Connection at Forge Mill Needle Museum

Last year I was fortunate enough to be selected as a guest artist for Cwilt Cymru, a group whose work I had admired since seeing it in the Spirit of the Celts exhibition.  The theme of the current exhibit is Connection, and I have chosen the connection with my mother as the focus of what I produced.  Since my mother's side of the family is entirely Welsh it seemed appropriate and I had been planning a series of pieces on my relationship with my mother for some time.

 

The first piece was an enjoyable and fairly straightforward quilt to make, called My Mother Made Spitfires, focussing on my mother's experience as a war worker at Vickers Armstrong's Castle Bromwich factory near Birmingham, where she was involved in making parts for Spitfires.

 

 

 

 

The hours were long, the factory a target for bombing, and the work heavy (the machinery she operated, a capstan lathe, was later deemed unsuitable for women to operate).  Even so, her wartime experiences, as she described them to me, were full of fun, films, fashions and dancing.  She had more freedom and more money than she had had before and like many others at the time had a determination to enjoy life to the full (the fact that life was uncertain at the time probably had something to do with this).  It was during these years that she met my father, a GI she married shortly before his return to the US in 1946.  The quilt tries to draw together the different aspects of her life at the time.

 

The poster at top left is used with permission of the Imperial War Museum.  Other images are adapted from contemporary sources, and the photograph near the bottom right is a photograph of my mother, printed onto Extravorganza and overlaid onto hand-dyed fabric.

 

The poster suggested the colour-scheme for the quilt: the base fabrics are cottons hand-dyed in various combinations of orange and purple.  Some of these have been digitally printed with images from the time and my own words describing my mother's experiences.  Overlays of digitally-pinted Extravorganza have formed a basis for applique, and the whole piece has been free-machine quilted.

 

 



The second quilt Turning Ugly was a different matter.  Originally I had planned to take a different area of my mother's life as the focus and to produce something relatively "safe", but as time went on my thoughts constantly got drawn to the years after the war, in particular a two-year period from November 1949 which were the worst two years of mine and my mother's life.

I was conceived shortly before my father's return to the US.  In the early days of her pregnancy, with my grandmother ill, and possibly getting cold feet about the whole experience, my mother did not take up any of the three passages allocated to her as a war-bride.  In 1949 my father divorced her.  She also lost her looks when she suffered a form of facial paralysis called Bell's Palsy which she never completely recovered from.  In November 1949 she married a recently-widowed father of two small daughters and we went to live with them in a village between Chepstow and Tintern in the Wye Valley, a beautiful part of the country made hideous for us because of the violence and abuse we both suffered.

The idea was to produce a quilt that had a sort of "double-take" effect: that looked beautiful on the surface but became other than that when you looked up close.  Originally the words that described the experiences were going to be obscured (as in the piece at top left) but as the quilt was being made, things changed.  The pieces of the story first became blurred but readable if you tried hard (written in inktense pencil overlaid with organza) but in the end they were written in stitch, on the surface of the quilt.  And one set of words - describing in outline an experience which I kept hidden even from myself, but which has been like a sort of invisible ghost haunting me all my life - emerged as I was writing it.  So that the quilt became in itself what it was never intended to be - a sort of therapy.

 

 

My neighbour pointed out that I had probably saved myself quite a lot of money in therapy costs - and I had a quilt at the end of  it.  It's been a very painful and difficult process but I now feel lighter and happier than I've felt in my life.  One thing that bewildered me - the last stage was quilting the larger squares: and it came out - unplanned - like this:

 

 

 

 With very free, joyful lines of quilting redolent of growth and natural forms - exactly the way I felt as a result of the process of making the quilt.

 

The exhibition - which contains beautiful pieces by the six permanent members of the group as well as the other three guest artists - opens at Forge Mill, Redditch tomorrow (11th Feb).



