Beginnings of a Portrait Quilt of my Baba

Meet Nettie Ciona, my Baba.

This photo is nearly 22 years old, my Baba is long gone from our physical lives. But it is a photo and a moment I can always remember. We’d taken her out of her tiny town nursing home to visit the old house and garden. She was feeding the dogs, laughing at my sister-in-law selvaging an old, rotten chair, found out she was going to be a great grandmother, and my whole family was together in the Saskatchewan sunshine. For years I’ve had this image spinning in my creative mind.

The self portraits of 2023 were leading to this project. I wanted to explore the different ways to make a portrait to see how I might translate this one. In the end, I’ve gone back to my original, over the top idea.

You can see that I’ve pixelated the picture. I used a random, free app I found online. Upload the picture and they pixelate it for you. That’s all it does, so the next step is on me. I need to translate those pixels into a piecing plan. Again, I know there are fancy programs out there that could probably help, but the way I am doing it makes sense to me.

After pixelating the picture I opened up Excel. One square for each pixel. I’m creating a colour map. As I go I am simplifying the colours a little bit. For example, using 4 whites, 4 pinks, 3 blues. I don’t want to have to buy a million new fabrics! I also want to simplify it for the making process as well. I’m going to have a lot of colours as it is. This level of planning is way out of my comfort zone!

My plan for sewing is the truly over the top part. Each square will finish at 1”. But I am not using straight squares. Instead, each square will be an improv X block. That’s right, I’ll be making all the blocks as little Xs. You see, my Baba was a phenomenal cross-stitcher. She sewed millions and millions of little Xs in Aida cloth and on linen over her lifetime. This quilt will truly be an homage to her.

So far in my planning I’ve determined I will make the quilt square. It will be 90” x 90” More than that and it will be a lot of extra sewing for nothing but background. The composition of the photo will still work so I’m sticking with it.

So this is my Morning Make until I finish. With breaks, of course. In the meantime, I need to go shopping and buy a bit of fabric. My stash is deep, but not that deep!

A Year of Stitched Self Portraits

A year of Morning Make.

Each day, before tea and clothes and the news and my phone, I make. In 2023 I spent all the time making and remaking myself. Mostly figuratively, but the process required a lot of self reflection. It can’t not when you spend a portion of your day staring at yourself, stitching and making. Truth be told, I’m kind of sick of myself at this point!

Clockwise from top left:

• Embroidered line drawing, based off a painting I did of myself based off a pic from the beach in San Diego last March.

• Skiing selfie done in Tina Tarr’s Stitched Mosaic technique.

• Raw Edge Applique on a crumb background - this one feels the most me in terms of a quilt.

• First one I did, based off of the headshot here on my blog using Melissa Averinos’ Making Faces in Fabric book and her process.

• Cubist applique. Saw a video about a cubist artist and felt inspired. Just freehand cut shapes and stitched.

• Based off a selfie I took on winter hike, this time I adapted Tina Tarr’s technique for improv piecing versus applique. Hand stitched the whole thing to quilt it.

• Another one using the Melissa Averinos’ technique, but playing with a black and white photo. Nailed the values, but boy do I look dead!

Here and there over the year I would draw and paint too. Nothing to share there, just experimenting and exploring. Always self portraits.

It was a great exercise in self reflection. Not only did I fall in love with the dimple I never really noticed before, but I learned to look at myself without criticism. Not necessarily with love, but without criticism.

All of this was a personal exploration. I did nothing in the way of classes or lessons. Where it was someone else’s technique for the quilts I used a book or online class. What I did not do is actually learn how to draw or look at people. I also had a number of ideas for different kind of quilt techniques for portraits. That’s why I am continuing this portrait exploration this year as well. There is a still so much to do!

Only now, I feel somewhat strong enough to at least sketch some other people. Let’s see where 2024 takes me.

