Needle sketches

As soon as I had done the continuous line drawings - drawing (mostly) without looking - of the weathered oyster shells and mermaids purses I collected from the beach at Eastbourne I could see that they would make great stitched designs, and had potential for incorporating into my Narrative Thread work for Diversity.

I want to put them on rusted fabric, as the colours are so sympathetic with the subjects, but I have had  problems stitching into rusted fabric in the past; my 'prima donna' top end sewing machine refuses point blank to stitch through it, with the message STOP FOR SAFETY REASONS. Personally I think it is getting over dramatic, but there's no arguing with it. My workhorse semi-professional machine behaves a little better, but you can tell it's not really happy. I've tried various combinations of fine needles and different threads, but I think the oxidised metal clogs up the weave and makes tension very difficult to control.

So I've decided to stitch first and rust later. The samples are testing out different combinations of quilt sandwich and a variety of background treatments.

I'm pretty happy with the 'drawing', each slightly different but quite recognisable. I wanted to densely stitch the background so that the images gained dimension, 

and I've tried conventional quilt sandwiches with white cotton, hand and machine stitched, linen with felt and linen with felted blanket. 

I though this was going to be too heavy, but once the the stiffness of the quilted background might be a good thing. I think I'm going to leave the edges raw, so it's important how the backing and wadding reacts to the rust too.

Next step layer them up with rusty finds and tea a wait and see what happens!

Summer blog

I think I really should re-title this blog Summer Blog - as that's the only time I seem to get around to posting! As usual it is a year since I last wrote anything. So here is a brief round-up of what I've been up to in that time . . .

We started InStitches - and have completed our first year of teaching for ourselves. Despite it being a very traumatic year for Hazel we have run three year-long courses, several shorter ones and lots of one-day workshops. Students have enjoyed dyeing, printing, sketchbooks, hand and machine stitching, and all sorts of other techniques, and all have produced some amazing work. More details on our web site here and pictures are on our blog and our new Pinterest board.  It has been a steep learning curve for us - websites, blogs, Facebook and Pinterest - and getting them all to communicate with each other; accounts and keeping the books up-to-date (not to mention tax and banks etc); sales and ordering student supplies (we only nearly ran out of fabric once!); dyeing and printing our own fabric and threads for selling at shows; advertising and promotion etc etc - and all we wanted to do was teach!!

My quilt Sussex Coast was exhibited in Contemporary Quilt's Horizons exhibition at the Festival of Quilts in 2013 and other venues, including Prague.

Its little sister, Early Morning (the quilt that was made in 14 days), was selected for the Water Water exhibition in Henley on Thames, and also went to the Quilt Museum in York with Region Three's By the Sea exhibition.

And Full Circle has been to Canada, for the Ailsa Craig Community Quilt Festival in May 2014. My quilts are better travelled than I am!

In March I was asked to make a new banner for Region Three of the Quilters' Guild, in time for the AGM which they were hosting in Portsmouth. It uses my usual technique of raw edge strip appliqué, letting the hand-dyed and printed fabrics speak for themselves. The challenge was to incorporate something characteristic of every county in the region, without making it too cluttered and keeping a contemporary feel. Eventually I decided to work with simple text and silhouettes of landmarks. 

L-R: La Corbiere Lighthouse, Jersey, Fort Grey, Guernsey, Salisbury Cathedral, Stonehenge, Winchester Cathedral, the Spinaker Tower and The Needles, IoW.

I have also been learning: last July I went on a great course with Denise Lach (calligrapher) organised by Committed to Cloth . . . and have been intending to write about it ever since! I'll write soon with some photos and the work it has influenced. 

In May, Hazel and I did a fabulous week with Leslie Morgan at Studio 11 in Eastbourne, arranged by Christine Chester, exploring colour mixing with Procion dyes - loads of fuel for future work, and Leslie is such a generous tutor. More of that in a later post too.

