Reading - The Uppercase Compendium

My copy of this little gem arrived a few days ago and I thought I would share it, as I adore what Janine (the creator of Uppercase magazine),  has put together. The Uppercase Compendium of Craft and Creativity is a snapshot into the creative process and lives of 66 makers from around the world. 

“There is a long publishing tradition of the creative annual. Creative industries like graphic design, illustration and advertising each have their own dedicated annual books and special edition magazines that compile the best of each category. For designers and illustrators, to be included in an annual is a benchmark of success. It helps get them recognized within their industry and opens doors to new opportunities. For aspiring creatives, annuals showcase what is possible in their field. They inspire, educate and promote. And as the years pass, the annuals serve as important cultural artifacts—a snapshot of the trends and aesthetics of a particular year.”

— Uppercase Compendium Webpage

As is customary for anything Janine puts together, it is beautiful, well written and insightful. It is a book that is rich with stories and gorgeous photography that truly celebrates the value of craft in our daily lives. 

"We", the crafting community, need books like this. Books that show us how others around the world are creating, thinking and engaging in their craft. Something that talks about all the things we care about. Connection. Meaning. Creating. Books that celebrate making in a real, everyday way.

I was lucky enough to be included in the Compendium alongside some other lovely Australians like Siobhan Rogers and Fiona Chandler. Being included was pretty special but it's even more special to me because of the main photo she chose to include; my kid and I cutting the steek of her cardy. Just out of a pool, sitting at our campsite under some olive trees in Umbria. Her total joy in what I had created, and then that she got to cut it, are that moment for me. All about the love. From me to her. A moment where I knew she could feel it in what I had made for her. 

You can read more about it in my original I Made This post or better yet, go click on this link and pick yourself up a copy. By doing that you will be supporting Janine, and all the wonderful things she puts out in the world. 

The Compendium is one of those books that will sit on dining table to be perused at mid-morning coffee time for many many months to come.* I can't wait.

Felicia x

*Other mid-morning coffee favourite dip-in-and-out books include Gee's Bend and Letters of Note and Women in Clothes.  

Putting The Passion into 2016!

Happy New Year lovely people! I hope you are all enjoying your summers (and winters :)) and getting in some focused crafting time. It hasn't happened for me with visitors and merry making - but I wish it for you.....and for me in the not too distant future.

So this morning I did what you do on school holidays. I took the kids to their swimming lesson, and then chased down that stuffy chlorinated experience with a delicious flat white and some eggs. Yum. Then, something shocking happened. While at the cafe, the kids were simultaneously reading their books so I picked up the paper for a moment's quiet. On the first page I looked at I saw a catchy headline and chased it down to page 17. 

The article was called "Lessons in courage and passion, from Lady Gaga" by David Brooks and it was perfect for me on this day.  As I was reading it I felt that sense of recognition where you just know that the universe (and David) wrote it just for me; for me today when I am sitting with the shifting energy of the New Year, it was just what I needed to hear. 

So I've mentioned that I haven't been on my game lately, and that I can't figure out what or why. I haven't been able to write and I'm barely making anything. I've been blocked. I've been tired. And that's totally OK - annoying but OK. I was just waiting it out. I've felt it before and I'm sure you probably have too. But I'm ready now for it to move on. 

When I started The Craft Sessions nearly three years ago I spent a lot of time feeling slightly queasy. Queasy about whether it would be successful. Queasy about whether I was going to let my family down and cost us a pile of money. Queasy about it failing and of no-one coming. Or worse, that people came and didn't like it. Anyway, as time has gone on and you guys have embraced this idea, then comfortable has replaced queasy, and I think that possibly that has a lot to do with my funk. I wasn't feeling the excitement or the hum that comes with leaping into the void. I was missing the danger that the article so eloquently speaks of. I was cruising.

This article was a great reminder of what I want in my life. I want passion. I want courage and I want to be putting myself out there. All in.

So in honour of that, and in honour of honouring things that I am passionate about, let me tell you one thing that I want to do this year with The Craft Sessions. Even though I don't have the details nailed down and I don't have a fully formed plan..... I'm going to jump!

I want to create a Scholarship Program to The Craft Sessions! Scholarships for a person/people who wouldn't otherwise be able to come. Scholarships for a person/people that need a break and need the shining light of something good on the horizon. I've been passionate about doing this from the very start of the idea of The Craft Sessions, but I've never quite been able to get around to hitting the go button on the idea. This is my stake in the ground lovely people. This year is the year. 

