Stitchery

How time flies and I don’t seem to have achieved anything although I reckon that I have been constantly occupied. Not having a structure to my life means that I have floated through the summer never really knowing what day it is or what I am going to do with it! With an empty diary I started filling it with noting when there were zoom meetings or on-line Stitch Club activities. In some ways this ‘time out’ has given me a freedom to experiment with ideas and things I would never normally do stitch-wise. I have to admit that there are various household chores which also come in to that category…. 

As somebody who likes things well organised I found a workshop with Gregory Todd Wilkins a real challenge, the idea of applying paint randomly, with no plan, difficult and my efforts were timid but I did it and turned the piece in to a 12” by 12” piece ‘Home is where the heart is’ or in my case the emotions which have been contained there in within the previous six months. I used colour to express how I have felt home alone. Grey: depression, Blue: calmness with a touch of sadness, Yellow : happiness, Orange : creativity and energy, Pink : cheeriness. Fabric paint with hand stitching and a wood block print for ‘home’. The quantity of each colour reflected the balance of my emotions.

Out and about: a wander along the coastal path. This was my July journal quilt using found objects and plastics in particular. Hand painted old sheeting and couched plastic string for the plants with beads as the seed heads.

Out and About: along the coast during one of my usual walks. The sea and the bush are made with old paper bags using Momigami (thanks Cas Holmes and the Textileartist), I have also used commercial scraps and the sky is hand painted silk. I tore the ‘sea’ paper in to strips and then painted it before layering it with some grey nylon. All hand stitched, the fishing hut should, in retrospect, have been in deeper water/mud ….

My inspiration continues to come from what I see around me and maybe the fact that I haven’t been far afield has led me to look at things in more detail and search patterns and textures where they are not obvious at first glance, the lichen on this signpost is a good example. I have yet to use it as a basis for a stitched piece but watch this space…

July’s Fifteen by Fifteen piece was the letter ‘D’ and I choose to work a stained glass window in the church of Dampierre-sur-Boutonne .
When I first saw the modern stained glass windows I was inspired to use them in textiles because I found the shapes so pleasing and there was no lead separating the coloured panes. The only separation is the line of stonework between the two sections of window. The pulpit was carved stone and again I was drawn to the designs. I first painted the silk ‘window’ and then stitched in the ditch to hold the layers together. I overlaid the pulpit design and machined the motifs with a rayon thread, the finer details are not too true to life but the creating of the shapes was fun. The idea was to create something that looked very basic but which  then produced a second more complicated shape upon closer inspection. I have used the centre of the flowers to insert my ‘D’ in morse code. This piece demonstrated how difficult photographing textiles can be.

A second workshop with Anne Kelly resulted in this small booklet recording a visit to Israel in 2017. A good many of the workshops have encouraged us to use found materials which is great except that recently I decided to declutter, moving house and living in a modern space really made me aware of how much clutter I had accumulated throughout the years. Sadly many small pieces of small memorabilia have been chucked away….

I am still, slowly, working through an on-line course with Sue Stone and am determined to get to then of it. I love stitching portraits and have done two recently, the first as a gift and the second for my coursework.

Aware that I have far too much surplus fabric I decided to cover two cushions which have been lying around for months, the first is from left overs from a quilt I made some years back, that was so much fun that I did another with further scraps in a brighter colour range. There is something very relaxing about piecing and hand quilting…

Nearing the end of September I realise how much time has slipped through my fingers, my walking group has restarted with twice weekly sessions which has given me some structure to the week so all I have to do is attack some new work on my empty and recently tidied work table….

Well in theory holiday time is here, in fact not a lot has changed I am still happily at home with no real desire to go anywhere. I have been tempted to venture further afield but I prefer solitude at home rather than wearing a face mask amongst strangers. I have been busily stitching since I last updated this blog but as virtually all my targets have now melted and disappeared, for the time being, I find myself beginning to relax. This doesn’t mean that I won’t be continuing to stitch frantically, it just means that there is no pressure to do so. I am doing an on-line course with Sue Stone which I began at the beginning of the year knowing that I wouldn’t really be able to commit much time until the autumn. Then, at the the beginning of lock-down the textileartist.org produced weekly challenges with other textile artists , it was really great to have workshop followed by a Q&A session each week, I didn’t do them all but I did listen to them all. The they started the Stitch Club and I am just beginning to catch up on that. There is no pressure to complete each week but I love listening to what inspires artists and see how others interpret the project. I intend to spend more time trialing ideas and ‘playing’.

