From the Salon des Refuses

The Contemporary Quilt Group, of which I am a member, has an exhibition at Festival of Quilts this year and I was one of the sixty-plus members who entered a quilt.  Unfortunately I was one of the ones whose work didn't get chosen.  I did discover however that I am in excellent company: people who have produced much better pieces than I did also didn't get their work chosen.  I suspect the standard of the exhibition will be extremely high.

The theme of the exhibition was Tin and the starting-point was a photograph by Tony Howell of East Pool Tin Mine, a restored tin mine in Cornwall.  A comment by an historian friend about Cornish miners who had migrated to the north of England being known as "Cousin Jacks" led me into spending some time doing historical research of my own, and being deeply moved by the way in which the closure of the mines in Cornwall in the nineteenth century led to mass migration and emigration from the county - a quarter of a million men, mainly miners, emigrated between 1841 and 1901; whole villages could disappear from the census in a ten-year period; there was a twenty percent reduction in the male population in each ten-year period between those years.  At the beginning of the twentieth century the total population - male and female, including children - was less than half a million.  "Cousin Jacks" took their skills to the far corners of the world - including North and South America, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. There's a saying: "A mine is a hole in the ground, anywhere in the world, with at least one Cornishman at the bottom of it", and to this day people all over the world celebrate their Cornish ancestry.

I suppose one of the reasons for my response is that I come, a couple of generations back, from a mining family myself.  Not Cornwall, but South Wales, and there and in parts of Yorkshire I have seen the effects of pit closures on local communities - not as devastating or dramatic as in nineteenth century Cornwall, but still a sense of the lifeblood draining out of the community when the mines close.

This became the basis of the quilt above.  Unfortunately, though there is a thematic link to the original photograph, the visual links to it have mostly disappeared - it seemed appropriate to use a ruined mine rather than a restored mine as the main image and the only bit of the photograph I've actually been able to use is the texture of the stone.  So yes  I would acknowledge that it may not have fulfilled the criterion of having a specific (i.e. visual) reference to the original image.  The jurors also felt that there were some pieces where an interest in the history had taken over rather than the consideration of the visual impact of the piece, and I accept this criticism too.

My personal feelings about this piece is that there are things in it that I like but also things that are unresolved.  I think I distracted myself with two things: firstly the attempt to convey a message visually, which is a very difficult thing to do and which I don't think worked out effectively (I have a tendency to believe that a piece of work should be able to communicate independently of artists statements or footnotes) and secondly the decision to include a "picture", however simplified.

It has not been wasted: I learnt a great deal from doing it.  And I do like the lettering (dyed fabric hand-painted with discharge paste), the story of the "Cousin Jacks" half hidden behind the image, and covered with layers of silk organza.

Only problem is - what do I do with it now?  It is a somewhat bleak image, not one that fits easily on the walls of my home!

A Really Good Day - with Wonky Bits!

Saturday was the latest meeting of Contemporary Quilt Region 14, a workshop with tutor Janet Bottomley on Liberated Piecing.  One of the best workshops I've ever been to - loads of fun, excellent teaching, and plenty of ideas for future projects (just need the time to make them now).  You can find out more about Janet from her blogs:  A Quilters Journal  (her personal blog), her City and Guilds/Contemporary Quilt blog, and her teaching blog.  For anyone involved in running a quilting group she would be an excellent choice for a workshop that could appeal to both traditional and contemporary quilters.

For those who, like me, were unclear about the difference between liberated and improvisational quilting, liberated quilting involves putting together traditional blocks in a non-traditional way, with a minimum of measuring, as in much African American quilting.  Improvisational or freeform quilting doesn't use blocks.

Below are some of the samples Janet brought, and you can see a corner of one of her quilts above (I wish I'd taken more photographs, but you can see more of Janet's work on her blogs.  I especially love her use of bright colours and fresh-looking fabrics, in particular her use of stripes - the blue quilt just peeping out in the picture above is particularly good.

 Anyway we were quickly on with the first blocks - stars and square in a square (occasionally pausing to flick through the books Janet brought)

and by lunchtime we'd completed our first blocks.  Being an adventurous group we soon discovered how to make things wonky, adapt and experiment with the techniques, and have lots of fun playing.