Shingle Garden Sample

And, true to form, in the last month I have made two new quilts and two small pieces for the QG Unfini-shed fundraiser. The new quilts are for this year's Festival of Quilts: one has been selected for CQ's Dislocation exhibition, which opens there, and the other is for the Guilds Challenge, where the theme is In my Garden. For this I really didn't want to do a 'conventional' garden quilt (I'm not good with too much green!) and did want to continue developing my coastal theme. So I hit upon the idea of having a shingle garden, like that of Derek Jarman in Dungeness, where the pebbles, rust and driftwood are the key features, with unexpected splashes of colour from extremely hardy plants that can stand up to the salt winds. I excelled myself with this one, and the last stitch went in at 5.30am, ready to deliver the next day (or should I say later that same day)! The small pieces, just bigger than A4, were really quick and enjoyable to do, and hopefully will be bought by someone who shares my passion for our coast. I'll write more about the larger pieces in my next posts but here are pictures of the two small ones. 

Moonlit Sea

And then there's the cycling - something I've done on-and-off over the years ever since living in Hull as a student (well it is flat there!). Hazel's influence again has finally got me back on my bike (about time too) and cycling the 100km NightRider challenge (London by night) in June. Now I'm hooked, and looking for an upgrade to my heavy hybrid bike so I might stand a chance on the hills! 

So, should I have a mid-year resolution to blog more regularly, or will that go the way of the New Year type? Only time will tell . . .

The quilt that asked to be made

Have you ever had a quilt that asked to be made?

'What is she talking about?' I hear you say, 'talking rubbish again!' And until April I would have agreed with you. But this particular quilt asked, no - begged, to be made.

Hazel and I had run a couple of classes on wax and starch resist and other surface design techniques for our Inspiration to Stitch students. In order to have plenty of inspirational samples we had had a play day where we prepared lots of fabric ourselves. We prepared so much that ended up finishing some of mine off at C2C (when I was supposed to be focusing on my own work) by colouring one side pale blue and the other pale brown. I justified spending the time on 'teaching samples' because these fabrics were in coast-inspired colours.

It was as I was washing out the fabric that the quilt demanded to be made. The fabric said: 'I'd look great cut up into squares and pieced back together.' The marks were mainly circles and lines, so they all coordinated very well. Once they were dry it didn't take long to find several fabrics from my stash which complemented the resist fabrics, and the quilt virtually made itself. This is the benefit of becoming really familiar with your theme - you begin to internalise the colours, textures, lines and shapes, so that you just can't help producing work that belongs together.

Full Circle 

As you can see I used several sizes of square and rectangle to showcase some of the fabrics and add variety to the piecing. Once it was pieced the brown circle was monoprinted on using a large sheet of plastic (and nerves of steel!). Then the whole lot was machine quilted - following the circle and with a simple grid over the rest of the quilt. The next step was to block it as the circular quilting has skewed the top somewhat. This is the first time I have ever blocked a quilt; I usually find that liberal application of a steam-iron does the job, but this one needed more. Perfectly square and flat, I gave it a faced binding and sent it off to the Festival of Quilts last week.

Soy-wax and starch resist is great fun and eventually Hazel and I got to the stage where we were searching for more fabric to 'treat', having run out of plain white fabric. So I have a whole range of colourways ready for new quilts and hangings (and overdue journal quilts) - just need to get organised!

. . . by the Skin of their Teeth - part 2

I promised to tell about the second quilt for the Quilters' Guild Region 3 By the Sea challenge.

Even though I had known about the challenge for a long time (I was at the committee meeting where it was first discussed!) it was still last minute. The fabric was dyed/printed on April 16th and the final stitch went in on April 27th - some kind of record I'm sure.

The challenge was to create a quilt 10" wide by 50" long. I have been working on some fabric at Committed to Cloth on a sea theme (one of my recurring themes) which was going to be ideal for this quilt. Trouble was, none of the pieces I had was long enough, and it needed to be wholecloth (you'll see why if you look at the photos). So last time I was there I made a piece specially for this quilt. The fabric is inspired by photos of West Wittering beach, particularly the row of old groynes at the top of the beach near the river/ harbour mouth. They keep cropping up in my work - I have drawn them (see the sketch book in February) and collaged them and I'm sure they'll be around for a while longer.

