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It is the beginning of May.

The Festival of Quilts is not till August.

Apart from the binding I have (whisper it . . . ) finished one of my entries!

Granted it's not huge - 48" x 33" - and it is simply pieced, but it has been thoroughly machine quilted. And when I say thoroughly I mean a half-inch grid - all over. Except for the large (24") circle which was mono-printed on using fabric paint after the piecing but before the quilting, and then machine quilted. The mono-printing was a nerve-wracking process - fabric paint tends to be a permanent process so it had to be right first time.

The fabric is a variety of hand-dyed and printed fabrics, all in pale(ish) blues, greys, browns, teals - in other words colours of the sea. I've been making this fabric over the past year, and the latest lot is double-sided (ie one colour on the front and another on the back), wax and flour resist, mainly with distressed circles and other textural marks. It was this fabric that was responsible for the quilt. It spoke to me whilst I was washing it out (a long process - as anyone who has done wax resist with thickened Procion dye will tell you it becomes addictive and you just keep making more) and told me to cut it into squares and rectangles and make this quilt!

So no photos of the fabric, because I've cut most of it up. I'll take some quilt photos soon and post them.

Skin of the teeth productions is alive and well, however, with the first 4 journal quilts of 2013 posted at midnight on 30th April (the deadline!). The final stitches had gone in less than an hour before.

January - Wheal Grenville

February - Wheal Frances

March -Wheal Coates - the iconic tin-mine on the cliffs above Chapel Porth beach

This year the format is 8" x 12" landscape, and we have to have a theme. My theme is By the Sea, and these 4 quilts from left over tin-mine designs qualify in that they are all by the sea (and anyway, nothing is very far from the sea in west Cornwall).

I have discovered a great way of binding these little quilts, which is Not Cheating. It involves using pre-fused fabric which you stitch at the front as usual, and then simply press in place on the back. Wouldn't be sturdy enough for a bed quilt, but perfectly fine for this application. And I expect everyone else has been doing this for ages, but I was always a bit slow on the uptake!

Student Exhibition 2012

Well another year has flown by and it's exhibition time again. This year we have 12 students completing, six from C&G certificate and six from diploma. And we have moved venue to Petersfield Library, which has an excellent exhibition space. Sam and her team at the library have been very supportive, and have even opened the library over the weekend specially to encourage people in. (This reinforces our experience of library staff as Viv and Rachel and the teams at Fleet and Odiham libraries are just the same.)

It took us all day on Thursday to set it up (till 8.30pm!) but it was well worth it. The work looks amazing - a real testimony to the hard work and skill of all the students. We have had lots of visitors of all ages during the first two days (including the ex-president of the Quilters Guild, who is a local) and, judging by the comments in the visitors' book, all have been impressed by the quality and variety of work on display.

Here are a couple of general shots of the exhibition to be going on with - there will be more on the C&G website as soon as I have time to edit them properly.

Isn't it a wonderful space?

Flower Festival

Flowers and quilts go together very well. Village Green Quilters and our C&G classes were invited to display some quilts during the flower festival weekend at All Saints Church in Fleet, which was part of their 150 years celebrations.

The flower display in the church was stunning. The theme was Sensory Delights, and there were some very imaginative interpretations, including a waterfall in willow with white flowers (lilies, hydrangeas, gypsophila) for 'sound'.

There was also a floral carpet, with plaques depicting the seasons running down the central aisle.

The church itself is Victorian, brick-built, but with painted decoration on all the walls and pillars. The ceiling also has painted bosses. Being brick built, the light is a bit orange, and as many of the displays were on windowsills quite hard to get a good photo which does them justice,  but the photos aren't too bad.


You can see more in this web album.

All Saints Flower Festival

The quilts were in the new parish centre (church hall), where they also have a coffee bar serving cakes and lunches (yum) all manned by volunteers.

We hung the display on Friday morning - it took about two and a half hours (lots of willing helpers and good organisation by Hazel), which is good going considering we didn't know the room well. The main problem was fitting in four stunning double bed quilts. The small stands were too small for them, and the large stands didn't fit, being 120" tall, and the room has beams and low-hanging lights etc and a pitched roof. In the end two of them went on our photographic stands (which are really not designed for the weight of quilts) and two were folded on the barre at one end of the room.

We had hundreds of people through (literally), and what was nice was the reaction of non-quilters to the quilts. I don't think people had seen anything quite like it before, and I think we shattered a few pre-conceptions. Men in particular took a lot of interest in the design and construction of the quilts. Everyone took the job of voting for the Visitors' choice very seriously.

There was also a special challenge to tie in with the flower show - to make an A4 sized quiltlet on the theme 'each little flower that opens'. We had 24 entries which is petty good for a short-notice challenge.

All in all a very enjoyable and successful weekend - and we may have gained some new group members and 'beginners' on our classes.

More pictures in this album.