I'm not fundraising to support it, but I will need to come up with some kind of commerce to make some money to support it. I have ideas but I need to get a wriggle on which is why this stake in the ground will help.

I'll tell you more about why Scholarships are so important to me soon, but in the mean time Happy Holidays! and a bright shiny New Year to you and yours. 

Here's to putting your passion where your mouth is ..... or something like that.

Fel x

PS. I have so many (super) idea's about what we are going to talk about in this space this year, I can't wait to start sharing them with you. 

The Craft Sessions' 2016 Retreat Dates

Just a short post today just to let you know our exciting news! We have finalised our dates. The Craft Sessions 2016 retreat will be run from Friday September 2nd 2pm to Sunday September 4th 4.30pm in the Yarra Valley*!

We are working hard on our 2016 program - to make sure we are meeting all your crafting (and connection) needs, by planning a weekend of good food, a beautiful location, fabulous workshops and inspiring people. We want to ensure we have the balance we want, the variety you crave, and the skills you are looking for. We are going to nail it!

As you know this year we sold out in 2.5 hours - totally crazy but true! We wanted to assure you that we would release all the retreat details a few weeks before registration opens, so you have time to get organised. A few people also suggested that we change the registration day/time to the weekend to make it easier to arrange and we will do that too. We can't wait to share all the details with you in April of next year!

Joining our mailing list is a great way to get all of the info you need straight to your inbox.

Wishing you a magical summer with some quiet crafting time.

Felicia x

*The Yarra Valley is just outside Melbourne.

Unintentional blog break and dates for dates!

Geez! This year the holiday season has really been kicking my butt. Concerts, and fairs, and birthdays, and bring-a-plate, and charity events, and meetings, and summer-sandal purchasing for kids with skinny feet, and then there is this thing called christmas and ..... well whoa. And as Karen discussed in her post from a few days ago, I totally identify with the feeling that life is a little meh at the moment. Too much rushing, to many obligations and not enough time to catch your breath. Life feels distracted with doing rather than being. Nothing feels concrete.

Karen really hit the nail on the head for me when she said that she thinks part of the problem is that she isn't making! Making is an everyday habit for me, even when things are chaotic. In fact normally, making is something that supports me through chaotic times. This year though, I haven't even got the energy to pick up the appropriate knitting on the way out the door, so non-essential making has come to standstill. And not making, and not having enough time for even a line of knitting, gets me all off kilter.

I'm sure many of you are also feeling it?

Anyhoo, school is out for the holidays, birthdays are done, and it is time to take a breath. And part of that breath is letting you know that I'm going to be posting the dates for next year's retreat on Friday.* I have them in my hot little hand at last and can't wait to share.

Hope your week has space in it, along with some time for crafting and general joy.

Felicia xx

*If you are on our mailing list you will hear a little earlier

One of the (many) things Anna Farago taught me.

So I'm lucky enough to have this friend Anna Farago. Lucky in all the everyday ways that make friendship over many years wonderful. But I often feel even luckier for her friendship for two big reasons.

1. We work very differently as humans, which provides a richness of experience and ideas to our conversations, that I love.

2. She is super patient with me, which is not always an easy feat.

She is an artist and a patchworker. And an art teacher. She is also very very smart. About art, craft and life.

Anyway enough about her. Let's talk about me. And what she has taught me.

As I've said before on this blog, I am wrong often. The whole "I was totally wrong about patchwork" is a fantastic example, and the Anna in question who did the sighing in that post was the lovely Anna Farago. Did I mention that she is patient with me.

Anyhoo. We make things together, not always physically in the same room, but we share what we are making as part of our everyday conversations. A lot. We have different skills. I'm a little more interested in the technical and love the maths, and she knows the art, the colour and the composition. We talk about things as we work on them; what we are doing, why and how. The way we make things is really different too. I'm a practicing-completionist/reforming-perfectionist whereas Anna loves the process.

She didn't/doesn't set out to teach me stuff. But over time, her thoughts on making slowly but surely, seep into the way I work. And today I want to talk about what she has taught me about the beauty of visible process.

I started this quilt a while ago (that is Anna in the top photo of that post) and it is an ongoing-work-in-progress. I'm not even halfway finished the hand-quilting yet, and so I've realised it will be an ongoing-work-in-progress for the next six months at least.

And that is where it has got interesting for me. The perfectionist in me traditionally wants my craft-person-ship to be as beautiful as I can make it. Although I regularly make mistakes, I make decisions about where and what I'm willing to live with and what I rip out. I rip things out a lot. However it turns out that this quilt is a little different.