Much of what I have been working on has to remain under wraps until it has been exhibited publicly but there are a few other projects I can share.

There have been various panics about not having what I most needed in the sewing line, in my confused state I had completely over looked the fact that I could dye my own threads because recently I have done far more painting than dyeing. When I dye fabric I also tend to through thread in at the same time that way my thread and fabric match.

I have continued to photograph things as I walk, I am beginning to have a large library of flowers, my phone is very good on close ups less good on landscapes but I glean inspiration nonetheless.

There has been another piece for Fifteen by Fifteen which was the letter ‘C’. I chose the Cinque Terra and Corniglia in particular. As I have probably said more than once I like the idea of layers so I used a slightly rusty old iron balcony in the foreground, cut in black interlining and de-coloured, with the village painted in in the background, well the form of it and the colours which were then machine stitched. I then hand-stitched the balcony in to place. it is bound in white because this year all my six pieces finished in this way to make them look like snap shots…

There are beads across the middle depicting the C in morse code.

During May I also gave a live Facebook workshop on the Spanish I maraton Covid 19 page. It was slightly harrowing when I couldn’t get the camera to work live on the trial session but after 5 hours of reading Macs: for Dummies, amongst other things, I finally sorted it out for the class. It appears to have been appreciated, despite the fact that I don’t speak a word of Spanish, judging by the number of positive comments I received. In return I was given a virtual medal…

Journal quilts continue and I am trying to use all that I am learning in the workshops to produce them. This one was as a result of a workshop led by Anne Kelly, her style of work and mine are poles apart but I was intrigued to give her method of working a try. I recycled an old linen napkin and cut it to size to keep the finished edge intact. The whole thing is machine stitched which holds everything in place and it is really interesting to see how the tight stitch really changes the density of colour.

Other workshops have been exercises in the different ways of using basic stitches which I have enjoyed. Focussing on one type of stitch and using it differetn ways really makes me stop and think and there are so many possibilities.

While sorting through my lace bits and bobs I found a collar and cuff set from Malta, I don’t know which grandmother bought them by I now need to find a special use for them.

 

The last workshop I did was with Mandy Pattullo, again her way of working and mine are very different, I watched thinking that I wouldn’t take the project any further because I consider myself a maker of books but I got hooked and produced a small concertina book on India. I had an idea in head but as I looked at my fabric scraps it morphed in to something quite different. India is a land of contrasts so the book tells that story, the base is a rough hand loomed cotton while most of the fabric is silk, the stitching which is hard to see in the photographs is either in contrast or matching the fabrics at same time creating texture. The scraps of fabric I chose all represent different facets of India, architecture, gardens, colour and bling. The story begins and ends with cotton, the elephant from a block printing demo and the end a pice from a shalmar kameez set I had made for me many years ago. The covers are lino and wood block prints… There is in my mind also the contrast between the tatty and chic….

 

Finally I once again have work on display at the Cabane de la Mairie just down the road from home right on the coastal path.

I had an idea of teaching small classes there but without the contact with people it has fallen by the wayside for the time being. It is strange how while I am busy at home I forget that things are different beyond the garden. I am so grateful that that the art textile community is there and so much has been going on through social media, it is such fun connecting with people world-wide…. Onwards and upwards!

 

I started the year with so many good intentions of keeping this blog up to date but ‘life’ had other ideas, difficult to write when one has nothing to say and one’s horizons have been clipped or should I say severed.

After the show at Cholet I was gearing up to four days at BIAT, Villefranche-sur Soane and a days’s teaching at Pour l’Amour du Fil at Nantes and then Covid19 came along….. slowly but steadily things were cancelled or rather postponed.  Now well in to the second month of confinement I find that in many ways life hasn’t actually changed that much. I am, fortunately, use to being on my own and spending time sewing and I have plenty of projects to occupy me. I set myself some targets for the confinement but as usual I think that maybe they were over ambitious, I didn’t build in time for grey periods…. When the sun shines I feel full of energy and all feels well with the world, or at least my little corner, the house is flooded with sunlight and I can throw the doors open and even work outside in what I call my garden . That is another story, the lawn is more weeds than grass but it is very neatly mown and fairly regularly, most of the growing area is weeded but lacks plants and the parts which aren’t weeded are too dry to be able to extract the roots of the weeds. If I am lucky I will have a couple of parsnips and some pick again salad… The bird song is fantastic and there is a hoopoe is doing a great job on eating the grubs in the lawn.

