Stitchery

Well, I failed to update in March and now it is mid-April…. I simply don’t know where the time goes. Last week I came home after two wonderful weeks walking in Madeira, wind, rain and clouds were high on the menu although we began and ended with a few days of sunshine. It is a very green volcanic island with plenty of up and down with some tunnels thrown in. Although early in the season there were flowers and the most wonderful forests, sadly the best day for trees was so wet that I left the camera at the hotel but I came home full of ideas!

During March I had work in a local art exhibition which seems to have been well received.

On the stitch front it doesn’t seem that I have achieved much, I finished a new piece which was designed to be mounted on a canvas except that the stitching reduced the size radically so that plan went out of the window, despite leaving a good margin of error.

The March Fifteen by Fifteen piece, the second ‘books’ was completed. This time I chose Wind in the Willows which I love, more for the memories of pantomime (Toad of Toad Hall) which was a family favourite than the book. The opening chapter is about the mole discovering the wonders of the river bank with the water rat, I just love the idea of the animals exploring new territories. It is virtually all machine stitched.

My March journal quilt was also completed, the forest with hidden squirrels. I really enjoy doing the monthly journal quilts as they give me the excuse to play around with different ideas. The hidden element is the quilting of the squirrel forms.

My next book piece is on the table and my April journal quilt has been to Madeira and back and hasn’t been touched and plenty of other ideas are swimming around in my head. This week with the sunshine the garden rather took up all my time, with all the rain everything has grown and the weeds had taken over, the lawn took two cuts to make it look anything like a lawn.

The best laid plans of mice and men, Go oft away….. (Robert Burns)

Firstly Happy New Year, I hope that there will be good health, peace and creativity for everybody.

I have been hiding with the excuses that the computer needed updating to have better access to my blog and that I had nothing new to show, both problems are now remedied so watch this space…

In June the exhibition space and conditions at the Chateau de Lacaze in the Tarn were excellent and I was able to exhibit all the 38 quilts that I took with me. As planned I stayed the first week; stormy weather but two lovely walks and a visit to Albi which I had wanted to visit for a long time. I wasn’t disappointed. The Saturday of the first week I taught a class which was well received by enthusiastic students, the accompanying textile weekend was sadly not well attended but it was really hot….

Two weeks later I returned with a friend, we set off early and managed to visit Moissac, Grauhlet and Lautrec before arriving at our accommodation. I first visited Moissac when I was on 16 and on an exchange visit and had always wanted to revisit, I wasn’t disappointed. Grauhlet was a thriving leather producing town sadly now rather sad but the museum was interesting. We walked all week discovering different small areas, the countryside was for the most part wooded and shady (thankfully as it was very hot) and the paths were at time rather steep. We managed to visit churches and small museums along our routes.

In August I took part in a three day village arts festival not far from Cognac. The entire village joined in and the exhibitions were held in people’s barns, courtyards, gardens etc, we were given lunch in the village square and there were evening entertainments which I didn’t attend but the whole event was really well attended and I returned home with fewer quilts than I took with me.

In September I took part in the local fete des arts, based with friends as per the last few years it was a great weekend and once again some of my work found new homes. It was then off to Alsace to the European Carrefour with the quilts for our on-line group Fifteen by Fifteen. It is a really long drive bt we were rewarded with excellent exhibition space and it was really well received by the general public.

Not long back from the show and I headed off to Sardinia with a group of walking friends. Due to lack of flights we had a couple of extra days to spend in Cagliari, two of us ventured off and saw most of what the town had to offer and we also took a bus south to visit the old ruins of Nora. The walking was wonderful, rocky and relatively wild although we did take some well worn hiking trails.

My Fifteen by Fifteen series were finished with the second bird, a griffin vulture and two quilts of vegetation that I saw.

I also finished my journal quilts, having produce six types of different leaves for the first six I then went to the shape of the tree adding quotations about each. The idea was to work with words and I tried to produce them in different ways. I have never really connected to adding text but I found the exercise a useful one and now know which methods I prefer.

