Rose Meditations

Rose Meditations

These Photos: 1) Making a rose throw pillow; 2&3) The throw pillows, finished; 4) An end table in the lady's restroom of a place I frequent; 5) A tile from a home show booth

The "recovering the chairs" project lead into the "making of throw pillows" project, which brought me back to something I've been writing in my notebook for a while.  I have different notebooks for different works in progress, one of which is for items I am designed to make with my own hands, household items or living items.  It's an obsession, something I do in addition to teaching and writing, to satisfy the ideas and images which come to me when I examine everyday objects and the way we live with them.

Depictions of roses interest me because they rely on repetition to build the flower motif in your mind.  Wether it is done in metal, clay, fabric, wood or frosting on a cake, the repetition of a certain shape, and the repetition of a certain action, adds up to the image of a flower.  The nature of a flower is to unfold, be it with two petals or a hundred, therefore repetition is also a design of nature.

When I had a bunch of leftover strips from making the chair covers, I knew I could use them to build a rose design.  I did not overly plan the design.  I started doing it, and as I did it, I lengthened the strips, let them overlap, let them be off-centered, until they filled out a square.  I suspect a real rose has more order to it.

This is a page from my creative ideas journal.  I keep this journal to jot down fabric and wood ideas, that is, things I think I can physically make.  This is an old page.  Roses have been on my mind for quite some time.

Reclamation Satisfaction II

Reclamation Satisfaction II

The chairs both turned out nice.  The very last piece to be sewed was the bottom band.  The journey though, was a tough conglomeration of solving problems, dealing with angles, and correcting mistakes.

I shouldn't sew when I'm tired.  That is when mistakes happen, like this one.  Can you see it?

Sometimes, when involved with a project like this, I have to learn to work with a mistake instead of starting over, or tossing the piece.  In this case, tossing was not an option: I didn't have enough fabric to recut both seat bottoms.  I measured every piece of this project by hand, marked it with tailor's chalk and a yard stick, and cut each one in duplicate, to do each chair.  When it came to the seat pads, I thought I was being very careful, but I actually miscalculated, and cut each about 8 inches too wide.

To correct this error, I decided to add two pleats, right at the where the seat seam joins.  As it turned out, the pleat detail added interest to the monotony of the pattern, so I'm not disappointed with the detail.

I also had a lot of scraps left over so I decided to piece together some throw pillows.

Now, here is where it started to get interesting, and go a little bit wrong.

Here is where I have to acknowledge my obsessive behavior.  It happens when I'm editing manuscripts too.  It's like getting on a train, thinking you're going about twelve stops, realizing the train goes all the way across the country, then deciding to ride it to the end, just to get to the completion.  I don't know what type of compulsion that is, but I know I have it.  Sometimes I can plan for it.  I can not start a project which I think is a moderate-sized endeavor (usually, the projects I think are an hour end up being four, and the things I think take half a day end up taking two days, so, I've learned, through many late nights of having to meet my outer-world due dates, to double my estimates and check my available time) until I have an entire weekend.  There is a tug-of-war here though, because I also know that multiple attempts are needed at some projects, attempts which must be spaced over a week or a month, before a task, which might only take 8 hours, can be completed.  Students take note here: this is why you are given long dates to finish major assignments.  You can't just sit down the night before and knock it out.  

So, the next step was to finish the throw pillows, and some other seat covers, and that took an extra day, and it also lead me into an area I've been gathering in my notebook for a while: rose meditations.

Reclamation Satisfaction

An old chair.  In this chair I have sat and watched sunsets, had good conversations with friends and loved ones, read many a book, cried some, and also had a good laugh or two.  It is a good chair, the perfect height for the bend of my knee, sturdy in frame, but tired at the seams.

I had a friend tell me once of all the things writers could do instead of writing.  He noted to me that a particular writer knew exactly how long it took to get a suit fitted, and that it was a favorite distraction.  Perhaps deciding to recover the chair is a distraction.  I don't know.  I can't do it all at once, at least not now.  I know how to cover a chair, knowledge not truly valued in the world of work and students, and because I know how to cover a chair, my mind can make all the architectural leaps necessary to adapt the craft of seaming, to the science of geometry and angles.  I just can't make them all at once, all those calculations and executions.  I can't dive in.  I'm also in the middle of writing something, and I can't do that from dawn to dusk either.  Why?  I can only stay inside the writing hut in my mind for so long, and then it becomes a prison.  I start to lose sense.  I look at the chair, know already the pattern piece required to uniformly cut the curve of each arm, and I know I must break down each task in covering the chair into chunks, and engage the process a chunk at a time.  If I stayed too long inside the world of covering the chair, it would be a prison too.  I would start to lose sense and make mistakes.  So, either recovering the chair is a necessary distraction from writing, or writing is a necessary distraction from covering the chair (two chairs actually--they're a set).

Why would one even want to attempt such a task?   Why not buy new chairs?  You would have to know me to understand why I don't give up on things, just because they show a little wear.  Perhaps it was being raised by two depression-era survivors, my aunt and uncle (maybe).  Perhaps it is because I'm too attached to objects (doubt it).  Perhaps it is that I enjoy puzzles and the challenge of walking into the unknown, and creating a bridge back to the known (my, my, we are rather proud, aren't we?).

Well, whatever the reason, I can't give up on an item with good bones.  How do I know it has good bones?  The chairs don't give in the frame when I move them, even after 30 years of being moved about.  This is something I learned from my uncle, who was skilled enough in carpentry to make his own cabinets.  A chair of this design, with the ledge of the seat protruding from the front (the armrest and the leg do not comprise one, straight piece), has a sturdy frame.  There's more wood in the frame, and more angles and braces supporting the entire structure of the chair, than there is in a chair of simpler design.  The fabric may give out on this chair, but the frame won't.

So, aside from liking the chairs, I've decided they are serviceable pieces of furniture that I will keep, and that will keep me.

First up, making room for a zipper in my slip-covers, so I can remove them and wash them when necessary.

The zipper will hit the back of the chair, center.

What is already apparent to me is that I have an idea about piping and the general look of the finished cover, even though I don't have a sketch of that idea.

And, this is where I am stopping for today.  Curves, ellipses, details, all floating in my mind, are left for the next day, the next session.