sidetracked again

I came across two phrases this week that I wanted to talk about.  One that I hate: "eye candy."  I especially hate when somebody's artwork is referred to with that phrase.  I think it is demeaning. Somebody referred to the book 500 Quilts as eye candy; I haven't seen the book but don't have any interest in seeing something described that way. Lots of definitions out there:

eye candy (visual images that are pleasing to see but are intellectually undemanding) "he wanted to put some eye candy on their web site"
Slang: a person or thing that is visually pleasing or superficially attractive and lacking depth of intellect or meaning.

'Nuff said.

The other phrase I heard this week was "the architecture of sleep."  It struck me as poetic, although the subject is hardly that. It refers to the sleep cycles we all go through, but I love it.

The week was a blur till yesterday, when I escaped again to my real studio. Sigh of relief!  I carried a huge bag of leftover blocks; many several decades old.  I intended  to spread them out, sort them,and see if there was fodder for reinventing them into something funky, along the lines of the Cinderella quilts I wrote about in the current issue of Art Quilting Studio.

Alas, so much for good intentions. My roommate Francesca was in and since we hadn't seen each other in weeks, we spent the first hour yakking and catching up.  Then it was lunchtime. By the time she got down to printmaking and I sorted the blocks, half the day was gone. I found, after all, that even though I don't do that stuff any more, I was too attached to the older blocks to touch them. Orphans I had made as experiments, just to see if I could make a block from the Kansas City Star.

Fabric choices a bit bizzare but I love these blocks. The left one incorporates vintage 30's fabric I used to buy at house sales, the plaid from blanket covers my Nanny made, and  some orange I think was a repro.

Some were pieced by hand, but most were machine pieced. I love these block patterns, too.  Would I ever make them again? Not likely. obviously, the one on the upper left was from my Nanny's blanket covers. The fabrics were scraps she brought home from the dress factory where she worked during and after the war.  So how can I do anything with them?  The other non-vintage ones, maybe.

I happen to love this pattern, too - and the block contains fabric from an apron my Nanny made.  But WHAT was I thinking? The colors are horrible and that green border has got to go.

Blocks with truck fabric left from Josh's first quilt; a bevy of assorted log cabin blocks, and a bunch of string pieced squares left from several quilts; scraps of the newspaper to which I had sewn them still caught in the stitching.

I threw the string blocks at the wall and then decided to trim them and sew them together.  One of my studio mates walked in, saw these blocks on the wall and said in a shocked tone, "these are so traditional!"

Maybe the center of a quilt for Miss Emma to play on?  We'll see. Two weeks old today.