International Quilt Challenge

Partly inspired by seeing the work of the Twelve by Twelve group at Festival of Quilts, I have recently joined an internet challenge group, The International Quilt Challenge.  Sixteen of us, including quilt artists from the UK, Ireland, Australia and the US are producing a piece every two months to a theme set by each member in turn.  The first theme, chosen by Annabel, was Sunshine and Shadow.  For a long time  I couldn't decide what to do then, pondering one morning with the deadline imminent, I became fascinated by the shadows of my neighbour's ornamental plum tree on my bedroom curtains, which reminded me of yet another photograph taken by my late husband, of evening shadows on the mesh curtains in the downstairs bay window: 

What I found particularly intriguing was the way that the shadows of the leaves in some cases were crisp and in others half-formed and varied in depth/intensity.

The resulting quiltlet was composed intuitively and at speed with no sketchbook input.  The ideal base fabric presented itself to me - a piece of silk charmeuse I'd dyed some time earlier, and the shadows were made from layers of silk and polyester organza I'd also dyed.  I ironed the organzas onto black mistyfuse, then cut and bonded freely composing as I went.  Then finished the composition with free-machine quilting. Though the end result is in my view a bit limited, and has nowhere near the depth of some of the other pieces in the challenge, I do sort of like it...



NWCQ Weekend Group: the Challenge Pieces

Just over a month ago I put together a series of challenge packs of bits of fabrics thread and so on from my huge hand-dyed stash - an attempt to do something useful with it instead of letting it just sit there.  The pack contained a variety of small pieces of fabric - felt/wadding, silk, cotton, satin, scrim, butter muslin, velvet, chiffon/organza, a silk carrier rod, stranded embroidery cotton, ornamental thread, and jute scrim.  The challenge - to use some of the contents (plus any of your own that you wanted to add) to make one or more small pieces - these could be sample pieces, the idea being to explore the possibilities.

The results amazed and delighted me, not just for the quality of the work but also on account of the enjoyment people obviously had in producing it.

So here goes - in no particular order (or rather the somewhat arbitrary order in which Blogger uploaded the photographs:

This gem of an abstract composition is by Ann Horton: something of most of the fabrics laid onto felt, embellished with stitching, couched thread and absolutely amazing use of beads which really make this piece (unfortunately the beads have not shown up as well as I'd hoped for which apologies) 

Catherine's work - in progress - started with the satin, which suggested stormy sky, together with the stormy sea of the hand-dyed cotton and scrom suggesting foam (if I'd known this fabric could look this good she might not have got it!)  I also loved the felt sails with the emboidered crosses.  Look forward to seeing this one finished.

Hilary's beautifully appliqued leaves really wowed me and I love the way she's found just the right fabric to use with the fabrics in the pack - and the stitching is wonderful too - again, really looking forward to seeiong this one finished.

Ena Glogowski's Volcano is a really dramatic and exciting pieces.  This is the first time Ena had tried anything like this and she has made really effective use of the materials - the silk volcano, the muslin and scrim mountains in the foreground, the fibres, jute scrim and bits of silk in the smoke and fire.  A very special piece - and Ena's comment - "You have introduced me to a Real Good Thing" is the icing on the cake.

The following piece - probably the most adventurous of all - is made by Anne Egerton, Ena's daughter.  She describes it as a 3D sampler, and once again I'm not sure the photographs do it justice.  Part of it is quilted satin made into a sort of cornucopia...

with various other fabrics spilling out in a sort of wild profusion - an effect I love but which I always find difficult to achieve; she's also included ornamental gift ribbon.  I especially love the stitching on the satin and the way she's used the jute scrim so effectively.  Again, one I look forward to seeing finished.

Helen's work will be familiar to those who have followed the Twelve by Twelve group or seen their book and exhibition at Festival of Quilts.  This piece contrasts the mass-production (shown in the comparatively flat machine-stitched background fabric) of textiles with the richness of handwork: and here it really is rich - if you click the picture it will enlarge so you can see the detail.  The more I look at this the more I see in it, and I particularly love the asymmetric composition and the way in which the tiny darker pieces of silk carrier-rod bring the whole thing together.

During the meeting Ann Horton made a frame for her piece (hope we get a lesson at some later stage - is there no end to this woman's talents?)

Dina is another member of the group for whom all this peculiar stuff was new, challenging and ultimately exciting and worthwhile.  Her piece is a sampler of different materials and techniques depicting the twelve months of the year, beginning with the paper fan ( a fanfare for the coming year, and including april showers made of scrim, chiffon plants, frayed velvet for a November bonfire, a painted apple and winter fires in jute scrim: a really inventive use of the materials.  She was also stitching a really beautiful scarf during the meeting.

