Balance

I don’t remember the first time I ever heard a cello. I do know that my first musical exposure was listening to Aaron Copland’s “Billy the Kid” on the stereo as a newborn. Because my parents are musicians, I was immersed in music early and often, and by the time I was in 4th grade, my instrument of choice was the violin. The reason for this choice was youthfully simple. My next-door neighbor, 4 years older than me, played the violin. Somehow I missed the significance when in junior high he switched to the double bass. Regardless, the violin was the center of my life for 25 years.

And then I changed careers. Forgive me if I don’t recount the whole event here. It makes me tired. I will share a regret from my career change: the selling of my teaching cello when I moved to CT in 1995. It was a good, solid student cello and a pleasure to play. But when I moved to a studio apartment in Greenwich, I didn’t have space for it. In 2009, As Bruce’s birthday approached, I hatched a plan to get him a C-flute as the yang to his Celtic flute’s yin. He was overwhelmed with this gift and immediately wanted me to accompany him on my Celtic harp. I was not so enthusiastic about this idea. The harp is pretty, but hard to play and limited in range.


Somehow, in the wake of Bruce’s Flute Birthday, the idea of replacing my cello was surfaced. With some advice from Mary, the new cello arrived. I haven’t shared too much about it since, mostly because, well, I’ve been practicing it instead of writing about it.

In fact, there is quite a lot of practicing going on at our house. We’ve both found teachers, we’re both working on technique, and we’ve both slipped into a regular practice rhythm that makes our evenings quite pleasant. Jack has made his peace with the flute, and with the cello itself, although he is not too keen about the cello case…

It has been a long, long while since making music was something enjoyable. But now, the cello, along with the quilt projects, my riding lessons, the summer cooking and baking, the lampworking, my godkids, friends and family, are all serving as counterbalance to the stress and strain of work...it feels like achieving balance might, might just be a possibility.

Welcome Kira Helen!

As I was posting the last entry on July 11, Kira Helen was arriving in the world! Here are a few photos of the quilt, with the binding on, and both sides showing. Hopefully, there will eventually be pictures of Kira *with* her quilt. :)

The Great Cousinly Quilt Adventure

When last we left our two intrepid cousinly quilters, they were feverishly piecing quilt blocks in hopes of finishing said quilt in time for the arrival of baby Andrews. Today, we pick up our tale...

The blocks are pieced, the sides are assembled, and the quilt is quilted!

Here is Kris's side, all blues and greens and perfect triangle points. Please note the high-tech quilt stand (Bruce).

And here is Tobi's side, all yellows and oranges and limes, and not a right angle to be found.

Kris's blocks with quilting:

Tobi's blocks with quilting:

Next up - the binding, and hand finishing, and we're done!

The Annual Glass Class with Caitlin

For the past 4 or 5 years, Caitlin, my eldest godchild, and I have celebrated her birthday by taking a lampworking class together. We really enjoy Stephanie's classes, and we've followed her to a couple different venues. We like the set up at Hudson Beach Glass best of all the places we've been. The 2-day format gives us 10 hours of torch time.



Here's my work station. Safety glasses, matches and shaping paddle in upper left. Torch, unlit, in the center. More shaping tools to the right of the torch. Glass rods to the right.



Stephanie doing a demonstration during class. Please ignore the "pooh" tshirt.





Caitlin at the torch. She's using the shaping paddle to steady the mandrel while she works the glass in the torch.
Caitlin's finished beads at the end of the first day.

A really blurry picture of my beads at the end of the first day. The two beads in the foreground have jellyfish designs encased in clear glass. I really need a better photo of these.

Advanced Improvisation with Denyse Schmidt

Yesterday, I spent the day in the Bridgeport, CT studios of Denyse Schmidt where she and her assistant Richard taught their new course in Advanced Improvisation. Part retrospective of Denyse's quilting evolution, part design concepts, this was a low-key, hands-on, personal exploration of design. There were two participants besides myself, so the teacher-student ratio was exceptional, and the high point of the 5 hour session was having both Denyse and Richard pulling fabric and ping-ponging ideas with me at the design wall.

Here's where the day started:

Sketching potential design ideas:

First-pass fabric choices, pulled by Richard, with greens added by Denyse:

Bringing in the berry colors:

Ending up with a rugby-striped theme and the pieced blocks in stripes:

Denyse in action with another student's blocks:

Denyse and Richard have a similar asethetic, but different approaches and they play well off each other. It was an interesting and engaging day, and I finished the day in a completely different place from where I started, and landed in an unexpected place, with an unexpected palette, and an unexpected layout. And, pretty much, that was the point.

The Great Cousinly Quilt Project

On Bruce's side of our family, there are 6 cousins. All but one are boys. Bruce was the first of the cousins to tie the knot (to me, obviously), making me the first "Mrs. Andrews" of this generation. The second "Mrs. Andrews" is Kris who is married to Chris. Kris is a professional embroiderer and quilter, and is one of the artists working on the Plimouth Plantation project of recreating a 17th century embroidered jacket. It's quite an interesting project. The third "Mrs. Andrews" is Esther who is married to Steven. Steve and Esther are expecting their first child, who will also be the first baby born into the Andrews family in about 30 years.

Kris and I have been looking for a project to work on together - and we've decided to do a baby quilt for Steve & Esther. Kris will make one side, I'll make the other, while swapping fabrics so that some of each ends up on both sides of the quilt. Here's how things are progressing so far:

Kris's perfect star with my Denyse-Schmidt-esque quasi-log cabin piecing.

Concept blocks with fabric palette.

Blocks in progress.

Blocks on the wall.

More to come...the baby is due in July.

Lampworked Lumps

Several years ago, when my eldest godchild, Caitlin, was thinking about pursuing an art career, I made the offer of a lampworking class together as a birthday gift. Although she is pursuing other career aspirations, the annual lampworking class tradition continues and we both enjoy these weekend workshops over the torch. This will be our 5th year - and we're both looking forward to it. We take our classes with Stephanie Maddelena who teaches in lots of places, but we really like the set up at Hudson Beach Glass.

Lampworking, however, is a lot harder than I ever imagined. Here's Caits, hard at work at one of our early sessions.

The thing about working with glass is that it's hot. And pretty frickin unpredictable. And you can't use your hands to shape it, except with other tools. So getting things round, square, even, flat, symmetrical, etc is really, really hard. Hence, the lumps. The other thing about glass is that when it's hot, it's orange. So you really don't have a good idea of what color you're going to end up with (although the color rod you start with is a pretty good indicator), especially since some colors react with other colors, and some colors change depending on the temperature of your flame. So after all the classes we've taken, I can say with some assurance, that I'm pretty good at creating lumps of various colors.

Last year, I spent lots of time encasing beads, which means that you start with colors and then add clear glass on top of the colors to make it look like its underwater, or something. Notice that none of these are perfectly round, flat, square, cylindrical, or symmetrical in any way. But the colors are pretty. The next step, which I am very, very far from mastering is to actually use these pretty colored lumps. This is my first unedited and very juvenile attempt at stringing. This necklace is too long, too heavy, and has terrible wirework, but I do like the combination of the silver findings, the various silver beads and bits, and the addition of some purchased small boring beads in the same palette as my lampworked beads.

To see some REAL work in this area, visit my sister's Etsy site, Nancy's Ear Candy. She actually knows what she's doing, whereas I'm just playing around.