The latter part of the year I started producing new work again, the pieces that sold during the year were, for the most part my newer ones so I need to build up new stock, I have finished two and there are more in the pipeline alongside a wedding quilt which I won’t show until I have delivered it in November

That rounds up 2023, now I need to work out how to be more adept at creating each post but the essentials are there, thank you for reading to the end!

It is only as I am packing up my quilts for exhibition in the Tarn that I realise that I have not updated these pages since January . The Tarn is a month long exhibition which while require two trips, one to set up and one to take down. The three days of lessons I planned were cancelled due to lack of participants but I am hanging around for a few days to teach a class on Saturday during the textile weekend. Typically the forecast is for stormy weather so I hope to get a lot of sewing done and hopefully discover the region between storms!

I seem to have been busy this year and there is always stitching on the go but I have also been out and about much more. January started with a week of snow shoeing and exhibiting at the Gallerie Arnaud in La Rochelle followed by the show at Cholet at the end of he month. February and March disappeared; what with spending at least two mornings a week volunteering, pilates on another morning and often walking twice a week my time stitching has been reduced, but I think being out of the house more is good for me. In April went on a 4 day coach trip to Amsterdam taking in La Piscine at Roubaix and Ghent en route, with a stop in Lille on the return. We were too early for the tulips but the hyacinths and narcissi were wonderful and the dahlias I purchased seem to be growing, lets hope summer isn’t too dry! Amongst other things we visited the Van Gogh museum and the Vermeer exhibition at the Rikjsmuseum. A week later I was visiting Portugal, staying just south of Lisbon where there were many good things to discover.

Above the Piscine, they have an “exceptional collection” of fabric samples only a few of which are on show.

Woman writing a Letter, with her maid 1670-1672; I really enjoyed the Vermeer exhibition far more than I thought I would, the clarity of the work and the light in the pieces were amazing.

Cathedral, Lille

Portugal was just so inspiring…

Mid-May there was a walking club weekend in the Anjou area where we had visits as well as good walks.

Chinon and Fontevraud

Then, finally last week I circumnavigated the Ile d’Oléron on foot with a couple of friends and I managed to take in the Festival d’Arts Actuel at the Citadelle of Chateau D’Oléron as we were staying nearby.

So much inspiration and so many vibrant colours

Stitching wise I am up to date for the moment with my journal quilts, this year we have to include text and I decided to create a series about leaves and trees, the first six are leaves complete with the name of the tree, its scientific name its order and family. I have tried to construct each family of leaves with a different technique while keeping the text the same but again worked differently.

My first three Fifteen by Fifteen pieces have also been completed, this year we have to make three pairs of quilts under the heading of nature. I decided to use my holiday in the Bardenas, Spain, for my inspiration, the first two on rock structures and the second two will be birds birds, the first one of which is below.

The first quilt is of the landscape of ‘Los Aquarales de Valpalmas’. The Aquarales is like the Bardenas Reales but on a much smaller scale. Both areas have a characteristic morphology known as badlands and are formed by the erosion of the clay landscape, in the Bardenas the cliffs can reach a height of 150m but they are only a scant 20m in the Aquarales. The landscape of multiple columns and pinnacles of differing forms and sizes a third of the size of those 50km away in the Bardenas. Hand painted silk noile, appliquéd and machine stitched.

 In stark contrast to the crumbly rocks of the Bardenas, the Mallos de Riglos which is well known area in the climbing world because its conglomerate formations which are well suited to climbers. They rise high and relatively straight out of a truly wild landscape full of plants and bird life with well marked walking routes. The photograph I worked from shows the sunlight shining through a narrow space between the rocks and I loved the way the colour changed so radically between the light and shade. Painted, appliquéd and machine stitched.

We stopped to photograph a field full of storks on our way back to the hotel one evening, they were feeding in a mucky humid field. Hand dyed fabric bought in Canada and the birds appliquéd and hand stitched.

