Uttoxeter Pt.2

Where does the time go, a familiar refrain but I am no nearer finding a means of either holding time back or cramming more in!

I've been buying fabric again! Maggie Relph's fabulous one of a kind pieces have come home with me again. Two pieces which are destined to be made into clothing and the basis of a quilt for after Festival.

This fabulous length of cotton will make a really "stand-out" wraparound skirt for the summer. It is full of vibrant colour, my colours and a range of T shirts will go with it. This isn't a cheap source of fabric for clothes but I really love the conexion with an ethnic artist on another continent.

This is a another length from Esther, a textile dyer and printer, whose work I have enjoyed working with for a few years now. This too will be clothing, but a handkerchief hem top. Esther always manages to work with subtle colours and they bleed beautifully into one another. This fabric washes really well and the initial stiffness soon goes.

My final purchase I chose to become a base for a quilt I've had in mind for a while on a Rain Forest theme. Luckily Oakshotts were there too and I bought some stunning plain fabrics which I'll be able to use with this, later in the year.

I have been absent from here, trying to complete two major pieces of work for Festival of Quilts, I find I get so sucked in that almost everything else gets lost. It's also true that when pieces are destined for a show like Festival or an exhibition I am reluctant to put too much detail here until they are shown!

Frosted Landscapes with Janet Humphrey

I had a lovely day on Saturday. I had the chance to spend the day looking at creating a machine and hand stitched landscape with Janet Humphrey who is a very patient and generous tutor.

Working from a photo of a winter landscape, I made the mistake of trying to work too big for an initial experiment. Not that I realised this until late in the day!

I'm using the middle picture of a ploughed field.

First task was to assemble the right collection of fabrics.

Quickly realising that these were in fact far too dark. So now I scoured round to see what I had with me and that Janet had brought for us and began to layer these up to create the horizontal layers of colour that make up the image.

Just placing the fabrics in the right area to get an idea of how they will work.

I machine stitched randomly over the scrunched up organza and then machine embroidered the skeletal trees branches over the organza.

I added in a frayed silk strip and a coarse organza like net to stand for the snow field.

I took space dyed scrim and layered it with some organza and stitched folds in it to create a ploughed field texture and tacked that in place.

Adding grey organza for the tree outline seemed like the right thing, but it was too dominantly dark.

So I tried some of the dyed scrim overplayed with silver curtail fabric, the colour was better.

I added in more slightly scrunched heavy organza to break up the starkness of the grey line.

Now I used a multi dyed thread to machine stitch the tree branches in place.

Now I stitched row upon row of horizontal straight stitch lines across the heavy organza to flatten it right down.

I added white teased out wool yarns in between the furrows of the ploughed field, hand stitching the. In place.

I machine stitched up and down the furrows to further flatten them and unravelled some ornate braid to give me a bundle of black threads which I fanned out over the tree on the right.

This was as far as I got in the day, so now I need to squeeze out some time to complete the piece. 

I have learned that I did not need to include as much scrunched fabric initially, basic shapes would have done because of the amount of surface stitching I was then going to add. Some bits of this are now so stiff with the layers that hand stitch through it will now be quite difficult. I would also have benefited from taking a smaller sliver of the photo and concentrating on the textures and the detail as I failed to give myself the opportunity to create detailed textures. 

I could have done with doing this day before I made my first four JQs this year!

Uttoxeter Quilt and Stitch Village. Pt 1

My first visit to this show left me with mixed feelings. In size, approachable, so one could see all exhibits easily in the day and today, sparsely attended so it was lovely to stand in front of work for as long as one wanted. I liked the mix of Quilt and Embroidery on display, chiming with my love of embellishing the surface of my work with hand and machine embroidery. There were a good selection of traders, my favourites being The African Fabric Shop and Oakshotts, more of which later!

The Paddock Boxes held an interesting collection of work by "Stitch in the Middle" a Contemporary Quilt Group regional group, where members had created work based on a visit to Whitewick Manor including a "Whisper" where members used a photograph as a starting point, with one person making a small piece in response to the photo, photographing their creation and sending this image to the next in the group who then made a piece based on the photo they received. This being repeated to every member of the group of six or seven. I was particularly fascinated by this as I have been participating in a similar process over the past few months and I'm looking forward to the "reveal"! 

CQ's collection of Journal Quilts were very well received, I enjoyed stewarding these as they provoke so much comment and discussion from visitors. 

There were some mind blowing quilts by Kathleen Matthews NDD, incredibly detailed evocations of landscape populated with animals and fantasy personas in the the most exquisite machine stitch detail imaginable! I could appreciate the skill without liking the work.

These were the positive elements of the quilting exhibits. Those in the main halls were much more traditional and reflected a wide range of skills in the makers.  There was a higher percentage of the embroidery display that was technically really good and I'm going to single out a few pieces.