One of the members of the group got a little stuck (it happens to all of us from time to time) and passed her pack over to Ann Horton, who made this piece for her friend - not only taking on the task of finding ways to use the fabrics effectively but also making something her friend would like  - beautiful felt and velvet leaves, padded petals and a variety of fabrics and threads for the flower centre.  Lucky friend!

Leah Higgins is the groups convenor and produced a beautifully finished geometric piece: unfortunately the photograph doesn't do it justice.  A pity because she's used a whole range of fabrics in a very complex way to produced a beautifully balanced composition.  Using simple shapes she's used a whole range of techniques - different kinds of edges, lines and overlays.  And being me I love the touch of asymmetry.  Another one I could look at for a long time (I hope I'll get a better picture at a future meeting.

Finally to Mary's.  Apparently her technique was to spread out the contents of the pack on the background fabric, rearranging until she got something she liked the look of and it really has worked well.  I love the contrast of colours and textures and particularly the way the wiggly lines in the jute scrim and the thread with silk carrier-rod contrasts with the straight-sided geometric shapes elsewhere.  Another one I wish I'd made.

And there are hopefully more to come.

Pleaase if I have mis-spelt or got names wrong could somebody tell me and I will correct it (I was still a bit train-lagged after going to London the day before!)

Journal Quilts and More Ferns

The first of my journal quilts this year is inspired by memories of a very difficult period of my life: my husband died eleven years ago and during the first two years after his death I experienced financial hardship, problems with the house which needed repairs I couldn't afford and depression.  I also neglected friendships and became rather hermit-like.  If the piece above, which I have called Dark, looks grim, it is because it is meant to.  I've also deliberately used coarse fabrics - various scrims, including jute scrim, raw edges and silk carrier rods - the black-dyed rods it occurs to me are like huge blocks of something barricading me in from the outside world, which is exactly what happened...

The second phase is where I was beginning to cope - living very abstemiously, paying off debts, decluttering the house and applying for a renovation grant.  However, another setback occurred when I wa diagnosed with endometrial cancer.  This left me feeling raw and vulnerable, hence the title of the second piece, called Raw:

The third piece is after I had been operated on and had undergone radiotherapy and the work on the house had begun.  I was also financially more stable by this time and the title, Mending, describes the time when I was beginning to find things enjoyable again, and becoming less isolated, repairing old friendships and developing new ones.  Hence the brighter colours.  I've also used materials and techniques which suggest healing - the dyed mesh is fabric used for wound dressings; I've used darning and knots.

The fourth journal quilt is called Light, and describes more or less where I am now, having shed some of the previous burdens: treatment for cancer was successful.  The house is still a work in progress, but only in terms of bits needing redecorating - all the serious stuff has been done.  And although I apparently earn well below the national average I can live comfortably within my income.  I am enjoying life and feel comfortable in my own skin for the first time in a long while.

The final project for this month has been a small quilt I made for a display at the Quilt Museum in York of work from our region of the Quilters Guild.  The challenge was to make a long narrow quilt in tints and shades of one colour only.  And somehow I found myself visualising ferns:  here's the quilt - it will be on display in the Aldwark Gallery for the months of July and August:

Digging for Bait

Made for the Hannah's Room Beautiful Batiks Challenge, this will be at Uttoxeter Racecourse (Quilts in the Garden) from 15th to 17th April.  Based on a photograph taken by my late husband in Whitby some years ago:

Admittedly not my usual style which is probably why I found it so much fun to do (once I got round to it, after much agonising - however the agonising was productive, as it went together like a dream in the end.  Quite a challenge for me too in using the commercially-produced fabrics, having to work with colours already there, rather than dyeing the ones I really wanted: learnt a lot this way!  And I love the way the patterns echo the fossils that you find in this part of Whitby!

Techniques are straightforward - curved piecing, improvised as I went (but only after trying out various ideas in paint and cut paper which is probably what made it so easy in the end), with the figure cut from a fabric also made from curved strip-piecing.  Then overloaded with a variety of free-motion quilted patterns for the backgound, with drawn lines (quilted drawn lines that is) suggesting the figure.  Enormous fun to do!

