Just a taste

Just a small taste of this year's entry for Festival of Quilts, and artists book based on the varied wildlife found in English woodland, partly based on Wytham woods where I grew up. Many of the pages remind me of specific incidents - the dragonfly which followed me one summer afternoon, the grass-snake which found itself wound round my dog's hindleg. The stag-beetle, above, used to terrify me when I was little, it looked so ferocious. The ghost-orchid, below, which is now extremely rare, is a flower I once saw during my career as an amateur botanist - not in Wytham woods but elsewhere - I did not know at the time how rare it was but even at that stage I knew to content myself with looking and then move on...

The pieces were made first by cutting designs from silk-painted pelmet vilene (timtex), one for each side of the page (producing double-sided designs was an enormous challenge but I managed sixteen of them). I used a scalpel for this - the first time I have done so, and the perfect tool for intricate cutting - providing you take great care. Then each page side was covered in hand-dyed silk organza (one of my favourite fabrics - it takes dye beautifully) and the design was stitched on: with the more intricate designs I drew it onto tracing paper and stitched from the back to outline the design accurately, taking out the paper before continuing. Next the two sides of the page were sandwiched together with a piece of hand-dyed silk tulle net as a "filling", and then quilted through all layers before being finished off with satin stitch. Finally I cut back some of the organza to reveal the net underneath. Using translucent fabrics means that the light shines through the pages which is meant to imitate the way you get patches of light shining through the woods.

That's why I've been so quiet recently!

the one that didn't make it...

The reason I've been so quiet recently is that I've been making a project for Festival of Quilts. Never one to shirk a challenge, I've been making an artists book with double-sided see-through pages (one of my neighbours said "Isn't that ... sort of ... difficult...?" which has to be the understatement of the year) using silk organza, silk tulle net and pelmet vilene all hand-dyed/hand-painted. It has been a lengthy process and a testing one and I am now looking forward to getting it finished so I can get on with something else (like normal life perhaps?).

During the process there have been some cast-offs and casualties. The moth above is definitely not a cast-off (apologies for the inadequacies of the photograph though), merely the other side of something that really did not work, namely a dragonfly that looked as if it might sink if it ever managed to launch itself. The metallic thread seemed like a good idea at the time; by the time I finally admitted it wasn't the two halves of the page had been sewn together, and ditching the dragonfly meant I had to - very reluctantly - give up on the moth as well.

journal quilt - now showing in Houston!

Not the perfect photo but the best I have at present (suddenly realised as the courier service was due to arrive that I didn't have a picture of it so had to whip out the camera, take it out of the packaging and take a couple of hurried shots (really it does hang straighter than this! I hope!)

The images are taken from Leeds West Indian Carnival which this year celebrated its fortieth anniversary plus the bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain and its colonies. The bottom image came from the slave-ship theme and I think may be a slavemaster; the middle image, the peacock, signifies pride; and the top image reminded me of a rising sun - I chose these both for their appearance and their symbolism; on the side panels the symbolism is obvious - broken chains growing into leaves then flowers (flowers loosely based on hibiscus).

As for techniques - the background is a single panel of hand-dyed silk overlaid at the sides with hand-dyed silk chiffon: the leaves chains and flowers are reverse applique outlined in braid. The faces on the centre panel are made very simply using a counterchange effect with multiple layers of silk and metallic organzas. For the top image I've used lame (never again!), fancy threads, sequins and braids; for the peacock, braids, multiple organza and lame layers, beads and threadpaiting fo the feathers; for the bottom image bonded shot silk and black georgette plus silver braid and metallic thread.

I'm still not sure I'm satisfied with it - but I'm conscious of having had to modify the costumes/headdreasses to fit the design - for example the slavemaster's collar (the stand-up bit at the back) was at least twice the size, giving an amazing impression of power and domination which is lost in my interpretation.