The marks on the quilt are printed using thickened procion dye and  an old credit card. The credit card is also used to scrape dye mixed with varying amounts of manutex over the rest of the cloth to colour it. The colours used were black (it tends to look blue when diluted), rust orange, petrol green and red-brown. The top of the fabric represents the sky, then the sea (lots of it) with the beach and the groynes in the foreground (lots of artistic license here - as anyone who knows this beach well will tell you!).

I thought, as time was short, that I would simply machine quilt in wavy lines to represent the sea, and do something different for the beach and the sky. However, nothing is ever that simple, and after I had machine quilted lines to supplement the grasses in the middle the beach, and the FMQ'd the wood of the groynes and the puddles at their bases,  the beach was crying out for texture. So I hand-couched a thread, and then another, and another.

The slippery slope!

Having started I had to continue adding hand stitching to the beach - first my favourite seeding to blend the areas round the groynes, and then I needed something quicker to fill the background. I tried a large-ish quilting stitch but as I wasn't able to get it really even I didn't like the effect, so out it came. As I started to unpick, I noticed that the smaller stitches visible on the back, spaced at about 1/4", looked really effective, so that's what ended up on the front - they give a Kantha-style effect en masse - and the ripples are just right for sand.

Now anyone who is a quilter will know that dense quilting significantly reduces the size of the piece. So by now the bottom of the quilt was 3/4" narrower that the top! There was nothing for it but to hand quilt the top section and the sea as well!

So the sea has straight lines of running stitch in various thick threads. The sky, which is pale grey with a pale orangey-yellow, prompting the naming of the quilt Early Morning, has more seeding and  the same tiny, spaced-out running stitch, this time in curved lines reminiscent of aeroplane trails. Then all I had to do was add a faced binding and a sleeve (at the Stitch Witches' meeting that evening) and it was done.

The thing I forgot to do before taking it to the Regional Day in New Milton the next day was photograph it. So these photos are dreadful - poorly lit (in a school library) and not facing straight on to the camera for the full length, which is why the rows of stitching under the groynes look curved.

We had 28 entries, all of a very high standard and so diverse. These quilts will all be displayed at the Quilt Museum and Gallery in York during July and August, so if you're near go and have a look.

And the best thing? Against all the odds, my quilt was selected as the winner of the challenge by our two speaker/ judges, Janet Twinn and Gill Turley. So sometimes last minute pays off, although I wouldn't recommend it as a way of life!

Procrastinating

Supposed to be quilting a Stitch Witch piece, but decided to look at emails, then facebook and then my blog, and now 90 minutes have disappeared! The piece is for our exhibition in November, the theme is Transitions (and there is a colour thing going on too). All pieces are 12" wide by 60" long, and mine is made up of triangle units, in red, orange and pink saturated colours, both commercial and hand dyes. There are 80 units, so 320 triangles in the piece, and the majority of them have all their points! Iit has to be said - I do like piecing, despite being a non-traditional quilter. Has to be finished by Friday! It's called Order to Chaos  because the units start off organised into blocks, with good contrast and a defiinite plan, but as the piece progresses it descends into chaos (the story of my life!?) Here are a couple of detail pics:

I'm machine quilting it but am having trouble with the rayon thread - keeps breaking - probably because I was lazy (and pushed for time) and used polyester in the bobbin instead of going out to find some red cotton. Have also tried bamboo wadding and am finding that the fibres migrate through the top fabric, which is a pain - perhaps if I'd washed it before use this would have helped reduce this.

I found a great blog via a link from Contemporary Quilt: in 2005 the owner of the blog decided to teach herself to draw by doing a sketch each day in a small book she'd been given for Christmas. She's posted them all on her blog. It's called woolgathering and is well worth a look if you have a free moment - interesting frames, and such discipline!

Anyway now two hours have gone - so I'd better go too . . .