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China and the Festive Season

| Chrisse Seager
Break Down Circles

In October and November, I travelled to China – a great experience. The cities were enormous often with 30 million people ie half the population of the UK. Mostly, they were modern and clean – very little of old China is left. That was reflected in art galleries and museums and even their Beijing Summer Palace and Great China Wall are not that old. The parks are very clean and beautiful with activities for the elderly communities that are provided free by the government. Buildings are tall and modern and go on for miles. Needless to say the food was fantastic made from rally fresh ingredients.

Once home, I needed to sort out Christmas for the family – a lot of internet shopping.

And for the last week I have been hard at work finishing work for CQ West’s Unfolding Stories 4 which opens in May in Stroud. Above is a taster of my work. The work isn’t actually round, just the images. Hope to see you in Stroud. Check the CQ West website for dates and times – http://www.cqwest.uk.

More broken circles

| Chrisse Seager

I have been enjoying making these small quilts or as I call them, textile prints. Here are two more.

I also made a small book as part of a book making course I am doing – not perfect but I now understand Coptic binding – yepee.

Thanks for reading.

Breakdown circles

| Chrisse Seager
Breakdown Circles 1

I am trying to get my blog to share with Facebook and it seems I either have to pay a fortune and buy a Jetpack subscription or I can add a page to my Facebook and post to the page rather than my Facebook Home – I will have to see if this works at all!!

Creature of Habit

| Chrisse Seager

Why did I keep my spoons in the sets in which I bought them? I can never easily reach the size I want. So I have just tidied them up unto hooks of one size only. This should work better. As you can see I have loads of spoons, collected over the years. Do I need them all? Who knows?

Breakdown fabrics

| Chrisse Seager

I have now pinned a number of my breakdown fabrics on my wall to work out what I want to do with them. This is the wall:

Wall of Breakdown

I have found some plain fabrics that can be put together with the breakdowns. The next step is to dye some more plains – I have meters of grey and blue – not much yellow, green and orange. so to work when I have cleared my table which is full of papers ie necessary admin.

One more attempt

| Chrisse Seager

I was severely told off this week – how can I read your blog if you don’t post on it. Difficult sentiment to argue with!

Last week, I spent two and a half days at Leah Higgin’s studios, Urban Studio North with a friend. We had an amazingly productive time, both producing endless breakdown cloth. Here are some of the the pieces:

Oh dear, WordPress has changed since I last used it – I shall have to practice more. The images seem to have a life of their own and random sizes!

Getting back on the horse

| Chrisse Seager

It is a long time since I posted on my blog – 15 months. Sometime in the last year, my creativity took a nose dive – too much admin and other computer work, much of it for SAQA.

I have had a very productive time as co-rep for SAQA Europe and ME. It is has been hard but rewarding work and I have made many, many new friends in the quilting world. I give special thanks to Baiba Vagule, who for much of that time has been my co-rep. She has amazing energy and we have  worked together to make Europe a more active place for SAQA members. Thank you, Baiba, especially for your great newsletters.

The SAQA Board very kindly sent me this beautiful “thank you” bouquet of flowers.

Now, I need “to get back on the horse” and start making and using my stashes and machines – this includes my monster, the Q24 Bernina Longarm, I splashed out on last year. Most of all, I need to get back to the happy mojo of creating work I like and am happy with.

I did do some work over the last year – is it creative?  I am not sure at the moment. The designs are very simple and stark and difficult to execute. This has taken away the pleasure of making.  I have Instagram’d and Facebook’d some of the quilts during the making and afterwards but haven’t felt like blogging them.

Now I plan to spend some time just playing and making cloth – my favourite textile activity. I have already made up some breakdown screens and I plan to use them with formulsol on some of the failed greys that I have already over dyed to dark blues, blacks and greens.

I shall be at the West Country Quilt Show next week, Thursday 30th and Friday 31st stewarding for CQ West Unfolding Stories 3 and CQ In Print. Maybe, see you there.

I will now try to write more regularly on my blog – it is a good record of what I am doing and hopefully, you will enjoy some of my musings and photos.

I hate my Bernina 830

| Chrisse Seager

What induced the engineers at Bernina to design these bobbins —–

bernina8seriesbobbin-120x120

They are a nightmare. I am trying to complete a big quilt and my tension keeps messing up. First it loops underneath. I get it all sorted and the bobbin runs out. Change the bobbin and the tension changes and loops again!!

IMG_20170502_123231856

This is one of Bernina’s most expensive machines and …

  • The bobbins are temperamental
  • The upper thread sensor has to be turned off as it keeps stopping the machine
  • And the thread threader, even when clean, doesn’t always work

And the household wonders why I am bad tempered! Ugh, ugh

Printmaking to textile

| Chrisse Seager

Why is nothing easy?? The next step with my printmaking was to replicate the design in fabric that it could be quilted. So on the left is the design I choose from yesterday’s printmaking:

Next to it, it is the fabric version – well sort of. The cutter won’t cut the fabric stencils the right way up so I turned the bonded fabric over on the cutter and it mostly worked. A bit of scissor work required. The pale grey is the failed cut which required lots of scissor work. The dark is the turned over fabric – which means it was reversed!! So I know I am dyslexic but even I should have worked that out!. So then I randomised with the fabric shapes to see if the concept worked. The resident art critic says it doesn’t have enough texture! So the jury is out.

Hopefully when I do my next post, i will have managed to replicate a print in fabric.