Most of my time was taken up on my tree project, some of the top stitching was machined but the main part was hand stitched and it took forever, the finished piece measures 150 x 200 cm. As yet I have no photograph of the finished quilt because I have nowhere to hang in good enough light to photograph, hopefully next week will remedy the problem! I really enjoyed making this mammoth piece, it was an idea which had been turning in my head for ages and involved using wood blocks that were made for me from my designs in India some years ago. I used different textured fabric to create effects.

Just a small sample of the whole.

As you can see there is no lack of inspiration just lack of application, there is so much I now want to explore…. watch this space.

All the best for the coming year.

Looking back I realise that after spending hours constructing an entry at the end of October it has never been published, heaven knows where that went, what a waste of time and energy! There were lots of photos of inspirational things I had seen but there wasn’t much work produced in that period and I have attempted to remedy that.

I finished the last 4 journal quilts for the year using the same hand dyed fabrics and shapes but the position of the fabric and the stitching for each one.

The last two pieces in the style of Georges Seurat for Fifteen by Fifteen were completed as well. I really tried to use pointillism in these two, fiddly to do but I was happy with the result, especially with the last one when I found a better support for creating my dots of colour. Working in the style of Seurat with the subject of reflections has taught me a lot and I really enjoyed the challenge because it pushed me to work in different ways to get the results I wanted.

In August I posted a piece I had printed and which, now, has been finished by hand stitched around the tree forms leaving the fabric to speak for itself. The second I printed in white and then machine stitched before adding leaves cut from silk scraps. ( long thin pieces are difficult to photograph!)

Then next project which is still in the quilting stage is big, again using lino cuts but also wood blocks which I had made for me some years ago in India. Based on trees and using various different hand dyed fabrics it is, in part, constructed using a traditional patchwork format.

The year ended with an exhibition organised by the association Gaspart in la Rochelle and January will see me exhibiting twice. I am delighted to be one of six people, the others are painters or sculptors, to have been invited to exhibit at the Galerie Arnaud in La Rochelle. The end of the month I will be exhibiting once again at Fils Croisés in Cholet .

Oops, the long, dry and hot summer days have made me rather lazy. All began well with BIAT, near Lyon, where I exhibited and met up with many textile artists, some old friends, others became new friends. It was a fun packed few days and great to be teaching and exhibiting again. Below is a piece that saw the light of day for the first time.

I then headed on across France to visit old haunts and stay with friends in the Chamonix valley, good company, mountains and sunshine are always a good mix. The drive back straight across the middle of France was long and hot although a break in Moulins to lunch with old friends was a very welcome break.

The last half of June was frustrating as I had bronchitis and the medicines made me very lethargic. Then came July, I have no idea where it went, but the Tour de France kept me busy and I was even more committed to the women’s tour last week. The heat and dry ground does nothing to entice me out to walk, the ground is solid and hot and there are few plants of interest, I did notice yesterday that the few ripe blackberries can be surprisingly good. In the middle of the month I had a visit from a couple of very old friends, or should I say friends I have known for ages. It was great to see them although they did choose the hottest few days of the year so they saw more of the interior of a darkened house than the surroundings.

I am not sure what I have achieved really, for the first time for a long time I spent hours on something, cutting, printing, dyeing and reflecting only for it to go nowhere….

I managed to meet the deadline and sent a 12″ x 12″ piece off to the States for the SAQA auction in the autumn. It is based by the shape of a rose window in Vernon cathedral which I visited in June. This mix of stonework and stained glass is a pleasing one although one doesn’t usually see the pale colour of the stonework against the colour of the glass. I worked with a commercial fabric, quilting it with black thread and then added black ribbon before appliquéing the stonework .

My last two journal quilts in the second series have been revealed as has my artist piece n° 4 for Fifteen by Fifteen.

This series of four journal quilts has given me the chance to play around with stitching and the difference it makes, the four cotton fabrics have the same de-colouration but each time the positioning of the colour changes as did the stitching. I like to use my journal quilts for sampling ideas for future use, or not as the case may be.

My fourth piece, of a series of six, in the style of Georges Seurat for Fifteen by Fifteen was extremely time consuming but the end result worked. Number three had been in the style of Seurat’s study for The Circus and this one has tried to be in the style of The Circus. There is very light crayon shading but most of the colour has come from my stitches, I am trying to keep the theme of water and reflections running through all six. I machine stitched the outlines then in filled with hand stitch using running stitch and back stitch to create more texture. At times I wonder what I have let myself in for but actually I am really enjoying working these pieces, they have made me dig deep and really think about how I am working.

This week I set off on another idea, I sorted the fabrics and the idea was in my head when I suddenly turned tail and set off on another track. The last two days revolved around drawing, cutting lino and printing, the stitching can now begin!

I have also made a start on the last four journal quilts. This last week I have tried to walk every day, 5/7 days is better than none but I do find that although it takes time away from my creative time I clear my head.

Well a couple of months have disappeared and I have written nothing, April because I didn’t have much to say and May because I have been out and about. I say that I didn’t do a lot in April but I do many good walks, I decided that I would make the most of the good weather to be outside and that I would catch-up when it was wet, only it hasn’t been wet…

May began with organising ten small pieces for exhibition at the Cabane at La Port de la Pelle as in previous years, I made a couple of new birds and added some more abstract pieces happily one has already sold so I had to buckle down and make a replacement and I am just finishing another. I feel that I am really ready to tackle more serious work which is just as well because I have had confirmation for an exhibition in June/July next year.

Mid May saw me exhibiting at St Jean D’Angély for three days. It was a fantastic location and the first time that organisers has actually come to chose the work to be exhibited. I had work in two locations, actually the museum gave me a wonderful big space but only five pieces were selected to be hung there so they were a little lost. ( I admit though that I could get used to having somebody hang my work with the use of an infrared marker to ensure my labels were all straight!)

The second location was in the gallery of the Abbey where the light was good and it was easy to hang work. It was a positive exhibition in the sense that the others exhibiting with me were either embroidery biased (including Maryse Allard, Hubert Valerie, Stéphanie Michaud and Clare-Lise Calladine) or patchwork so I was the only one with art textiles and the feedback from the visitors was positive even if there were not very many of them.

At the end of the following week I headed off to the Morbihan region with the walking group amongst other places we visited Vannes, L’Île aux Moines and the Chateau of Suscinio.

I then stayed on a further couple of nights with a friend and we went to Auray, Locmariaquer and Carnac to visit the megaliths with a visit to Rochefort en Terre on the way home.

We visited Ste Anne d’Auray which had the most fantastic embroidered banners.

Barely home again and I headed off to near Limoges before taking a coach trip to Giverny and Roche Guyon. At Giverny we had a guided tour of an exhibition of work by Monet and Rothko there were only around six pieces from each artist hung in chromatic themes so as to compare the way in which both artists worked. One piece of Rothko’s work really caught my attention:

In the gardens there were crowds of people and my camera settings went awol but because the water lilies weren’t in flower and the rhododendrons were almost over it was a kind of mid-season. The herbaceous beds were really incredible although again it wasn’t quite the right season for a mass of colour. It is a garden to be visited at different times of the year to really appreciate it.

We spent the night in Vernon where the sunset on the Seine was calm and beautiful and lit the old mill beautiful in the evening light.

Then this week with the club I visited the gardens at Chaligny.

All in all it was a really interesting ten days with loads of photo inspiration and ideas buzzing around my head.

Despite all this galavanting I have done some stitching as well. I have kept up to date with my journal quilts finishing the fourth of the first series and the first two of the next. The idea always being to be the same but different. This current four are all using decolouration on commercial fabrics , the shapes are the same in each and there are only four fabrics , they are all stitched differently.

The second and third of my Fifteen by Fifteen pieces have also reached completion. Working in the style of Seurat the second was in black and white as per his pencil sketches and again I worked with reflections.

The third is worked by hand and inspired by the preliminary sketch he did for ‘The Circus’, I will go on to develop it further for the next piece.

Now I am packing to go to BIAT at Villefranche sur Soane for a four day show/salon where I hope to teach two classes one on symmetry and the other on stitched portraits. I also have a couple of new pieces which will be amongst those I am exhibiting but I am keeping things under wraps until the have been seen in public. This is a snap of the current work in progress relating to the symmetry class.

Well, I am updating but without much to say, last month I felt totally uninspired and the creative flow dried up. Recently I have been dyeing again but am not ready to show anything finished yet.

I have signed up to do journal quilts for the UK Contemporary group of the Quilter’s Guild, January’s is almost finished just needs the finishing touches.

Last weekend I was at the show at Cholet, about an hour and a half from home. There were some very good and varied exhibitions and the number of visitors the first two days was good. Once people were in the show for the most part they wandered about aimlessly, I don’t have any photographs to show because I fell into a lighting black spot, at least a few contacts were made and it was good to see old friends again. My car had a very unexpected decoration for a few hours one evening, actually I rather fancy a car like this.

The one piece I do have to show is the first of my Fifteen by Fifteen pieces. This year we have all chosen an artist and are each working a series of six in the style of our chosen artist. I made a short list from a list of 101 best known artists and then I looked at each artist in detail to see how I could produce a series in their style. It is interesting to see how many of the others have chosen from my personal shortlist! It wasn’t an easy choice because I wanted to have a progression in my series but I finally settled on Georges Seurat 1859 – 1891 as my inspiration because A) I like his work and B) despite his short life he produced a large body of work from which to draw inspiration. I have begun by using his black and white drawings as a starting point.

For Seurat black and white drawing was a perfect medium, more than using just individual lines he rubbed rough paper with a greasy crayon, therefore creating tones of blackness. He wanted to be a painter of an instantaneous view of a single moment with no movement. As somebody who often works from photographs the instantaneous moment is totally apt and something I relate to totally. For this first piece I have used a photograph of the river Charente in flood in the town of Saintes which I took on December 25th 2019.

To recreate the heavily textured paper I have used old cotton sheeting. I have used black thread and black paint but I strayed slightly by using black vilene for the reflection of the tree trunk. I made a stencil and applied the main part of the tree then stitched the main lines and applied more paint before returning to stitching in more detail. Seurat has a way of leaving patches of the page totally white which I have tried to use to give more light and definition to the piece, I found that leaving the halo around strong sunlight very difficult to blend in the lines are a little too regular and angular. Onwards and upwards for the next piece. all the group’s work can be seen at fifteenquilts.com.

Tomorrow I am heading of for a week of snow-shoeing hoping that there will be some snow, not only for the snow-shoes but also because I have packed a snow dyeing kit! No point of going to the snow if I can’t dye with it!

While wishing you a Happy 2022 I am trying to promise myself that I will update my blog more often but in order to do so I need to get back into the habit of producing work! The festive season has seen me re-cover my dining chair seats and attack a tapestry, started more than twenty years ago, which I would like to get out of the way. I also made the mistake of giving myself a 3000 piece jigsaw puzzle….

Looking back on 2021 all things considered it wasn’t a bad year for me I made new friends and sold a fair number of pieces. After three years of Serge Billards inviting me to exhibit at Face à la Mer down on the coast I have worked out what works as far as sales are concerned. I started working on small, normally 20 x 20 cm pieces, mounted on a frame and they have proved to be very popular. Although I want to sell work it is important to me that these small pieces represent my way of working, this year I made a series of birds and some small more abstract pieces.

During these last few months I have also played around with the Katazome technique after having taken an online with Sarah Desmarais, it is a resist dyeing technique that I have always wanted to try and Sarah shared her way of more available materials. After a first attempt on silk organza with ready made stencils and a paper one which wasn’t strong enough I found that some sail cloth which I had made a really good reusable stencil and I tried again. It also works well as a stencil….

I also played around with a piece of shibori, having dyed the cotton it sat on my pin-board for some time until I saw the ‘marais’, the drained marshlands near home. For me there was a tangle of trees and the water in the foreground so I densely stitched the two areas, blue horizontally for the water and green vertically for the foliage.