I reckon that when I come out the other side I am going to wonder what I did with my time, each project I start takes longer than expected to finish and then I spent time earlier this week making masks, didn’t think it would take very long but 30 masks later I wondered where the time had gone. The plus of this lockdown period is Textile Artist.org who have organised weekly challenges with different artists, there is a video on a Monday and then a questions and answers FaceBook session on the Friday, even if I haven’t actually found the time to sew all the challenges they have been really interesting and informative. I am still doing my on-line course with Sue Stone but that has been temporarily put on the back burner and I can’t wait to finish the project I am doing to return to it. Ideas are now flowing far too fast.

The main consequence of the lockdown is that I can’t walk more than a 1 km radius from the house which means that there is not much chance to get out of the village, there is one lane around a field of flax flowers from where I can see the coast but it is a little like drink driving easy not to do do it at all than be frustrated ……

I try and keep interested in the natural world by photographing flowers most of which have been in the garden, that source is now just about finished for the time being but it is amazing what one can find when one looks

 

I have made the March journal quilt, I photographed a tuft of grass growing in a crack of the tarmac in the car-park at Cholet, I heavily quilted black wadding and then added the grass using an old veggie net and some plastic ribbon.

April journal quilt, based on an old tie I created a snail shell by hand stitching the motif on the tie after having machine stitched the motif itself. The inner part of the shell is painted with Inktense.

The end of March also brought the second Fifteen by Fifteen piece of the year. This time it was the letter ‘P’ and I was inspired by my visit to Pisa, the buildings were created in layers and the background quilted with the design of a wrought iron balcony I also photographed while I was there. I sun-printed  the sky and the word Pisa which are like clouds in the sky…

I am still producing work

and yesterday I painted the background for a new piece which I am really happy with.

I have hit a slight block with another piece I am machine appliquéing at the present because the thread keeps breaking and I can’t change thread because it would show so after a couple of days of trying different machine breaking two needles and loosing patience I have put it to one side for the time being! Onwards and upwards I am not going anywhere in the near future so hopefully time I will soon feel a sense of achievement, roll on May 11th when I will once again be able to go on long walks even if they have to be solitary. The real plus is that at last my garage has turned in to the work and storage space I wanted and it is tidy!

 

Another month has slipped through my fingers and I don’t seem to have got a lot to show for it. As January drew to a close I went to Cholet to exhibit at Fils Croisés, I hung a a mix of old and new works. Working on one’s own it is always good to share one’s work with the public and very rewarding when it provokes an emotional response as was the case several times.

This is a new piece that I made straight after the fire at Notre Dame, Paris. I took a while because, at first, I wasn’t happy with it. After storing it away for a couple of months I took it out and reworked the stitching. It is rare that I don’t use my own photos but this image really cried out to be worked.

This is a second new piece which I did after the Cholet show in 2019.

As I was preparing my things to leave for Fils Croisés I realised that i needed a photo of myself, instead of a photograph I did a quick stitched portrait.

 

I am really bad at taking photographs of other people’s work but here are some which I really liked, some are overall shots some are close-ups.

Chantal Guillermet had a big exhibition with an interesting collection of her work and this photo really doesn’t do it justice.

Marie-Christine Hourdebaigt also had a very interesting exhibition.

Galla had the biggest space and was showing work of her own and her students, the individual image is that of one of her students ( Galina Bogdanova) which I particularly liked due to its muted colours.

Stephanie Michaud was next door to me, I had seen her drawn threadwork work previously and I really admire it.

Embroidery by Nicole Jarret, her smaller pieces are really attractive.

Jacqueline Jégou’s thread painting is painstakingly worked and really grabbed my attention.

Finally France Patchwork had a really colourful and varied exhibition reflected in their banner.

 

At the end of January it was the latest Fifteen by Fifteen reveal. This year we are working with letters of the English alphabet. I have chosen to create a series of places I have visited and am using the morse code symbols as an additional link between pieces.

