I have lots of small pieces of fabric left over from the Break Down Circle pieces so I am using them to make books. Still learning how to make them and get them looking good. Here is one of them.
Break Down Circles Scraps
China and the Festive Season
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
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
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
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
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:
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
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
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.
Working in Series 4 – Pieces of Crow
In the past, I have made pieces that are so close to quilting – but always referred to them as embroidery because they were not traditional quilting and I have never actually made a traditional quilt. At the end 2012, I left the comfortable environment of Committed to Cloth, retired from the City, decided to start quilting and set myself a number of goals.
The plan – start improv cutting and piecing in black and white, introduce colour as I progressed. I now have over 40 quilts of varied sizes in this series. The series was named Pieces of Crow – I would have liked to go to the States and attend Nancy Crow workshops. This wasn’t practical as I needed to do 2 workshops back to back which meant a 3 to 4 week stay in the USA, hotels and a car, 200 metres of fabric (and I only use my hand dyed cloth) and so on. It wasn’t go to happen!
The first one is badly stitched. one eight of an inch between parallel lines is hard to keep even. It needed a walking foot and doing such fine lines with a walking foot I find difficult. The second was slightly better.
By the time I got to number 4, I was cheeky enough to enter it into the Fine Art Quilt Masters as Festival of Quilts in 2013. I called it POC XL as it was much big
ger than the first three.
The following year, Bush Fire, was accepted for FAQM. I had introduced colour by this point – actually, it is bleached IKEA black cotton. As well as FAQM, this quilt travelled to the USA with the World of Quilts shows.
A number of the others in this series have been accepted into various exhibitions.
A taste of India (detail) travelled with Wide Horizons IV around Europe and the USA and finally to China.
Below are detail images of some of the other pieces in this series – the yellow ones were a mistake for two reasons, a quilt with lots of yellow is unlikely to be accepted for a show as it is difficult to fit into a coherent exhibition (lesson learnt) and the smaller horizontal slithers I added, broke up the design.
Next time will be about the mini-series within POC.
chrisse textile stitcher 