All my good intentions of keeping up to date with this page seem to have gone by the wayside, but being away from home rather frequently means that while I am at home I have my day time work to attend to and then I need sewing time…

In June I was lucky enough to be invited to Israel to teach at the Israeli Quilter’s Guild’s annual meeting. What a brilliant experience! Two day classes which were both full of really keen and eager students. I taught two different classes encouraging the students to work on their own ideas in ways that were new to them, stitching from their own photos and stencilling with Inktense blocks.

 

During my week I visited Caesarea, Tel Aviv and Jaffa, Jerusalem, Acre and Haifa amongst others, they were so many things to see, ancient and modern, man-made and natural and of course the sea was never far away. The first real surprise was the bird mosaic which you could just walk all over…

In Jerusalem we visited the museum which had, above the usual exhibitions, an exhibition of the work of the outspoken Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, truly mind-blowing, I found his 2016 Odyssey wallpaper breathtaking, probably because of the subject of immigration….

There were textiles from all over the world as well as ceramics all of which had inspirational patterns and motifs, and a statue of Hadrian which I was rather taken by.

Despite being the end of Ramadan we visited the old town of Jerusalem, I just loved the old streets and the few shops which we explored.

I could go on for ages with where we went and what we did but below are other photographs which demonstrate the richness of inspirational designs.

Since I got home I put my head down and did some sewing. My visit to the Gambia, and the exhibition I saw in Venice,  inspired me to do another quilt about the futility of migration, having talked to young in the Gambia who all know people who have the left the ‘back way’ so using fabric which was dyed with kola nuts and indigo in the Gambia I produced the following:

The text says, “such is their pride, their folly or their fate”….

I also produce a small portrait ( 6″ x 4”) for the Through Our Hands, Save the Children portrait shuffle, it is from a photograph I took in Kenya of a lady with a severely handicapped daughter…

 

The July/August edition of Magic Patch published an article about me and my work which was very wonderful even if some of the text is not exact…

Other work I have done are my journal quilts, continuing the black and white with a flash of colour. Some have worked better than others but that is the idea of journal Quilts, it gives you the chance to play with ideas which can then we taken as a starting point for other things. The first is one I made after looking at Murano glass in Venice, the island of Murano has no shortage of glass shops and there are designs which are repeated in each. The quilts itself hasn’t worked as well as I had hoped…

Then there was the drain cover in old Jaffa which attracted my attention and was a good excuse to play with stencils on a commercially dyed back drop. A little artistic licence crept in to make the motifs fit the size of the quilt!

The most recent JQ was using lino blocks that I had cut for a larger project and wanted to trial. It was an interesting exercise because the design which i saw at the Red Fort in Agra actually required two lino blocks because the design is symmetrical.

In July I spent a day in London and visited the Grayson Perry exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, although I have read about him and heard him talk on radio 4 it was the first time that i have seen his work, the Battle of Britain tapestry blew me away, the detail and the amount of information that he managed to include in this piece is amazing as are the references to tradition quilts.

After a hectic 4 days at the festival of Quilts where I was teaching again I am home and trying to make headway with the house and garden which have been seriously neglected these last few months. September will see me at EPM in Ste Marie, Alsace where after the show i am doing a 4 day course with Denise Labadie, watch this space….