Michael5000 lays down some quilty filial piety.

I made this one for my parents, who recently celebrated one of those birthdays that is divisible by five. 

You might remember it from such recent posts as "How to Pin an American Quilt."  The pins are all gone now, of course; they held the three layers together until I put in the lines of stitching that are doing that work now, and then went on to pursue solo projects.  I'm pretty pleased with the piece, which is a good thing.  My mom's technical mastery of quilting is about a zillion times my own, so even though I understand that it will be used and valued, I cringe at the thought of her noticing the details.

It is kind of like this one from three years ago:

Except it's, like, green.

It's such a simple design that it's almost not a design at all.  The devil, as usual, is in the details.  You have to work pretty hard when you want to make something look like you threw it together randomly.  If you really do throw things together randomly, all sorts of screwy fragmentary patterns will start to emerge, and it will look like crap.  So, the essence of a piece like this is making sure that similar color values and textures don't end up together very often, and don't cluster, and don't recur in any particular pattern across the width of the quilt, but that they're not too obviously segregated either.  

I did a better job of engineering the random look with the new one, having had three years to study the flaws of Purple & Blue.  The older one is still my favorite, because, well, purple and blue, but my parents have a green living room and and I guess you could say that the new one was an "occasional piece."  That it had the happy side benefit of helping me thin out my green fabrics was merely a side benefit, I assure you.

The Specs

Name: Let's just go with the pattern of Purple & Blue, and call this one Green.
Serial Number: 70

Dimensions: I forgot to measure it, dang it.

Batting: Commercial batting.

Backing: Cream patterned flannel
Quilting: Two parallel lines near the edges of each stripe

Begun: February, 2013.

Finished: April, 2013.

Intended Use/Display: Blanket for use; Birthday Gift.

The Infinite Art Tournament, Round One: Frankenthaler v. Freud!

Helen Frankenthaler
1928 - 2011
American

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Lucian Freud
1922 - 2011
German; worked in Britain

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Vote for the artist of your choice!  Votes go in the comments.  Commentary and links to additional work are welcome.  Polls open for at least one month past posting.

Saint of the Month: Saint Leo IX!

A stained-glass portrayal of St. Leo IX
in his hometown, Egisheim, currently on the French
side of the border of France and Germany.

Saint Leo IX

AKA: Bruno of Egisheim-Dagsburg, "The Apostolic Pilgrim."
Feast Day: April 19.

Really Existed? Without a doubt.
Timeframe: June 21, 1002 – April 19, 1054.
Place: Europe

Credentials: Canonized by Pope Gregory VII in 1082.
Martyrdom: None, although captivity and some high-profile failures presumably made his final months pretty frustrating.

Patron Saint of: no clear tradition.
Symbolism: no clear tradition.

It’s kind of hard for we moderns to imagine a Pope personally leading an army into the field, but then we haven’t seen a lot of Popes elected in their forties and also the nature of warfare has changed quite a bit in the interim. But Pope Leo IX was nothing if not vigorous, at peace as well as at war. He pushed through significant church reform during his five-year tenure and covered thousands of miles to oversee the church hierarchy, partner with the civic leadership, and participate in military action all over Europe.

As a reformer, Leo (a German, born Bruno of Egisheim-Dagsburg in 1002) did not by any means have the last word, but he is generally considered a strong administrator who was on the winning side of major debates (at least as they have evolved to our point in history). He was against simony (the selling of religious office, which seems to have waned quite a bit lately) and in favor of clerical celibacy (still Vatican policy today).

As a military leader, he was somewhat less effective. Nervous about the Norman kingdom in the south of Italy (those Normans really got around) and egged on by the Byzantines, St. Leo led an army south against Christian forces that apparently really didn’t want to get in a fight with their own spiritual leader (although sources differ on this point). When he insisted on battle and the outnumbered but tactically savvy Normans won the day, they were very polite and respectful to their honored prisoner, and didn’t keep him captive for a day longer than it took to extract a hefty suite of political concessions from various involved kingdoms.

He would only live a few months after his Norman misadventures, but in that short time he managed to squeeze in another colossal error of judgment. This time, it involved the “Donation of Constantine.” You may have heard of the D of C, a great medieval forgery that convinced people for centuries that the Emperor Constantine had bequeathed the Western Roman Empire and authority over all of Christianity to the Roman Papacy. The internal flaws in this document eventually seemed pretty obvious, and it seems kind of weird that nobody ever wondered whether the Roman Empire and ultimate Christian authority were really Constantine’s to give, but the document was considered totally legit at the time.

The Vatican post office celebrates
St. Leo IX's 1000th birthday

What Leo did, though, was to try to enforce it. He sent a legation to Constantinople to demand that the Patriarch of that city henceforth follow the Roman lead in all matters doctrinal and administrative. Since there was no conceivable way that Leo could enforce this sweeping demand, the Patriarch dissolved into giggles (metaphorically speaking), and before you know it there were mutual excommunications and an increasing realization that the Western and Eastern churches had broken up for good. The split wouldn’t be fully consummated for 150 years, when – in one of history’s most colossal fiascos – the flower of Western Europe decided it would be a lark to sack Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade. Leo’s ultimatum however, is generally regarded as the moment when, as the (1908) Catholic Encyclopedia has it, “the East was finally cut off from the body of the Church.” Or perhaps when the West was.