S for Suzdal. I have used a couple of the many photographs I took in Suzdal as the inspiration for this piece. The inner panel, the view through the window, is machine stitched and then coloured with aquarelle pencils, I wanted there to be colour but it need to be soft. The front is then hand painted and stencilled with the brown panels appliquéd. 

Lastly I have completed the second journal quilt of the year using things that have been used previously, in this case a piece of lace that I have transformed into a hedge. My theme this year is out and about, I often pass the ostrich farm when I go out for a walk and it is down a lane lined with high hedges…

February is going to pass by very fast and I have dead-lines to meet so back to the drawing board….

Wishing everybody health, wealth and happiness for 2020.

With the festive season season I can look back over the last month and see that I have made progress. The holiday season is a quiet time for me and one which tends to be productive, the somewhat uncertain weather has helped.

A project which had been hanging over me all year was finally finished and sent, I was told it would take a week to arrive in the UK, it took three days, a true miracle and a great relief. It was a wedding present for my nephew and his wife who got married in 2018… a king size bed quilt which could be reversible according to their mood. Piecing took ages and then every other square was hand quilted, it actually was easier to sew than I had anticipated. The idea was to quilt throughout the autumn and finish around the time I finished with teaching English, and yes, I managed it!

Other work has also been in progress, I have started the journal quilts for the Contemporary group, this year nine inch squares using recycled/found objects. I have opted for the subject of Out and About as my title and the first was made using a piece of very old table cloth which was coloured with with fabric paints. The old square is mounted on some snow dyed cotton reflecting the muddy estuary…

I have also photographed all my 2019 quilts together, the first column being India, the second Israel and the third Russia.

On Christmas day I went for a walk around the town of Saintes, a little south from here. It was a perfect day for a visit, the sun was shining and there were very few people around, easy to park and the churches were all open to visit. The Charente river was in flood and there were some streets under water, the reflections were stunning.

One of the joys was finding a whole series of ,at what were at first glance, woven tapestries but in fact were hand stitched wool embroideries. As far as I can work out they were designed by Jean-François Favre and stitched by the Christian Community of the Abbaye aux Dames.

It was really lovely to be able to look at them really closely even if the presence of a piercing fire alarm ringing in the church meant that I didn’t linger too long.

As well as making new pieces for the forthcoming shows, Cholet at the end of the month, BIAT in April and St Jean d’Angely in June, I am doing an on-line class with Sue Stone in an attempt to improve the way I work with images of people and I am also doing a 30 day sketch-book challenge, the later is making me realise that maybe I am best to stick with fabric….

These are two images that I have reproduced in the first part of the Sue Stone course;

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Other work, I have finished or which is progress, will be revealed here when it has first been shown in public. I am finding the challenge of doing a course alongside my own creating very rewarding, it means that there is always something to hand stitch in the evenings….

Autumn is meant to be the season of mellow fruitfulness, but for me, one word describes this season, which is morphing into winter, and that is soggy. In theory that means that I have sent more time in the workroom, in practice I am not so sure!

I finished the last of my series of the coastline for Fifteen by Fifteen, this time the subject was Music and the title ‘All in the Mind’. Ideas turned in my head for a long time but once I had found the song ‘Sitting on the dock of the bay’ I knew that I had what I wanted. It is by Otis Redding and Steve Cropper and I simply couldn’t get the tune out of my head although the song itself is about the Bay of San Fransisco it suited the ideas I had. I persuaded three friends to pose on a bench and then I constructed the image around them. With the music forming the waves and the ships cut in lino and printed on an underlying layer of organdie. A second piece of organdie was painted blue and overlaid before the quilting was applied. The foreground was assembled with appliqué and stitched by hand and machine.

My journal quilts were also completed, I had split the year in to experiences /inspiration from three different countries this last group are inspired by my visit to Russia. The first one is using aquarelle and intense crayons and represents the coloured houses in the trees around Ples which is on the Volga river. I printed the houses with a wood block and then coloured them before adding the trees, some of which were also printed with a woodblock. Machine quilting was then added.