And - probably Janet's influence - there was a lot of orange about.  And some really nice fabrics, as in Lesley's beautifully wonky star.  

In the afternoon we experimented with asterix blocks, hash signs, and wonky houses and trees, but I got so caught up in the process I forgot to take photographs.

And we all went home grinning from ear to ear, with a new challenge - to use the techniques in our own pieces to be revealed at the next meeting.  Watch this space!

Help!

I'm not sure how I got here, but at present I am unable to use any of the links from my blog. I keep getting an error message that says:
ERROR: Possible problems with your *.gwt.xml.module file. The complete time user.agent value (ie9) does not match the runtime user.agent value (ie8). Expect more errors.

I managed to post this - if it does post - through Blog this! on a Google search - I am unable to link to dashboard or new post from my blog itself.

I have posted a query on a link from the help-page but have not had any reply: is there any way of contacting Blogger direct rather than a user-list? Does anyone out there know what I can do?

Collages Part Two

More collages from last autumn - this time from an A5 sketchbook: the first two use ink drawings of beetles from the Leeds City Museums collection. Top - cut-out beetle on paper rubbed with soft pastel, plus paper coated with oil pastel, then indian ink, scratched and rubbed back; bottom one uses paper printed with iridescent paint, bought textured paper and paper monoprinted with lacy pattern from an almost exhausted marbling tray.

Above - wet-on-wet watercolour paper, wet-on-dry paper, plus monoprinted paper.

Two more using marbled papers.  Above - three different cut marbled papers, plus coloured pencil lines.  Below: oil-marbled paper with added pale water-colour and wet watercolour pencil lines plus translucent blue tracing-paper overlay.

Two using photoshopped photograph prints plus cut watercoloured paper and (in the bottom one) torn sugar-paper.

Top: monoprinted and marbled papers.  Bottom: scrunch-dyed tissue paper, bits of linoprint sampler, and watercolour "bullseye".

Many thanks for the comments on the earlier ones, and - yes - they are feeding into my quilting.  Plus being fun, and a good way of exploring composition.  All done very quickly as a sort of creative "starter" for the day.

Collages

 During the autumn last year I played with simple one-a-day collages, allowing approximately ten minutes for each.  They used papers and prints I already had made at various times, and much of the focus was an exploration of composition:

 monoprinted and blockprinted white and coloured papers;

 wet-on-wet watercolour on hand-made paper; wet-on-dry on cartridge paper

oil-marbled and freely cut watercoloured cartridge paper (above and below)

inked pages from an old falling-apart guide, marbled paper, watercoloured paper, blue tracing-paper;

cut monoprint;

and cuts from the same monoprint with layered coloured tissue-paper.

I also filled two other sketchbooks, in different shapes (of which more later)  Lots of fun - and I learnt a lot too!

Big Buttons and Catching up

The Contemporary Quilt Group Journal Quilts for the October-January pieces are all required to use buttons, causing many people including myself something of a real challenge.  Looking through my button box I came across eight huge buttons and the idea of using these as focal points for composition proved irresistible.  As I have eight buttons I have challenged myself to double up and make two pieces per month.  I've also set myself the task of exploring complementary colours in each one.

The first, called Yellow Colour Field with Big Button is a collage of various fabrics - cotton, scrim, dyed wadding, felt and butter muslin anchored with machine quilting and embellished with couched purple thread and bits of silk carrier-rod - lots of  time playing with the arrangement but the stitching was straightforward.

The second arose from a series of samples I made for a workshop I taught on Improvised Curved Strip Piecing for Textile Without Limits.  It uses fabrics which originated I from Ghana along with some hand-dyed fabric.  This is also a tryout piece for something larger.  It's called Ghanaian Grid with Big Red Button.

Number three, which also uses fabric from Magie, dyed damasks and Zimbabwean prints, is called Big Button Blues.

The fourth one uses my stash of fabrics designed by Native Australian Artists.  My husband was born in Australia and was fascinated by Aboriginal Art.  Improvised curved piecing again but this time in crazy form.  Couldn't resist calling this one Big Button Dreaming!

