The last three weeks . . .

. . . have been hectic but exciting.

It all started with a phone call from Grosvenor, who run the National Quilt Championships in Sandown,  to say that my quilt All that Remains II had won not only the Theme category (A Touch of Yellow) but also Best Art Quilt and also Best in Show!! I was speechless.

So that was on 23rd June. The following weekend we had our last ever C&G student exhibition at Odiham - of which more later - but in between I had to finish a quilt for Contemporary Quilt's Horizons challenge (deadline 1st July). Normal service has resumed, and as usual I had left the majority of the work to the last minute. The quilt in question is the third in the series of the seascape quilts. These are wholecloths, with dye-painted and printed fabric, some machine stitch and lots of hand stitch for texture. Hand stitch, unfortunately, takes ages! And once started has to be done evenly across the whole surface, otherwise distortion ensues.

So on Sandown weekend I still had approximately half of the surface to stitch. I sewed all day on the Saturday, and then till the early hours on Tuesday and Wednesday night. The final stitch went in at 3.30am on Thursday morning!

We hung the C&G exhibition on Thursday. A couple of students had had similarly late nights, but the work looked amazing and fitted the rooms at Odiham perfectly. Alongside the C&G work we displayed some of the books and sample pieces made by our first Inspiration to Stitch students, and they also put on a very good show.

The weather was improving, and to round the weekend off Saturday was Armed Forces Day in Odiham, complete with army bands in full regalia (Bearskins!), tea and cakes and picnics in the church yard, and parachuting teddy bears off the church tower! This brought people to the exhibition who had never seen this kind of thing before and we had loads of complimentary & admiring comments from visitors - both those who knew what they were looking at (who were amazed at the quality of workmanship and diversity of the work) and those who didn't (who were just amazed that you can do all that with a bit of fabric and thread). In all it was a lovely weekend.



Photos of the exhibition are in this web album 

C&G Group 4 & ITS 1 exhibition

Final day of term for all three courses was last week, and Hazel and I were treated to lovely lunches by our students on three days running!

So - onwards and upwards - InStitches courses are filling up for next term - that's exciting too!

InStitches - taking the plunge!

Well, after months (years?) of talking about it, Hazel and I have finally taken the plunge and set up our own business. It's called InStitches, and is all about delivering exciting courses to people who love patchwork and quilting, dyeing and stitching and sketchbooks.

We have spent the last month developing the website www.InStitchesTextileCourses.co.uk, talking to accountants and business advisers at the bank, designing and ordering business cards and working out costs (the courses have been planned for a long time). It has been time consuming getting all the little details right - you wouldn't believe how long it takes to get everything linking to everything else on a website (or how gratifying it is to be able to figure out how to change the colour of the background to a non-standard one, or insert a HTML/Javascript back button).  OK - I'm turning into a nerd, but it is so exciting to be getting bookings and deposit money appearing as if by magic in the bank account!

So now I need to spend some time (OK a lot of time) stitching my quilt for the CQ Horizons challenge, otherwise it will be another skin of the teeth production.

Something wrong here?

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!