However the journal quilts are meant to be about exploring and learning and this one definitely took me out of my comfort zone: the techniques I used from the book are threadpainting, couching and reverse machine applique; these are new or relatively new to me; the composition is much more formal than I sould normally use - but it seemed to fit the subject; I created a number of my own fabrics by bonding together transparent fabrics - unfortunately the depth you can achieve this way doen't show up in the photograph; and I used a lot of unfamiliar and non-traditional fabrics.

Below are details of two of the appliques:

a couple of new pieces

This piece is called Untangling - the meaning is both literal and metaphorical: at the moment I am trying to get the various strands of my life untangled and sorted out and - the literal bit - it started with a tangle of hand-dyed twisty rayon thread - very strong (it was once used in the making of car tyres) but twists and coils like snakes when it gets wet; it is also impossible to take through any fabric that isn't very loosely woven - beautiful, with immense possibilities but intensely frustrating to work with (two of those could also apply to me, though I was quite pretty in my youth!). Started by simply attaching (machine zigzag) to the centre of the fabric sandwich that forms the base, then pulled out and couched down coils one by one. When I started I thought that was all I was going to do, but when I looked again it looked rather stark and unfinished, so filled in some of the space with free-machining in my favourite rayon thread, Natesh and various rayons bought from Asian shops in the neighbourhood: I find Indian rayon thread wonderful to use - runs smoothly, rarely breaks and costs a lot less than rayon thread I've seen elsewhere - highly recommended. I cut off the remaining threads at the centre and let them coil. It still needed more. Had bought some beads on impulse in the sales and dug through these, adding them a few at a time over a period of several days (one of the risks I run is overdoing things) until it looked finished. Here's a close-up of the beads:

and finally a picture that shows the stitching a bit better, though it is a little pale:

The second piece is called Mellow Fruitfulness (I'm definitely in Autumn mode these days) and is based on a notion of seed-pods (don't bother consulting the botany books, this species exists only in my imagination).

The idea with this one was to try the approach I used with the previous one (do - question - respond -do and so on) but shorten the time-scale.

When I began it I had a very definite idea of what I was going to do - very simple fused cotton in autumn colours on bright blue - and I did get as far as making a quilt sandwich with the blue on top. At that point I started to play with fabrics, tried out a bit of scrim, ir0ned it and placed it on top of the blue:

Loved the effect of this so decided to use the combination as my base fabric. Auditioned various fabrics and eventually settled for some dark rust-coloured dyed cotton wadding - takes rich colour and really soft after dyeing: you can also get sculptural effects with stitching. Cut shapes directly into the fabric (fun - if it goes wrong it's only a bit of fabric and you can probably use it for something else anyway) and laid them on the base then stitched:

Next the seeds - what to use? The only beads I had were too big and looked clumsy. Felt was too like the wadding in texture. Could have made 3D seeds in fabric but difficult to do them in scale. Tried rolling some silk roving bits into seed-shapes but difficult to get them to stay in shape without lots of stitching or alternatively using fabric medium and waiting for them to dry (getting impatient by this time. Eventually settled on silk noils, which had the right nubbly texture - put a lump of fibre in each pod and used free-machining to anchor:

and then stitched in circles to suggest seeds using a polyester trilobal variegated thread which had touches of turquoise with a lot of orange which I thought would help bring the whole thing together.

Finally I quilted the whole thing with the same thread using a sort of free contouring (a doodle I've been doing since I was a kid - it used to fascinate me the way that by changing the contour slightly you could gradually change the whole shape. I left gaps in the contouring which I filled with shapes that echoed the groups of seeds.

I tried satin-stitching the edge - lazy thinking and it didn't work - but eventually used a chunky chenille thread I'd dyed some time ago which did. I used a blind hem stitch to couch it (I'd already brought the dges together with the satin stitch) which worked better than a zigzag in that it didn't flatten the thread.

All done in under three hours (including a very brief coffee-break). This is what the cutting/putting together area in my studio looked like when I'd finished: