Author: Jodi Green

pintucks + pleats

On Monday afternoon I took an online workshop on the Quilty Nook (link: The Quilty Nook) with the amazing quilting teacher Heidi Parkes (link: Heidi Parkes) focused on adding texture to your quilts using pintucks and pleats. It turned out to be immensely fun and also maybe has helped me get unblocked on a new line of work I’ve been struggling to find focus with. I immediately realised the potential of this technique for drawing, and Wednesday evening I took a stack of fabric to life drawing club and made some loose contour portraits to try combining my drawing with stitching.

Here’s my first test piece, worked in red sashiko thread on a piece of thrifted cotton bedsheet dyed with tea and iron. This is the pintuck side:

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And here’s the pleat side, with its wonderful clots of pooling red in all the tight little corners and cluster points:

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Exciting, right? I’ve got around ten more sketches of faces on fabric to work with, plus a few hands and feet. I’m looking forward to seeing where this new method takes me, and of course am already bursting with too many ideas.

birthday dress

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I’ve been slammed lately with a big bookbinding commission that I just finished up, but found a bit of time to sew up a new dress for my birthday, a newish tradition. I cut into the good linen with an untested pattern but it worked out okay.

This is a shortened version of the Skyline Dress by Syd Graham (buy the pattern here: Etsy link). I eliminated the bottom tier and lengthened the top tier, and also made the straps fixed instead of adjustable (because the adjustability relies on a bow tied over one shoulder blade, which I know from experience isn’t something I’m going to enjoy wearing). It’s drafted for someone a bit taller than me and on my next one I’ll shorten the bodice. I may go back and shorten it on this version as well.

This is handkerchief weight linen that I dyed with willow leaves and iron. It’s not as drab as it looks in the photos but still pretty drab and I may end up dyeing it again. Worn on my birthday as above, overtop of an ecoprinted cotton gauze Yesterday Dress by Caramiya Maui (shop link: Caramiya Maui) and my indigo dyed toile skirt that I made from an old dress that used to belong to my late mother in law.

Here’s how I wore it again the next day, much more rumpled, over leggings and a safety orange Slocan Tank by Helen’s Closet (shop link: Helen’s Closet). Yeah, I pose the same way every day, I guess.

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Overall I’m happy with the relaxed fit and layerability of this and I’ll definitely make it again. I’m already planning a long tiered patchwork version, and will try the short version next time with a trapezoidal skirt instead of a rectangle. I feel a binge coming on!

blue sketchbook pages 16 & 17

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Howdy friends, it’s been a while!

Here’s another spread from that blue sketchbook. Ballpoint pen, white gel pen, and colour markers of varying quality. Those floating rings reminded me of meat, mac, & cheese, something with which I had a sick fascination as a kid but which I have never eaten (because, ew).

“Peking Duck in Lotus Land” was the title of a painting by an unknown Chinese artist, one of a small collection that were for sale in a gallery I used to work at in the late 90s. The painting depicted a line of ducks zigzagging along a winding river between giant lotus plants and I desperately wanted it but couldn’t afford it because I was in my 20s and working several part-time jobs. I still regret not buying it but, oh well.

blue sketchbook pages 14 & 15

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A droopy eyebird, a gold lamé doughnut explosion in space, and a super sheen comet.

Ballpoint pen, markers, gesso, metallic gold paint pen, old wooden thread spool label.

Up in the attic I have a big sparkly round gold lamé tablecloth with a single cigarette burn in it, given to me 25 years ago by my cousin Chris back when he was working for a party rental company. I’ve been hanging onto it all this time waiting for the perfect project. Throwing it on as a cape and going as Rick Wakeman for Hallowe’en has always been high on my mental list of options, but my hair is all wrong and also, I can’t play piano.

the kitchenening: part ten

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We have tile. I’m falling into a swoon over here.

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And just like that, the colour of the countertop we chose finally makes sense. Even knowing the green tile was coming, living in this unfinished kitchen for the past month I’ve been willing myself not to hate the countertop because of how uninspiring it has looked next to the cold white primed drywall. Against the green it’s suddenly beautiful, and I love it.

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Having lived here for a month now, we’re completely rethinking this wall opening, and are now pretty sure about what we’ll build to fill in this space: a midcentury style wooden divider, the kind with upright dowels or spindles going through small shelves. Peter’s mother’s house had one just inside the front door, providing a screen to set the entryway off from the living room, and I’ve always wanted to incorporate one into our house. It certainly took us long enough to think of it but now that we have, it’s pretty obviously the perfect solution. We’ve been enjoying having the visual and conversational link between the two rooms, but more importantly, shelves are better suited to our maximalist decor sensibilities. And all those ceramic frogs have got to go *somewhere*.

blue sketchbook pages 10 & 11

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Mycelium everywhere, branching on the right and a worm-shaped spiral on the left, with a horned bird.

Ballpoint pen, markers, gesso, bingo dabber. Page 11 is a two-strip newsprint bingo card tipped into the book to create a new page. I used to collect and bring home all the cards our club paid out on during my volunteer shift at the bingo; some of them wound up in my mixed paper junk journals (my perennial bestselling item) and some travelled in my bag to Spanish class to get doodled on.

books I read in 2023

1. Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries (re-read)
2. Margaret Lawrence, The Diviners (re-read)
3. Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
4. Lawrence Hill, Some Great Thing
5. Souvankham Thammavongsa, How to Pronounce Knife
6. Zadie Smith ed., The Book of Other People
7. Eden Robinson, Son of a Trickster
8. Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
9. Nick Cave, The Death of Bunny Munro
10. Alexander Boldizar, The Ugly
11. Joan Barfoot, Exit Lines
12. Homer, The Oddyssey (re-read), Emily Wilson, translation
13. Selçuk Altun, Songs My Mother Never Taught Me
14. Anouk Markovits, I Am Forbidden
15. Camilla Gibb, This is Happy
16. Timothy Findley, The Piano Man’s Daughter
17. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
18. Johanna Skibsrud, The Sentimentalists
19. Alan Watts, TAO: The Watercourse Way
20. Joan Barfoot, Charlotte and Claudia Keeping in Touch
21. Lori Lansens, The Wife’s Tale
22. Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome
23. Herta Müller, The Appointment
24. Sunil Yapa, Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist
25. Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
26. Joan Barfoot, Getting Over Edgar
27. Doris Lessing, The Summer Before the Dark
28. Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans
29. Shirley Jackson, The Lottery and other stories
30. Yasuko Thanh, Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountain
31. Rudy Weibe, Sweeter Than All the World
32. Joan Barfoot, Critical Injuries
33. Leila Slimani, Adèle
34. Isabel Allende, The Infinite Plan
35. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
36. Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies
37. Q Hayashida, Dorohedoro
38. Salman Rushdie, Fury
39. Sharon Bala, The Boat People
40. Nino Ricci, Where She Has Gone
41. Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost
42. Sonali Deraniyagala, Wave

first finished project of 2024

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Over the first few days of the new year I finished up the binding and the last bit of quilting on my indigo and gray snowball quilt, and embroidered my signature. Once the weather is a little nicer I’ll go outside and take some better photos and put together a few notes on the construction and inspiration. For now here’s a portion of it laid out on the kitchen floor. It’s already been warming us on the couch and has graced the guest bed for visiting family. I’m so pleased with it and now have a grand plan to go through all of my decades of stashed fabrics around the house and compile the lot of it into blankets. I didn’t need a new hobby but here we are, and I’ve definitely caught the bug.