Since the end October when I last updated this blog life has been calm even if I was involved in two exhibitions and one show. The first was Arts Atlantic in La Rochelle which involved 200 artists, I exhibited four 20×20 cm pieces along with fifty-nine other members of Gaspart17, I never got to photograph them together because they sold within half an hour of the show opening. I spent Saturday morning at the show and was really impressed by much of what I saw especially the work of Victoria Danville Vermeersch who works by sculpting textiles .

The next outing for my work was Fil’Passion at Perigueux, it was quite quiet but there were some interesting artists present. There was one piece which really intrigued me in an exhibition of work by a local group who had not exhibited before. This piece by Amandine Bézamat seen from a distance was really striking, close up there was a more visible three dimensional aspect.

The weekend before Christmas I was invited to exhibit at Sainte Marie de Ré, they invited all thirty of us who had had exhibitions in the town during the summer season to exhibit but only six of us were interested which gave us four metres of hanging space each, apart from myself there were three painters, a photographer and a sculptor which made for a very interesting exhibition. Sadly visitors were very sparse but some those who did come were very interested, I am happy to say that I was the only one who sold anything but then it was one of the smallest and cheapest things on exhibit!

Now my work is all stored away until I go, fingers crossed, to Cholet for Fils Croisés at the end of January.

The end of November also saw the completion of the last piece for the Fifteen by Fifteen challenge about countries, mine being Pakistan. This time it was fauna and flora and I chose to take a photograph of mulberries being collected for our dessert as my starting point. I printed the photograph on ExtravOrganza and then created the leaves using the above mentioned resist technique and stencils. The background was a piece that had rust dye on it and reflected the colour of the bark and dustiness of the surroundings. The mulberries were created with small beads.

So until next time…..

Well, time has truly flown since I last wrote, but that is not to say that I haven’t been well occupied!

The first weekend of September was the ‘Fête des Arts’ at Nieul-sur-Mer, the neighbouring village, and good friends of mine invited me to exhibit in their home; it was a lovely weekend and the visitors who came were really interested in my work which was a real boost. I am happy to say that the following piece found a new home although I was sad to se it go.

Once that was finished I headed off to Sainte-Marie-aux Mines for the EPM show where I was exhibiting in tandem with Chantal Guillermet, our work on show was based on places visited while travelling. Our style of working is very different but as a result complimentary. In the past EPM has been extremely busy attracting people from far and wide, this year there were many fewer people which meant that we had time to talk to visitors and they had good space to view the work on show. It was so good to be among people who were really interested and I was amazed that the distances some people had travelled especially for the show.

Made it to the local paper while I was installing my work.

While I was away an exhibition opened at Ste Marie de Ré where I had three pieces on display, the subject being sea shells. It was an interesting exhibition because not only was it multi media but it also had a scientific element in the guise of lectures. I used two pieces which fit the bill and made one more on the subject of shells.

Ten days later it was time to head to ‘Pour L’Amour du Fil’ at Nantes where I taught two classes both of which were over full with enthusiastic students, it was so good to be in the classroom again.

At the end of September the fifth Fifteen-by-Fifteen piece was revealed, still based on our chosen country, mine being Pakistan, the subject was literature. I struggled because the north-west of the country is not strong on literature but there is a culture of mime, dance and oral stories. I chose to depict two different tales, that of Halmasti a wolf-like creature the size of a horse spitting flames and that of Terich Mir, 7708 m the land of fairies. The full story can be read with this photograph at Fifteenquilts.com .

Barely back from Nantes and rather last minute I decided to visit the UK for the first time for over two years. This meant that I could finally deliver my niece’s wedding quilt, which I made in the spring, because I had been unableI was unable to get to the wedding in June due to COVID restrictions. I also got to meet my great niece for the first time and gave her a rag doll I had made. I had made a ball for my great nephew but sadly didn’t get to meet him due to illness in the family but at least he now has his ball!

I made two new birds to make a collection of four, I sold all the others I had made, for the Arts Atlantique show next weekend.

Now it is time to start a new body of work and I started off trying out some resist printing, now the ideas are running out ahead of me….