But wait – can we really pin all this on St. Leo? Most Catholic sources argue that Leo “fought the coming Great Schism between the Eastern and Western churches,” and merely responded to an aggressive Byzantine Patriarch, who was the real troublemaker. “That ambitious prelate,” says the old Catholic Encylopedia,

was determined, if possible, to have no superior in either Church or State. As early as 1042, he had struck the pope's name off the sacred diptychs, and soon proceeded, first in private and then in public, to attack the Latin Church because it used unfermented bread (azymes) in the Sacrifice of the Mass. At length, and that, too, in a most barbarous manner, he closed the Latin churches in Constantinople.

It would be easy to dismiss this he-said/he-said debate as trivial and argue that the big split was going to happen eventually, regardless of what was done by individuals. But that’s reasoning backwards. We are enough accustomed to the Great Schism after nine and a half centuries that it seems like it must have been inevitable. For as much as there were powerful historical forces pushing Rome and Constantinople apart in late medieval times, it is still conceivable that had Leo and the Patriarch (his name was Michael; no relation) merely hit it off better in their correspondence, the foundation could have been lain for a united Christianity, or at least a more united Christianity, that would have evolved through a very different sort of second millennium. (You can scoff at great-man history, friends, but it can scoff right back at you.)

St. Leo brought a fellow named Hildebrand, another energetic, can-do administrator, to Rome as his personal assistant. Hildebrand later became Pope Gregory VII, and canonized Leo in 1082. Gregory would eventually be canonized too, but not until 1728, by Pope Benedict XIII. As of this writing, Benedict XIII is not considered a saint.

The Infinite Art Tournament, Left Bracket Second Round: Christo v. Chagall!

Javacheff Christo
born 1935
Bulgarian; works in the United States

Defeated by heavyweight Giorgio De Chirico in Round 1.
Snuck by American impressionist William Merritt Chase in First Round Elimination with a one-vote margin. YOUR VOTE COUNTS!!

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Marc Chagall
1887 - 1985
Russian-born; worked in France

Defeated Philippe de Champaigne in Round 1.
Lost a closely-fought match to Cezanne in Round 2.

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Vote for the artist of your choice in the comments, or any other way that works for you. Commentary and links to additional work are welcome. Polls open for at least one month past posting, but likely much longer.

The Wednesday Post

Greetings from Dieric Bouts
Appreciate the man.

Dieric or Dirk Bouts was a "Netherlandish" painter, sure, but he lived and worked in Louvain.  After the 80 Years' War, or after the break-up of the post-Napoleonic United Kingdom of the Netherlands if you prefer, Louvain became less Netherlandish and rather more... Belgian.

Hence, Dieric "Dirk" Bouts has a strong claim to the title of "Belgium's famous painter."

...and he has been featured in the postage of his more-or-less native land a number of times.

So is he a mere local talent?  The Upper Voltans thought not, back before they became Burkinans Faso.

And the people of Benin certainly thought not in 1973, very shortly after they had ceased to be the people of Dahomey.

...and he is huge in the Cook Islands.

Dieric Bouts left the Infinite Art Tournament last weekend with a overall record of 1-2-0 and a cumulative total of 14 votes for and 19 against.

The Infinite Art Tournament, Left Bracket Second Round Tiebreak: Bingham v. Botero!

The scheduled match for today would have pitted the winner of Botero/Bourgeois against the winner of Bouts/Boucher.  Boucher took care of business ably enough, but a 6-6 tie in the former match makes things a little more complicated.  Here's the first of the two resulting tiebreakers.

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George Caleb Bingham
1811 - 1879
American

Lost to German-American landscape painter Albert Bierstadt in Round 1.
Crushed Josef Beuys in First Round Elimination.
Tied with George Bellows in the Left Bracket Second Round.

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Fernando Botero
born 1932
Colombian; works in France

Made a serious run at Botticelli -- yes, THAT Botticelli!! -- in Round 1. YOUR VOTE COUNTS!!!
Knocked out French proto-impressionist Eugène Boudin by a comfortable margin in First Round Elimination.
Tied with 20th century "confessional artist" Louise Bourgeois in the Left Bracket Second Round.

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Vote for the artist of your choice in the comments, or any other way that works for you. Commentary and links to additional work are welcome. Polls open for at least one month past posting, but likely much longer.

How to Pin an American Quilt

Some of you folks out there who are not practiced in the fiber arts may have said to yourself, of a sleepless nights, "I wonder how the three layers of a quilt get put together."  It's not likely, of course, but it's theoretically possible.  While those of you who know the craft may have some curiosity, or a polite simulacrum thereof, about how I, Michael5000, handle that part of the quilt-makin' process.  Well, I'll tell you.

