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 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!

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!

. . . 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.