Finally - Journal Quilts October-December

The final Contemporary Quilt Journal Quilts for 2010 use fabrics I created in Rayna Gillman's amazing masterclass at Festival of Quilts in August.  .  The printed fabrics are combined with hand-dyed poplins, mainly an extraordinarily vivid red I dyed some time ago.  For me red symbolises life and energy and I have tried to use this symbolism in different ways in each one.  Technically, I have also tried two things.  The first is to focus on the use of contrast in composition; the second is to use a more minimalist way of free-machine quilting instead of the all over complex patterning I have done in the past. 

The September one contains a fern in a layered screenprint containing various elements.  I wanted to get the efffect of light through trees and shrubs; those of you who read this blog know that for me ferns are a potent symbol of life and continuity.  I've added two hand-dyed fabrics here, using fused applique, and the whole is lesss simplified than the later ones.

The October JQ uses a ready-made thermofax screen over hand-dyed fabric screened in a low-contrast colour in two directions over corrugated cardboard to make a grid.  I printed several layers of the pattern to create something a little more complex. I also wanted to get the sense of looking through something to see the seedheads (another image of continuity and new life, now I think of it).

The November JQ uses  multiple printings with another ready-made thermofax screen using squares of different sizes over a "failed" screenprinted piece.  This seemed to be like a city to me, with the line where the fabric had folded and not been printed suggesting a river.  Rivers were once the life-blood of many cities, including Leeds, where I live, bringing in goods and raw materials and taking out manufactured items for trade.  Leeds also has many underground streams (one runs down the middle of our back alley and has been known to reappear in exceptionally heavy rain) and the unprinted 'river' under the superimposed thermofax has become one of these, the main river is in the red fabric, and the only quilting other than the rivers is a branching river that has become a plant.  This is the least quilting I have ever done on a piece this size, and the jury is still out on whether it needs more.

The December JQ uses fabric which was not my favourite at the time but which has become the one I like best.  It is a ghost print, i.e. a second one made without reinking, just using the ink left on the screen after the previous print, which had been made using pieces of sequin waste some of which had been removed before the second printing.  The image it made suggested dust, smoke and urban decay and I wanted to contrast this with curves in the red applique; the quilting adds the suggestion of more curves.

I must admit to being fairly pleased with these pieces.  My favourite is the last one; my sister-in-law's is the first.  I'd love to know which you like best.

And - oh yes - these were the first photographs taken on my new Lumix G10 camera which the cats (in a fit of reckless extravagance) gave me for Christmas, so they should enlarge well!  (Though having checked that I've discovered there is such a thing as too clear - apologies for the cat-hairs!)

Quilts finished for FOQ

This is the one I struggled to finish - not the best shot.  It's the quilting that took the time.  Made of layered scrim over yellow-green satin (hand-dyed) for the big fern and grey silk overlaid with dyed silk organza for the dark fossil-ferns.  I ended up liking the back more than the front, but there you go...

The title is Survival of the Fittest as for me ferns are a potent symbol of survival and renewal (and they are actually great survivors - having been around since the Jurassic era, though the ones in my garden are mere youngsters, having only been around for a hundred years or so.

Next is another fern one - made near the end of 2009, a sort of companion piece to the quilt chosen for Contemporary Quilt's Breakthrough exhibition, which will also feature at Festival of Quilts:

This one's called Nature's Blueprints - with Improvisations and attempts to celebrate the ways in which ferns are not - as many people think - fractals but in fact vary greatly from one frond to the next;  this capacity for improvisation is a key factor in their success.