The result pleased me and may well be developed further at a different scale, this is only A4. For the final one I choose to work the background with paint sticks and then apply the image printed on Extravangaza, the disadvantage of extravaganza is the it is not A4 so I added a binding which I attempted to blend into the background. The image is of two chairs which I saw sitting in the garden of a farm we visited, I like the folkiness of the image. I won’t be returning to this one but doing journal quilts each month give me to try things I wouldn’t otherwise do, some are more pleasing than others.

Otherwise I have been quilting the big quilt, to date, there are only 100 of the over 2000 squares still to quilt and the binding to finish. I will add some embroidered details to personalise it and then it will be done. The idea was that it would be finished by the time that I stop teaching English at the end of the week, I am more or less on track. I have also almost finished another piece for an exhibition later in the year.

Next year looks busy kicking off with exhibiting at Cholet at the end of January and BIAT, Villefranche-sur-Soane in April followed a few days later with teaching a couple of classes at Pour l’Amour du Fil, Nantes. Plenty to keep me occupied and on my toes.

Wishing everybody a happy end to 2019 and a great start to 2020.

Finally I have internet 11 months after requesting it, finished are the days of counting how minutes I was on-line and unable to watch videos, make video calls etc….

Since I last wrote so much has happened. At the end of July I drove to the UK , in part to attend the festival of Quilts where I had a half day class to teach. I then flew to Moscow to attend and teach at the Suzdal Quilt Festival. In September I had a piece on exhibition near home and then I headed to Ste marie for the European patchwork meeting where I gave a day class. Now I am at home and have time to stitch again in earnest for next year which promises to be busy.

I finally caught up with my journal quilts, the July and August pieces were to be made using materials other than the traditional ones, I chose to make this group of 4 based on photos and experiences in Israel. Tow have been posted previously.

 

 

August’s is based on a photo I took in Israel of a river with roots hanging just above the water line. My target was to make something that didn’t take very long. Lutrador rocks, nylon water stitched in silver and miscellaneous fibres: an experiment I won’t be returning to!

The interesting challenge of these journal quilts is pushing one’s limits to try alternative ways of working. One can experiment and either take the idea to another level or file it away as something which won’t go any further.

The last four are to be made using different techniques for the background which I am much happier with and will be based on inspiration from my visit to Russia. The first didn’t quite work as well as I had hoped the background was sun printed on a piece of old sheet with a commercial product which was rather old, plus the wind started blowing while I wasn’t looking. The result was a flop until I looked at the back…

There have also been two new Fifteen by Fifteen quilts, one at the end of July and one at the end of September. I am working on the theme of the coastline near here and am trying incorporate all the six subjects into this theme to create series.

July’s subject was flight: Natural and Manmade

September’s was Photoshoot:

I wanted to show a little of the history of the area which is known for its mussels and oysters. I used a photograph on a signpost and enhanced the clothing with patterned fabrics and highly stitched by hand and machine to create life and texture.

The local exhibition was on the subject of animals which is not a subject that I am totally comfortable with. The group is an art group comprised of artists using different media and I find this a very interesting means for exhibiting some of my work. We had to choose an animal starting with the letter of the alphabet that we were given I landed up with ‘N’, not easy but finally I found a sheep called a Navajo-Churro and I contacted the association for these sheep and Bonnie Barcus very kindly sent me a photograph of her ram Ceasar and gave me permission to use it.

I worked it on a fairly rigid felt and then mounted it on a frame. The background of the sheep is a fine wool jersey, the horns are painted bark cloth and the fleece is fleece, mainly hand-stitched but with some machine stitch. Bonnie was pleased with the result and she is putting the photo into their newsletter…

Teaching in Birmingham went really well and I had a lovely group of students who produced some great results.

The Russian students were so enthusiastic and diligent, I taught three classes and thanks to the translators the results were stunning.

All these samples are work in progress, when I teach the aim is to give students the techniques and encourage them to create their own designs which can be further worked on at home.

At EPM in Ste Marie the class were also very keen and enthusiastic and we spent a great day together. Again the results were brilliant.

After a great 4 days in Ste Marie-aux-Mines I returned home and vowed to continue with a very long over due project to make a king size quilt for my nephew. They chose the pattern that they wanted and then they asked for a jazzy back so that they could choose which side to use. The front has around 2000 small squares and so I used large brick shaped blocks for the back as I am hand quilting and wanted to keep the seams as far apart as possible. Last Sunday was a grey day and the usual weekly walk was cancelled so I sat at the machine and stitched the back.