All Saints and VGQ

Spring Clean

Inspired by the sunny day today (finally!) I decided to take the plunge and upgrade to one of the new Blogger templates - so here it is, all bright and sparkly! And not black any more. Only a few hairy moments when I tried one of the dynamic templates and lost all my buttons. Luckily, having decided that the dynamic templates were perhaps too headache-inducing and settled on a simple one instead, they all came back.

I'm not sure I like all my pale photos against this background, so I've given them borders for the moment - these may go as I'm not keen on them. But I do like the clean look.

I've just finished building (with a lot of help from Weebly) the site for Odiham Bridewell City and Guilds courses and I have to say I'm very happy with the way it looks - lots of photos of students' work against a clean white background. It's amazing what you can do with a little knowledge and determination.

The reason we've finally bitten the bullet and created a website is that we have an end-of-course exhibition coming up, so this allows us to publicise the courses and the exhibition with minimal printing costs. It is also much easier to update information on a website than printed information and we can include far more inspirational photos than we could otherwise.  It's very exciting!

Note added May 2013 - Odiham Bridewell City & Guilds course archives are now part of the In Stitches website.

. . . 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!

...by the Skin of their Teeth...

That should be my motto!

I have just completed the fourth set of work to meet its deadline by the skin of its teeth. This time it was the first four journal quilts for Contemporary Quilt's Journal Quilt project. The project runs every year, the goal being to make one small quilt every month for a year, and to post the resulting quiltlets on the group pages on Yahoo. Each year there are specific crteria, usually relating to size, and sometimes specifying a theme. This year the JQs are to be A4 portrait size, and the theme is 'Shades of . . .' with the first 4 being  red, the next 4 yellow and the final 4 blue.

You will have noticed that I said 'one small quilt every month'; not 4 small quilts on the final day of the 4th month, which of course is exactly what I did! Why do I have to be such a deadline person? I can think all round a subject for days, weeks, months even, but until the deadline is looming I cannot seem to get down to work. As it was I had planned to add my own extra theme of text to the challenge, using words in different languages to represent the colours, pigment names, wavelengths etc. I had done all the research, worked in my sketchbook, dyed and printed fabric, even made a thermofax screen . . . But I left it so late that all those plans had to be abandoned in the execution, in favour of something simple and achievable in a day.

So they are just simple explorations of colour and composition.
January's is just Red & Blue, February's is inspired by the daffodils that were in my garden in February, March's is green for spring, and April's (above) is purple - Purple Rain! (it was teeming down all day on Sunday when I made them).

And why was I so late in starting these JQs? Because I have recently completed not one, but two more quilts just in time for their deadlines too!

The first was also for Contemporary Quilt, this time for their tenth birthday challenge, CQ@10. The theme was tin (10th anniversary) and the source a stunning black and white photo by Tony Howell which you can see here. I really enjoyed the research for this piece, as tin mines have been part of my psyche since we used to holiday in west Cornwall when I was a child. And we were going down to stay near Falmouth before the deadline so there was plenty of opportunity for a close look at the remains which are everywhere. Here are some pics of Wheal Coates, on the coast near St Agnes - probably the most photographed mine in Cornwall (with the exception perhaps of Botallak Crowns, which are perched precariously on the cliffs near St Just).

The visit was just two weeks before the deadline, but I knew I could do it - I had dyed and printed fabric and worked out various designs in my sketchbook, so being able to look at the real thing rather than photos was just going to add authenticity. And the quilt was finished (albeit with no hand stitch due to time - and maybe the edges were't quite done before the photo was taken, but they are now!) and photographed, and the photo and sample submitted the day before the deadline on the 31st March.







Here's a detail - the quilt itself is actually landscape format.

The background is simple strip-piecing using fabric that has been dyed in combinations of royal blue and petrol green. Some has been screen printed using a screen developed from a drawing of the headgear at South Crofty mine. Other marks have been made using an old credit card (my favourite technique). Another (the one that looks like vertical white and green stripes) has had the colour discharged using a thermofax screen. The stripes are actually words describing the geology of the tin-mining districts. The chimney fabric was printed with a breakdown screen to represent the stonework of the walls. The whole is densely machine quilted in straight lines using a variety of threads.

And on Friday I heard that it had been selected for the CQ exhibition at the Festival of Quilts this year! One of 23 chosen from a total of 61.

The theme of tin mines is sure to feature in future work as it has loads of potential. And I have a whole palette of suitable fabrics developed just for this.


And the second quilt was for the 'By the Sea' challenge for the Region Three regional day on Saturday. That one was made in record time, but more of that in another post.

Sketchbook Part 2

The sketchbook arrived safely!

And it has been catalogued at the Brooklyn Art Library with a call number of 148L.5-5 (whatever that means!). In time it will also be digitalised, so able to be viewed on-line. The full Sketchbook tour starts in the US in April, and the European books will come to London in October. Exciting!