So the quilt is a linen quilt with alternating stripes. It goes from a darker blue stripe to a light off-white stripe with blue cross hatching. The back is an incredibly pretty silver linen sheeting from Tessuti. Because of the colour contrast on the front I wasn't sure what colour hand-quilting thread to use when I started the hand-quilting. 

If I used a dirty darker blue it would show on the back of the quilt but not so much on the front. That the stitching would appear in a really subtle way. Subtle but beautiful. However if I used a silver thread it would really show on the front but not on the back. This would be the opposite of subtle. The stitches would be features; highly visible in all their glory. Which might be totally lovely.... I needed to make a decision between subtle (the blue) and striking (the silver). I decided to go for a more subtle look. So I started with a dirty blue cotton as I thought that would look lovely on the blue square in the middle of the quilt.

The thing is, that when I started the quilt, I hadn't done any hand-quilting for a year. I knew I would be rusty and my stitch size would be all over the place. So I started quilting by doing single stitches as a time (rather than loading the needle with three or four), because I was totally lacking rhythm and skill. Now - because the cotton was blue - and remembering that the fabric was blue on the front of the quilt and silver on the back - the stitching looked lovely from the front and, well... the back just looked atrocious. Small, large, small, on the skew. Wacky. And because it was blue cotton on silver fabric the stitching (mistakes) were incredibly pronounced.

The perfectionist in me still finds these photos a little difficult to look at.

If this was a quilt for the wall that would be totally fine. You wouldn't see it. But it is not. It is a quilt for my own bed, which means you will see both sides, often. If I hadn't been in quite such a hurry to get started, I probably would have done what any self-respecting quilter working on an important project would have done, and made hand-quilting samples to figure out what to do. But I didn't. I jumped in.

I stitched a few rounds in blue, and after being appalled by my lack of technique (perfectionist), I changed the cotton to silver and kept going. My thinking was that stitching on the back - which is always messier unless you are an expert hand-quilter - should be the same colour as the fabric on the back, as that way the messiness wouldn't be so pronounced. I decided to keep going, and after completing a few rounds in silver to make sure I liked it, I decided to pull out the blue stitching and redo it with the silver later.

I mentioned this false start to Anna and she said "hang on a bit - don't pull it out yet - just leave it and see how you feel about it later". And so I did. All the while thinking she was crazy (often my starting postion) but as often happens with me, I've slowly come around to her way of thinking (often my end position).

See Anna loves seeing the maker in the craft. She loves seeing the mistakes in all their glory and isn't obsessed with making things perfect. She likes to be able to see the process. Seeing the history, the choices, and the personality of the maker as part of the object.

This quilt is being made over time as part of the continuum of our lives. What I am discovering in making it, is that I too, am actually enjoying seeing a visible representation of that process. I like that my initial choice of blue stitching is still the the quilt. I like that apparently at random, the stitching then changes to silver. I like that you can see at the centre of the quilt that I'm rusty and then that my stitches even out as I find my rhythm.

I want to say "oh my" but instead I'm embracing the history.

This quilt often gets tossed aside for weeks at a time, so my work lacks consistency. I'm also changing my hand-quilting style all the time, as I try to improve my technique. Sometimes I use the top of my finger, other times I'm pinching the needle. Sometimes I'm quilting towards myself, and sometimes on an angle. Other times I'm quilting in the dark when the bulbs blow out in our loungeroom due to a dodgy fuse. Other times I'm tired, or grumpy, or have had two glasses of wine. Or I have a kid sitting on me. All this history is visible and featured within the stitches of the quilt. Maybe not visible to the uneducated observer but visible to me.

And I love that!

Somewhere along the way, I have given up notions of consistency, perfection and craft-person-ship being my primary goal. Slowly, without feeling it change, I've embraced the nuances of quilting over time, and as part of a life. I've learned to love that the inconsistencies in the quilting, mirror the inconsistencies of living. And that this quilt - which I will hopefully have on my bed for the next fifty years - will be a record of the my skill level, my mood, my decision-making, and my environment during the years in which I made it.

If I hadn't had Anna in my ear, subtly guiding me towards freedom by modelling a different way of making, I would be sitting in sadness as I was quilting; knowing that I wasn't quite crafting a piece that was technically perfect. Instead I sit with my quilt on my lap with a feeling of joy, knowing that I am creating a piece of tangible history, that contains a part of me in every stitch.

Much love to you Anna, for being my friend and leading me to the water.

Felicia x