The final quilt of the three (photographed in the car on the way to the P.O. is a double-sided miniatureusing hand-dyed silk organzas and nets over silk-painted pelmet vilene (the shadowy trees in the background deliberately show through from the other side).  Unfortunately this had to be finished off rather hurriedly and some of the stitching has suffered as a result (quilting layers of sheers, especially silk nets, is not the easiest job in the world).  A pretty piece rather than anything very special but I actually manage to like this one!  The trees are drawn from real ones in Wytham Woods, the title is Wildwood - Spring and Autumn and the label is pinned on so it can be easily removed - I understand this will be done before it is shown to the public (I hope)

V&A Quilts 1700-2010: Part 2 - the stories

Every quilt has a story.  Making a quilt is a meditative process and our thoughts, memories, all the things we experience are stitched into them.  Looking at my quilts instantly brings back events during its making.  Sometimes the fabrics have memories of their own.  But the "hidden histories" and "untold stories" - to quote the subtitle of the V&A exhibition - rarely come to light: usually we keep them to ourselves and do not record them: even present-day artists' statements give only a brief nod to the thoughts and events that went into their making.  And most of those who made the older quilts in the exhibition remain anonymous. 

However, some quilts do come with something of the stories of their makers.  One such is amongst the earliest quilts in the exhibition, a cot-quilt made by Priscilla Redding at the end of the seventeenth century.

We know something of the turbulent events of her and her family's life because she also left behind a diary which tells amongst other things of her father's persecution for his beliefs, and the death of one of her children.

The George III Coverlet (image in previous post) contains a series of applique panels depicting both private and public events from the beginning of the nineteenth century; as V&A curators discovered, through painstaking research, a number of the panels are based on contemporary prints.  However the maker has included what is thought to be a self-portrait in a number of the panels, emphasising her role as onloooker.

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The Elisabeth Chapman coverlet (above) arrived at the V&A complete with its history: it was made as a wedding coverlet,  including a love poem and paper templates cut from love letters.  Much of this proved to be myth.  The "love poem" turned out to have been written by a dentist who embalmed his wife's body after her death - he continued to receive her dowry only while she remained above ground.  The "love letters" turned out to be receipts, copybooks, household ledgers and so on.  The quilt also - rather bewilderingly - contains a panel commemorating Wellington's victory at Vittoria.

Some of the most poignant stories are those stitched into the prison quilts.  One of the women involved in making the Rajah  quilt, stitched on board the transportation ship of that name, had been sentenced to transportation as a seventeen-year-old after stealing at the age of fifteen a length of cloth.  Happily she lived to become a pillar of the community in Tasmania, where she settled.  But imagine all the sadness and anxieties stitched into that quilt.

One of the women present at the preview had been one of the girls who had made the quilt whilst a civilian prisoner at Changi Prison in Singapore.  She told of how the quilt had been made from scavenged scraps, stitched in secret (the guards would have beaten them had they been discovered) using the thread from unpicked clothes.

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The most recent of the prison quilts is one made by men at Wandsworth Prison, organised by the charity Fine Cell Work.  Each of the hexagons was made by an inmate, choosing his own illustration and/or message:

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Another of the contemporary quilts is that made by Quilt Art member Sara Impey:

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 This beautiful quilt, called Punctuation, contains the phrases never did like puntuation and see you suddenly one day found in a letter amongst her mother's possessions after her death.  The letter suggests there was a relationship between her mother and a family friend - the rediscovery of a "hidden history".

But possibly the most poignant of the stories relates to a piece I was unable to take a photograph of (it was behind a glass case), a tiny piece half of a larger piece that had been embroidered with a heart.  It comes from the Foundling Museum: this piece was left by a mother with her baby whom she was forced by poverty or some other circumstance to leave at the Foundling Hospital.  The other half she kept with her, intending to reclaim her baby when circumstances improved, using the piece she kept to prove that she was the mother.  In this case, as in many others, she never did return.

Interestingly, there is a link between this and the final piece in the exhibition, one which I also find profoundly moving, the installation by Tracey Emin (shown in the previous post).  There is currently an exhibition of work by Tracey Emin at the Foundling Museum on the theme of lost children.

Breakthrough exhibition: Spring Ferns

Quiltfest - http://www.quiltfest.org.uk/ - is taking place on Llangollen during the month of February.  There are three major exhibitions - Effie Galletly  with a new exhibition A Sense of Place, works by Liesbeth Williams, and selected quilts by members of the Contemporary Quilt Group (a specialist sub-group of The Quilters Guild of the British Isles) in an exhibition called Breakthrough.  Quiltfest is an annual event and is known for the quality of its exhibitions and this year is no exception - so if you can get to Llangollen this month you'll be in for a treat.