The first thing you do is put the back side of the quilt face down on the bedroom floor.  Why the bedroom?  Because it's the only room in the house with carpeting.  If it's an adult-sized blanket, as in our example, the bed needs to be partially disassembled to make this happen, which is as good a reason as any to continue sleeping in the ancient futon of my college days.

The back, in this case, is two lengths of fabric sewn together (or, looked at another way, a length of fabric cut in half lengthwise and sewn back together widthwise).  Sometimes backs are just a single piece of fabric, and sometimes they are more complicated.  It doesn't really affect this process.

After spending a minute or two making sure that the back is as squared-up as possible, we're going to stretch it taut on the floor.  We'll hold it in place with these hefty T-pins, which we'll drive right into the carpet.  You were wondering about why the carpet was important, weren't you.  Now you know.

After we've gone all around the perimeter, the back should be relatively taut against the floor.  The next step is to lay out the middle part of the quilt sandwich, the batting.  "Batting" is the stuff in the middle that you can't see, but which keeps you warm on a long winter night.  Often I use old blankets, crappy old commercial quilts, or other salvage material for my batting, but since the current project is relatively high end (a present for my mom) I'm using a commercial batting.

This particular batting is a 50/50 cotton/bamboo blend, which is kind of cool (cotton, the fiber that I so love, is something of an environmentalist's nightmare in its modern production, whereas a lot of bamboos just shoot out of the ground unprompted with frightening speed and vigor).  I took it out of its bag to "breathe" about an hour before the picture was taken, and I'll spend the next few minutes smoothing out the wrinkles.

Then it's time for the top, or face, to make its appearance.

Am I going to pull the batting and the top taut, like I did with the back?  No, and for two reasons.  First of all, the batting is kind of like felt in its makeup, and if you tried to pull it taut it would just rip apart.  Secondly, when we unpin the back at the end of this process, it's going to contract a little bit.  Since they'll be attached by then, it will cinch the face in with it, making the display surface slightly rumply.  We actually want that.  Having the face be slightly slack relative to the back will give the display side of the quilt more visible texture after we've sewed this whole sandwich together.

On the other hand, you don't want to be sloppy or you will suffer the heartbreak of "pucker" -- folds of fabric caught unattractively within stitches -- when you are sewing.  To avoid that, we'll spend quite a bit of time at this point basically petting the face outward from the center, making sure that the two free layers are evenly spread, free of wrinkles, and squared up relative to each other and to the back underneath them.

Then comes the pinning.  This whole process is I'm talking about is called pinning, in fact.  We've got the three layers centered on each other just the way we want them, so we're going to put in about a zillion pins to make sure they stay that way until we get them quilted -- quilting being, of course, sewing lines of stitches that penetrate all three layers and thus hold the piece together more or less permanently.

I'm using safety pins here.  One of the great humiliations of my career in the needle arts is that for YEARS and YEARS safety pins did not occur to me, and I used regular straight pins while pinning.  This made the process go a little faster, but had two appreciable disadvantages: (1) they fell out by the dozen, and (2) for the rest of the quilting process, your hands were progressively torn to ribbons by the hundreds of sharp sharp pins.

The first pin goes in the exact center.  Then you make a line of pins lengthwise down the quilt, and a second line of pins widthwise across the quilt, quartering it, always working outward from the center.  After that, you pin out each quarter in turn, still always working from the center outwards.  Why do it this way?  Because it's how my mom told me to do it, damn it.  But I think the idea and the reality is, this is the best way to keep the quilt squared up (really rectangled up, usually) while you're doing the pinning.

This process takes a long time, plus you'll need to take breaks to rest your knees, so it's good to have some sort of recorded or filmed entertainment at hand.  The more seriously you're taking the quilt, too, the greater the density of pins you are going to use, and more pins means more time.    I watched The Seven Samurai while pinning out an especially large quilt, to give you an idea.

Working on a quilt consists of endless repetitive tasks punctuated by a small handful of lovely "ta da!" moments, of which taking a quilt up after its pinning is one of the best.  The back and batting should both have been somewhat larger than the face to avoid unpleasant mishaps, but now that your three layers are together for the long haul you can trim the back and batting away at roughly an inch from the edge of the face.  Me, I cut the quilt out right on the floor, before I take out the T-pins.  This is a satisfying moment because where you walked into the room with a boring back, a very boring piece of batting, and a fragile and unfinished-looking face, you now basically have a quilt.  True, it's not actually quilted yet, but it is starting to look like what it will become and can even be given a little modest use as a proto-blanket, if you're careful.

Since the three layers are now giving each other mutual support, it's already a much sturdier item than any of the three parts were when you started.  As you get ready for the next step you can just wad that sucker up and throw it on your sewing table.  The pins will take care of business until you get the actual quilting in.

And that's how blankets are put together.  Or at least, that's how I do it.  Other quilters, and industrial blanket manufacturers, probably have their own tricks.