Morning Make 2023 - A New Focus

In the last months of 2022 I decided that this year would be different when it comes to Morning Make. Rather than switch it up each month, as I’ve done since 2020, I decided to focus. The three years of exploration and play with different and new things were absolutely awesome, but I was ready for a change. More importantly, I was ready for a deep dive. It was easy to pick my focus, there may have been a slight influence from the BBC, but I did have the idea before I became obsessed with a certain show. My 2023 Morning Make focus is portraiture.

Now I will fully admit that I have extremely limited drawing skills. But when I started quilting I had extremely limited quilting skills. You only get better by doing. Of course, there are a lot of ways to tackle learning new skills and drawing is not the only way to do a portrait. It felt, to me, like the most logical place to start. I mean, if you can’t handle how a face comes together with a pencil you aren’t going to know much about how it might work in any other medium.

This is the very first portrait I drew this year. It’s about the same skill level of me in 6th grade. As I said, drawing is not my thing. To learn the basics I went back to one of the teachers I’ve had - Melissa Averinos. In her book and class on Making Faces in Fabric she covers the basics of anatomy and seeing a face, before you get to the fabric part. She suggests drawing a face first, before you’ve learned anything, so you can see how far you grow. So here is my first face.

And then I dove in to the details. Little things like how we all draw the eyes far too high on the face. How to sort of draw a nose. Using lines to show lines. For a few weeks I did nothing but draw. The vast majority of it is very bad. That’s okay, you only get better by doing.

See? In just a few weeks I got much better! I’ve learned that smiles are incredibly hard to draw though. Those teeth! But I like pictures better when I am smiling, so I guess I will have to figure that out.

Once I felt sort of comfortable with the basics I scrolled my selfies and practiced some more. Trying different styles or techniques. Simplifying things, paint, overcomplicating things, playing. I interspersed this with some fabric explorations, how could I not? For now, however, I want to show you the work on paper.

Am I in love with any of these? No, but they are the ones I like. They are the ones that I feel captured a likeness. Sometimes the jaw is wrong or the cheeks too wide or the nose too straight. But they still look like me.

So far I am realizing that I fall into a less is more camp when it comes to drawing. I want to get the likeness and the energy with the fewest amount of lines as possible. Does that mean I won’t try other things? You know I will. I’m a long way from oils or a detailed watercolour and I don’t know if charcoal will make it to my hands, but my confidence is building.

Speaking of confidence, it is a big thing to stare at yourself this much. Taking a selfie you like is one thing, turning that into something else is a whole other thing. It requires you to stare at yourself a lot. A lot. I am so far removed from the insecurities of my youth when it comes to my face, so this isn’t jarring or anything. But it is eye opening. I have more wrinkles than I thought. My dimple is more prominent than I ever pay attention to. My forehead is still very much a fivehead. As part of my recovery from depression I need to love myself more, give myself more compassion. While I realize this whole experimentation had the potential to make me overly critical and, thus, worse, it has had the opposite effect. I’m enjoying noticing the details, I’m appreciating the life in my face. I’m falling in love with myself. I chose self portraits to start simply so no one else had to feel bad at my mediocre skills drawing them, but now I am grateful.

For Sarah Golden

Sarah Gold Mini

16” x 20”

It was a few years ago, in the middle of another lockdown, that I became truly entranced with the work of Sarah Golden. Something about her shapes and colour use, not to mention that we are birthday twins, just got to me. One day she posted some paper collages she was making. It was instant inspiration and I wanted to turn it into a quilt. With her permission I explored the handmade and the shapes of her work but in fabric and thread.

Here is the inspiration image:

To make the mini I dug through my stash for the right colours to reference her original piece. Some of my finds meant that I did not have to piece all the sections, but let the fabric talk. In the end, the components of my quilt collage were a combination of improv piecing, appliqué, and single fabrics. Then I used embroidery and hand quilting for additional details. I even matted my details like she did, with a ground of white.

Not entirely sure why it took me so long to finish this quilt. It’s just a mini! Yes, there is a lot of work in this small space, but that isn’t it. I just went in fits and starts on it. But it is finished now. Bound in a fabric to look like a wood frame. Sent to Sarah as a thank you for the inspiration.