Mid-Week Inspiration

Hello, my name is Kathie and I'm a magazine addict.

I can't leave them alone. I spend way, WAY too much money on them. If the theme is home decor, antiques, art, books, sewing, quilting, beading, food, and lately Buddhism, or if it's anything British or French combining any of the above, my wallet is on its way out of my bag. And I have the piles of magazines on every horizontal surface in my house to prove it.

(And I have years worth of most of them. I had nearly every issue of Threads until last year when I got mad at them and dropped my twenty-year subscription. But that's a topic for another post.)

Anyway, after work last night I drove up to Brookfield to pick up a few sewing-related things I needed. I stopped in Harry W. Schwartz, our area's very best independent book retailer and stumbled onto a new source of wonder and inspiration in the form of this very pricey magazine:

Rich and Poor, Variation 8 by Mamoun Sakkal

This magazine. Oh. My. Goodness. That cover art above would make a dynamite quilt, wouldn't it? It's a type of Arabic writing called Square Kufi, the script working its way inward in a spiral. Such graphic impact and it actually says something! (It's a text attributed to the Caliph Ali.) And that ripple efffect--that just brings the whole thing to life.

But here's what made me hyperventillate and then shell out the considerable shekels for this magazine:

Alphabetic Composition by Kjell Sjoegren

This is pen and ink on paper but oh, what a quilt this would make. This one image literally kept me awake last night. One could take the idea of this and render it a la Tonya, in free-form pieced lettering. Or one could do it in fused applique, which would make it possible to better imitate the fine points, such as the angles and curves and the wonderful negative spaces crossing multiple letters. This just absolutely makes my heart sing.

Thinking, thinking...

I have always loved typography, letterforms, and fonts. We played with just a smattering of pen lettering in a college design class--just enough to make me dangerous with a wedge-tip felt marker. I get to play with fonts in my work and to pick just the right one to express a mood when I'm doing publicity things for the library. I love the look of letters and numbers and words and have a healthy stash of letterform fabric such as this gorgeous Marimekko duo that I haven't been able to bring myself to cut into in the, oh about fifteen years I've owned it.

Positive/Negative Marimekko Cottons

After the bookstore last night, I stopped in at Bigsby's, which, if not exactly a LQS is certainly a LBS: Local Bernina Shop. It used to be a hole-in-the-wall sewing machine dealership with buttons but is now a wonderland of Bernina and thread and patterns and notions and--lately--fabric too. They're getting ready to vend at the Madison Quilt Expo and were kitting merchandise like crazy. Owner Rosemary took me for a quick tour of the newest fabric arrivals--wonderful Japanese and Australian things. And fun space-age-y barkcloth. It's all pretty exciting, but then, fabric has always made me weak in the knees.

I stayed strong. No fabric purchases, just about $40 worth of Mettler thread--enough to get me through the upcoming Boulder Junction trip, I hope.