June-September Journal Quilts

For this series of CQ Journal Quilts I have chosen to explore family history, specifically four generations of women in my family at similar points in my life.  These pieces all use text - a specific requirement for JQs in these months.

The first piece, 1968, relates to myself - yes folks the picture below really is me, taken from my passport photo, posterised, solarised and blue-printed in Paint Shop Pro, then printed onto Extravorganza, cut out and stitched down with a simple running stitch, which has also been used to emphasise some of the features.  It is appliqued to a piece of tie-dyed silk taffeta; the whole thing was then machine-quilted, very simply, using the same thread as for the applique, then bound with tie-dyed cotton.

The words round the edge were suggested by an idea from fellow CQ member Margaret Cooter, who created a piece of artwork using the last three words of popular phrases.  In my case I have used the last three words of favourite sixties quotations, plus one quotation from something written later about the sixties.

In 1968, I was a student at London University.  It was a heady time, with a rather strange feeling of a worldwide student community (I suspect for those of my contemporaries have to devote their energies to earning a living things might have felt different) and a real belief that we could change the world.  It was also a huge amount of fun, and a great time to be a student in the swinging sixties. 

The second piece centres on a picture of my mother in 1944.  She was then doing war-work in the Vickers Armstrong factory at Castle Bromwich in Birmingham, making Spitfires (she told my brother about the Spitfires, me about the partying that went on in off-duty hours); to hear her talk it sounded like a bundle of laughs; it was only later that I found out about the long hours operating a capstan lathe and the fact that the factory was the target of bombs (one bombing raid had taken out one of the main sections).  This piece again uses a photograph (printed "straight" this time) on Extravorganza, layered onto pale fabric.  The background is a contemporary fabric of the sort used to make overalls and aprons; another contemporary fabric contains the text that describes her life at the time.  The poster is used with permission of the Imperial War Museum.  The whole thing is quilted very simply, with the addition of the outline of a Spitfire.

In 1926, the year of the General Strike, my grandmother, who is the subject of the August JQ, was 23.  She was a miner's daughter, married to a policeman, though there doesn't seem to have been any sense of divided loyalties; though having to police pickets and demonstrations publicly, in private my grandfather sympathised strongly with the miners' cause; he also helped support her sister's family through the hard times of the twenties and thirties.

Unfortunately, I have no early photograph of my grandmother, though I do remember her as very young-looking well into her fifties.  The drawing here is a combination of later photographs and my own memories - though not the best drawing I have ever done it did succeed in capturing something of the look she had.  The other pictures are all taken from contemporary sources, and again there are some details in print about her life at the time.

The final piece centres on my great-grandmother.  My research into family history began with her, and I have included the family record from the 1901 census as well as a tinted photograph from a couple of years earlier, at around the time of her wedding (again printed onto Extravorganza)  The census entry means the piece goes back a further generation, including my great-great-grandmother.  Both were quilters, and they quilted professionally.  My great-grandmother died young, in the flu epidemic of 1919, but her mother went on to quilt for the London market in the 1920s, in common with many other women from her home town of Maesteg in South Wales.

Both census entry and text are printed onto commercially-treated cotton, with hand-painted silk chiffon layered over to give an antique feel.  The whole piece is hand-quilted, including a characteristic Welsh spiral pattern (which unfortunately doesn't show too clearly at this scale.

One annoying feature.  The commercial fabric I bought came in sheets, and unfotunately none of the sheets in the pack were straight, as a result of which it distorted when being taken off the backing paper, and no amount of gentle tugging could make it straight again - unfortunately I had not more left and it was getting just about to the deadline by then so I had to go with what I'd got.  But I shall be exploring similar themes again - and next time I'll get it right, I promise!



 

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...



More challenge pieces

First updates on work from NWCQ Weekend group - aka Textiles Without Limits:  Mary's piece with the couching finished:

Phyl's leaves (well worth enlarging to see the detail, especially the embroidery:

and a clearer photograph of Leah's piece!

and a whole series of small pieces by Julie - showing a wealth of techniques and a wonderful degree of imagination, not to mention artistic ability!

Leeds West Indian Carnival - 44th Year 2011

Just a few of many photographs!