Lesley Alexander's "Weathered Surfaces 4 & 5" were stitch interpretations of " faded, decayed, worn and weathered surfaces", intricate machine stitched textural pieces.

Complete works and a detail.

I was also drawn to "An English Meadow" by Rita E Weston a hand dyed fabric and thread tryptic which was full of detail, print and stitch that matched its title so well.

I also enjoyed "Golden Memories" by L Platts where the simple lines and bold colours drew one to the piece.

In the next post I'll share my exciting purchases!

"Art Cloth" experiments.

I am lucky to be a member of Weedon Bec Creative Textiles, a CQ regional group. At our last meeting, earlier this week we challenged ourselves to experiment with creating 5 "Art Cloths".

We started with five different pieces of hand dyed fabric and in small groups, worked , in turn, on each cloth to add surface pattern and texture with screen prints, Thermofax prints, stencils, block prints and rollers. We were allowed a maximum of twenty minutes working on each cloth.

Here are three examples of what we did.

Cloth 1

Cloth at the start

 After the first 20 mins.

 After second group had worked on it. 

 After third group had added their ideas

 After the fourth group finished. Finally those who had started off at stage one, returned to add any final details.

 Printing of lettering over the dominant petals.

Cloth 2

Here is the same process for a seconds cloth.

Cloth Three.

The challenge, next month, is to create something with the piece of cloth we have each taken home with us! 

My piece Is now pinned to the wall while I consider how I may use it.

African Quilt pt.3

With a clear view of the source inspiration for this piece I began looking at quilt design ideas.

I also looked at an idea I had used on a recent piece, where I made a large and a small quilt and stitched the small one onto the surface of the larger. Below is a photo showing the edge of the smaller quilt lying on the background quilt.

This would allow me to use the fabulous yellow fabric from Esther as my background while I then created a smaller piece using the shape and colour and feel of the sun on the water.

When I got to this stage I was really happy with the concept and could then bring together the fabrics I would use to suggest the sunset on the river. My stash is more than adequate and a recent purchase of another piece of Esther's fabric fitted with the concept as well.

I also realised that a piece of cotton damask created by Nene Jallow from The Gambia would fit with this scheme as well. (the bottom swatch)

As I will have a significant amount of the yellow Esther fabric as a whiolecloth quilt, I needed to give a lot of thought to the quilting of it.

The photo from the river, showing the patterning of the ripples suggested a simple watery horizontal quilting to me.

My design included putting a vertical stril through this yellow fabric, would that affect the quilting? Another sample needed.

My feeling was that the strip did not necessitate changing the quilting pattern.

Now I had to try out my idea for the smaller top quilt, stitching strips of colour. Did it matter id the strips were straight or curved? I decided that it was an abstraction from the photo and therefore quite OK to use straight lines.

I like the hand stitching, and plan to continue any of these lines through into the background quilt to anchor the two pieces together.

Now I just have to get stitching for real and make this quilt!!

African Quilt - pt. 2

I have had time to keep looking at my ideas for this quilt. The more I looked, the less happy I became with the ideas I had generated thus far. For a long while I just didn't "get" what it was was that I was unhappy with.

Here's a reminder of where I had got to.

What I realised was that the fabric is organic, random and free, but my designs were rigid and regular and owed little to the culture that had created the fabric. So..... I turned to the large collection of images that I have brought back from trips to Tanzania, Kenya, Namibia, Botswana and South Africa hoping that among them something would trigger the "yes!" Response.

I found the images that evoked the right response.

The Rufigi River in Tanzania. I had very strong images in my memory as well as these two photos of the light on the water at sundown, the patterns in the water and the array of colours if one looked hard enough. Now I could work on a design.

"Sewing for Pleasure" at NEC

Just back from this show at the NEC. Just a bit disappointed this year, as there were far fewer groups exhibiting really interesting work.

However three things really did stand out.

"Experimental Textiles" students of Kim Thittichai had a fascinating display of their just completed nine, two day course. Full of fascinating experimental textiles and students' sketchbooks.

Jane Bradshaw's excellent sketchbook really caught my eye. The students stewarding their stand were quite excellent ambassadors for the programme and I enjoyed chatting to them about the work.  I also thought how much my work might benefit from such a rigorous programme!

"Jeudis" exhibited again this year. I had been completely bowled over by Elaine Winterton's work last year and her vessels shown this year were less quirky but stunning pieces. She has the instant recognition factor! I was also drawn to Christine Plummer's mixed media, framed work and enjoyed talking to members about their work.

CQ and the Journal Quilts again had a stand and these little gems attracted a good number of visitors drawn to the fabulous array of 8" squares.

I really liked these pieces:

Three of mine were there too

I have come home with a selection of scrim, sari ribbon, threads and beads and bought some very tactile linen/silk mix and a piece of recycled cotton from the help Burma stall which I hope will become a new quilt in a very different colour way for me. More later!