like but it is the back.

Nod to Nick or Variations on Chai

I was going to write about the Torah Tie Project, but I got waylaid. 

I was visiting Carmit in Preston, UK.  While she worked during the day, I wandered around Preston which has a museum/art gallery.  There I saw Nick Kennedy's "Dice Drawings". https://www.nickkennedy.info/dice-drawings. His premise is to decide on the medium, rules of engagement, and let dice dictate placement and use of media.  Long story long, his medium.  He made an "x" in the middle of the page, rolled a die trying to hit the "X", and where the di landed, he made a mark.  After many rolls of the die, and switching pencil colour, he arrived at his Dice Drawing. 

When I got home, I kept thinking about how I could use the premise - i.e. leaving the placement of stitches up to chance.  After contacting Nick and obtaining his permission to steal borrow his idea, I thought hmmm, how can I do this in textiles?

My rules of engagement were:

1,    to use fabric on hand.

2.    to give the piece Judaic content.

3.    to break the rules if necessary, me being the arbiter of necessity...

For fabric on hand, I had leftover dupionni silk from other projects in many colours.

For Judaic content, I thought "chai".  If I make the piece an 18" square, that's chai.  If I made the piece from 36 dupionni squares, chai again.  And if I use 3 dice, yet again chai.

How to choose the fabric colours and placement?  I didn't have 36 different colours but I did have over 18.  So I made a grid of 6 blocks across and 6 blocks down and identified each A1-6, B1-6, etc.

	1	2	3	4	5	6
A
B
C
D
E
F

If I used 18 fabrics, I could use each colour twice, the first in A-B-C 1-6, the second in D-E-F 1-6.  I hope you're getting the visual.  Just imagine each cell is 3" square (because I haven't figured out yet how to make the table yet.

OK.  So now how do I decide on placement?  By casting lots, obviously.  A Jewish tradition going back to the Torah. See Leviticus 16:8.  So I put fabrics squares for A-C in a bag, and slips of paper numbered A-1, A-2, etc. into a separate bag.  I pulled a square from the fabrics bag and a slip of paper from the papers bag and voila.  The colour and its placement on the grid.  The process was repeated for D-F.  So if I pulled out, for example, a blue fabric square and a paper slip marked A-3, the blue square would go into A-3 on the grid.  And so on until the entire grid was filled.

But could I leave it alone?  No.  I broke the rules by deciding that I could roll the die once for each half of the grid.  The number on the face of the die would dictate how many squares I could move around and reposition, up to a maximum of 6.  My luck, it fell on 1 on each roll.

So that takes care of the placement of fabrics.  I sewed them into rows and then joined the rows together in numerical order.  However, I wanted to bead the squares.  New Rules!

 I was going to bead 18 chai squares.  To determine which squares to bead, I rolled two dice, I one marked A - F, and the other with the regular 1 - 6 dots. 

 Then to determine how many beads to bead at each location, I rolled 3 regular dice (maximum of 18 beads per square). 

(Sorry, haven't figured out how to rotate photo yet...) But you get the idea, I hope.  I had two rolls for placement which were duplicates so I had to roll again.


I got to choose the type of bead and how to bead on each square. 

The almost finished pieces was not quite 18" - it needed borders.  So I left the final decision of whether to do a border of one colour the entire perimeter or one colour on each side up to the member of the Pomegranate Guild.   They chose one colour for the entire border.

And this is the finished piece, not the best photography but a future challenge.

What I learned: a new for me word "aleatoricism" which is defined as the incorporation of chance into the process of creation, especially art or media, from Latin "alea", the rolling of dice.

Now I'm off to shred the papers and contemplate another piece about chance.   A series of 6 X 3, 2 X9... or perhaps I could use fabric instead of paper and make a mark with a pen and then cover it with an embroider stitch.  Or use silk and permanent markers and rubbing alcohol, or...

 

It's December 26th but I'm declaring the start of 2022

 So I'm trying to get a headstart on 2022 creativity by summarizing 2021 and maybe 2020, maybe even 2019 when I last posted at my previous blog...

 

I guess I should start with the Torah Tie project I'm currently working on.  It's been ongoing for 8 months and I have made significant progress.  But let me tell you how it came about.

 

I am a member of the Pomegranate Guild of Judaic Textiles, Toronto or POM for short.   Menachem and I were in Israel in March 2020 for our son, Rotem's wedding with his bashert, Maya, when Covid hit.  My entire family, including my now 100 year old mother, had flights booked and one by one, they cancelled. Our daughter, Carmit, who lives in Munich also had her flight cancelled.  And then the Israeli guests cancelled.  Rotem and Maya ended up getting married with only her parents, her brother and sister-in-law, my daughter, Inbal, from Toronto and her children, Amit and Doron, and Menachem and me in attendance.  Rotem and Maya exchanged vows in their backyard, under the chuppah I had made many years earlier.  It was lovely, notwithstanding the extraordinary circumstances.

Around that time, POM started having ZOOM "lunch and shmooze" meetings.  Lunch and shmooze was a once a week in person get together of POM members, some of whom couldn't get out to our monthly evening meetings.  We have been meeting twice a week on Tuesday and Thursday lunchtime to chat, show what we're working on, learn new things, and share info, not exclusively textile related.  For me, the ZOOM meetings have been a source of creativity un a wonderful community

At one of our meetings, the moderator asked if anyone would be interested in ties - she had been approached by someone whose late husband had lovely silk ties.  Several people suggested me as a possible tie taker, probably because of a previous project I had done called "Marty's Ties".  

 

Marty's Ties was a big project and a daunting undertaking.  My cousin had given me her late husband's ties "to do something with".   There were close to 100 ties.  I used a pattern from a book by Christine Copenhaven called "Necktie Quilts Revisited".  For this project, I needed 108 different ties.  Fortunately, some ties were reversible.  So in the 108 tie wedges, there are no repeats. Those ties travelled from Israel to Toronto, where I pieced most of the top, Toronto to Munich where the quilt was quilted and finished by Carmit, Munich to Israel where Carmit met up with us and delivered the quilt to my cousin, Ruthie, back to Toronto for adjustments (Rotem had measured Ruthie's bed and his measurements were off - too large, I had to cut it down), and then back to Israel.

 

Ruthie loves the quilt, but I sighed a huge sigh of relief when it was done.  So when asked if I wanted a new batch of ties, I intially said NO!  Then I relented - hey, free fabric is free fabric!

 

 

 

 

 

.