I’m having trouble with my Bernina 740 machine. So I brought it into the spa to shower it with care. And, it came back with the same problems. It stops intermittently with no discernible reason. So I am a bit hobbled right now. Which makes me think of other ways to entertain myself. Today I spattered more ink across a piece of canvas and yesterday I spent most of the day working on an upcoming presentation for the Studio Art Quilt Associates (all SAQA members can register for the presentation here).
Ink spattered on canvas is a starting point for free-motion quilting designs. It won’t take long for this piece to inspire some stitching,
Fun with math
As the folks at the Bernina shop try to figure out what exactly might be causing this little problem they did give me some mind-boggling information. I bought this machine in 2016. That’s five years ago. It now has 2,395,196 stitches recorded on it. If I stitch on average four hours a day five days a week for 5 years excluding holidays and weekends that would mean that I put in about 1916 stitches in a day. And if there are ten stitches per inch then I would be stitching about 191 inches in a day. Or about 16 feet. Or about three times my height. That seems doable.
Changing my focus
Though I know that there are days when I stitch what feels like miles and miles of thread there are other days when I can’t stitch at all—like yesterday. Those are the days when ideas have a chance to breathe a bit. They can percolate or morph. I can attend to some bookkeeping or housekeeping. Those are the days when I can look around for other toys to play with. Those are the days when I spatter paint across a canvas.
At Play in the Garden of Stitch, thoughts that come while eyeing the needle.
About my book, At Play in the Garden of Stitch
I have had such positive feedback about the book I just released. Thank you. I am grateful for your thoughts and comments. For those not familiar with it you can order a copy at Barnes & Noble, your local bookstore, Amazon and at any number of online bookstores. It is a compilation of simple stitch exercises, stitch tips and quilt stories. Many of the samples in the book are from my students. If you do order the book I would really appreciate it if you could leave a review on the site on which you purchased it (a little shameless self promotion here). I hope the book inspires you to look for new ways to experiment with this medium.
An Interview with Ariane Zurcher
I had the wonderful opportunity to talk with the talented Ariane Zurcher about my work and art practice. Here is a link to the video that she posted. Take a look around at her other interviews while you are at it. She is a delight and provides many stitch-related videos on her site.