TAKING ON NEW TASKS

Seven Cities of Cibola

The extreme Arizona Summer heat has arrived in full force.  Whew!  It compels me to seek refuge indoors with sedentary tasks that have gone ignored in recent months.  Among them is this blog.  (I didn't mean to ignore it for so long.)  Another happy activity is sewing.  I took the time, and found the courage to cut, and make another Harwood Steiger dress, using Seven Cities of Cibola in an electric lime green with dark blue printing.  Joan, Harwood's niece, had made a gift of this fabric last year when I exclaimed about the color.  I love it!  After seeing my dress, Joan told me that somewhere she has a man's Western style shirt also piped in dark blue that she made long ago.  She's going to send it to me when she finds it so that my husband and I can offer a striking picture in our matching clothes! I always clip the Steiger labels from the selvage and sew them into the garment.  Should someone inherit my collection, I want them to know exactly which treasure it is. 


Luckily, again, someone reading this blog has contacted me and offered Harwood Steiger treasures found in her mother's stash.  They were designs which were totally new to me.  Both are abstracts and not obviously traditional Steigers.  But, Caravan and Scheherazade are clearly in Steiger's distinctive abstract style.  Scheherazade is lively, fanciful and fun.  Executed in hot pink and medium brown ink on ivory colored fabric, it has lots of spirals, lattice designs, and tent shapes.  It calls to mind tents billowing on desert sands.  I think Sophie Steiger exactly captured the mood of this fabric in naming it.  The piece is generously sized, so I think I'll just set it aside for a while and wait for inspiration.

Caravan is a very complex design.  It flows from tightly detailed areas to open areas, punctuated with floating elements.  It is very, very interesting and contains many varied design elements such as balloons, shields, faces, webs, plants and a whole lot more.  Caravan is printed in hot pink and black inks on a medium pink background.  It is truly unique among Steiger designs and hard to categorize, other than to say it is an abstraction and highly stylized.  Again, this a generously sized piece of fabric, so I have lots of options when considering how best to use it.  People who know me will attest that pink is not a color I often select.  But, there is nothing girly-girly about these Harwood Steiger fabrics.  And, I must add that I am thrilled to have them in my collection. 

These two new Harwood Steiger designed fabrics underscore an important fact:  There is no way of ever knowing how many Harwood Steiger designs exist.  If only someone had kept records over the years!  If you have any Steiger fabric treasures, please, please send me pictures.  You just may be hoarding one I've never seen!  Contact me here and we'll take it from there.

Hope your Summer days are filled with images of our beautiful Sonoran Desert courtesy of Harwood Steiger fabrics.