One of the quilts selected is by me!  Yes!  Really!  I have seen photographs of the exhibition and there are really amazing quilts in it, many by well-known quilters: I am proud (and excited) to be in such august company.

My quilt is one of my fern pieces.  It's based on the ferns that have grown in my garden for the last century, but every year seems like new when they start to grow - and for me they are potent symbols of growth and survival.  In terms of my development as an artist they also represent a personal breakthrough in that the ferns are all portraits developed from drawings (apart that is from the screenprinted ferns which remind me of the ghosts of the previous year's ferns that hang around till spring):

The fabric for the quilt is hand-dyed (the background had to be overdyed to get the depth of colour I wanted).  The "ghost-ferns" were screenprinted with thickened dye, using a real fern as a mask.  I've been experimenting with ways of attaching applique by machine: in this case I used a tiny zigzag with a line of straight-stitch either side (if I'm going to use something that will show I prefer to make a feature of it).  I've couched hand-dyed thread (six strands of stranded embroidery cotton) round the screen-printed panels.  The same thread is also used to outline the other fernlets (the ones that haven't yet grown).  The whole wuilt is free-machine quilted (I have been practising this and while I'm not yet perfect I have come on!) with Oliver Twists hand-dyed threads.

Ferns

My interest in nature's patterns and observation of the ferns in my garden have led to a deep fascination with these amazing plants.  My ferns, like many others in the neighbourhood, have probably been growing there since soon after the houses were built at the beginning of the twentieth century, but they are mere youngsters compared with the history of ferns in gerneral, which have been around since the Jurassic period.  Good job I like them, as they are not only great survivors but are almost impossible to get rid of.

It started with observational drawings I did last spring, including these two:

For me drawing is not only an intriguing activity which lights up the artist in me but is also a process of observation and discovery sparking questions and a need to know who what and why (I've always felt art and science were closely interlinked and not the separate disciplines many people seem to assume).  One of the first things I observed was how irregular ferns are: a surprise because, like many others who had been fascinated by fractals some years ago, I had thought that ferns were among the most regularly-patterned of plants.  Looking more closely at the growth-patterns of the Male Ferns (the species name) in the following months I discovered a huge degree of variation from the "blueprint" pattern: individual leaves or groups of leaves missing or stubby, for example, especially where they grow near a solid object like a wall or are crowded together (maybe because there's no point in expending energy in growing leaves that have no chance of prospering? I haven't yet found an answer to that question but I'm still looking).

The next drawings took me from naturalistic to stylised:

(apologies for the roughness of these sketches but they are rough notes rather than finished drawings)

I also produced a series of screenrpinted fabric pieces using ferns, hand-dyed fabrics and thickened dyes - here are two examples:

I used these in two quilts: the first is called Nature's Blueprints - and Improvisations.  The ferns here are based on actual ferns in my garden.  It uses the printed panels, my hand-dyed fabrics and machine applique and quilting.  I have not shown it here as I may want to enter it for a show.  There is also a slightly smaller quilt in this series, which I will not show here as it has been selected for the Contemporary Quilt Breakthrough exhibition at Quiltfest in Llangollen next month, so I will not be showing it on my blog until after that exhibition opens.

Then followed some linocuts I did for my printmaking class at Leeds Art college - these are the first two in the series.  The first was intended to be the closest to naturalistic, though it has a strong degree of stylisation.  The print is hand-coloured using watercolour pencils.  The second is strongly influenced by Peter Randall-Page's linocuts (see previous posting)

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During this time I was also producing a series of Journal Quilts for the Contemporary Quilt Group's challenge: the idea was to begin naturalistically and become increasingly abstract.  The first, the September JQ, used a print made by pressing one of the ferns used for screen-prints onto fabric, then free-machine quilting the image produced.  The October journal quilt uses the stylisation and techniques used in the larger quilts.

November's JQ, Fuzzy Fern, uses lines rather than shapes and is made by cutting back layers of scrim:

Whilst the last one December's JQ, which I have called Electric Fern because it reminded me of a neon sign, simply focusses on the basic ferny line, to me essence of fern:

I had intended to give ferns a rest after this, but then I went for a walk in Wytham Woods and saw this clump of ferns growing on a tree:

which set me off thinking again...