The quilt is now blocked and the long task of hand-stitching has begun, the longer evenings will be well occupied! Other projects are in the pipe-line but photographs of full pieces won’t appear on this page as they are all for upcoming exhibitions, teasers will appear from time to time….

I could add a whole list of photos that I have taken during these last few months but I would much rather be sewing…. As I hope to use some as inspiration so there will be glimpses of all I have experienced over the months to come.

I am alarmed to see how long it is since I updated these pages, life has flown by and still without internet so I am still counting the minutes, hopefully there is a light at the end of the tunnel and I will soon have a fibre optic connection… watch this space. Except that when they came I discovered that the casing for the wires is blocked so no further forward…. I can’t believe how difficult it is proving to be connected.

Since I last updated I have been busy, I don’t like putting new pieces up before they have been exhibited, I have completed one big one and given up, for the time being, on another as it was not giving the result I wanted, maybe I will pick it up again one day. I have had a fair amount of English teaching and two separate weeks away walking with the local group, I now have a library full of inspirational photographs. One of the club members suggested that I gave a show of my photos but my view is very related to how I could use them as inspiration for stitching, textures, pattern, shape etc. so I don’t think anybody other than me would find them very entertaining.

This is a mix from Italy, the Cinque Terra, Florence and Pisa with not outstanding weather in May

Belle Ile in June and the weather was better but changeable, the scenery was fantastic.

In April there was an exhibition of small works, no more than 40cm square so I joined the group, Gaspart 17, and exhibited some of my journal quilts and Fifteen by Fifteen pieces. It ran for four and a half days and I wasn’t required to be there all the time, this meant that I had the time to visit Pour Fil d’Amour at Nantes for a day and catch up with friends who were also there. The exhibition in La Rochelle was a good networking exercise but there were not many people who visited and very few understood the concept of textile art, I will repeat the exercise however because it is a good, if limited, window.

May saw me spending two days in a lino cutting class down the road in Rochefort, it was designed for graphic artists but was brilliant, it really motivated to do more. I worked on a piece, which is yet to be finished, but it is to produce a work which will be exhibited in September with Gaspart.

I have managed to keep up with Fifteen by Fifteen and my Journal Quilts. For the former I am trying to link the six of this year to the coastline and this region, as for the journal quilts, the first four of the year had to use a sewing technique and were based on inspiration from my Indian travels, the next four have to be made using something other than cotton and are based on photos I took in Israel.

Coast line in winter

Horizons: I must go down to the seas again ( John Masefield) the view across the bay with the weather vane from the Gros Horloge, La Rochelle.

This year is disappearing very fast and I really have not been very productive, I miss having unlimited internet access so that I can listen to BBC all day, having somebody talking to me really motivates me to work, without it I am easily distracted. I still have a, now very overdue, wedding quilt to finish and am working on the next Fifteen by Fifteen and Journal quilts while have just finished a sample quilt for my teaching at the Festival of Quilts at Birmingham in August. This year I am only doing two days because I have been invited to go and teach at the Suzdal Quilt Show in Russia. I was invited at Quilt en Beaujolais (before it became BIAT) some years ago but due to various commitments and the dates of the FOQ this year was the first year that I have been free. It is a great opportunity, and I am looking forward to it. It feels, at last, as if it is really happening now that I have got my visa and my teaching materials are packed and ready to go! I am also taking all Fifteen by Fifteen’s first three months of the year quilts with me to be exhibited.

Last week quite by chance I visited a new place down on the coast, a cabin which belongs to the village, Serge who is running it has chosen some local artists to exhibit their work on the theme of the surroundings and I found myself hanging eight of my pieces of different sizes which is really great. I am also hoping to run some small classes there when I get myself organised.

In September I will be at the EPM in Ste Marie-aux-Mines and again will be teaching a class there. Apart from that I am trying to build a new body of work for next year. My next piece is in the pipeline and is for a Gaspart exhibition in September, the subject is animals and I drew the short straw for an animal starting with an ‘N’, it has been a challenge but …… more in the next update.

I am not sure how much progress I have made but I have made some! My life is still blighted by the lack of a proper internet connection, counting the minutes that I am on-line is really limiting, I have, however, discovered that a little negative feedback works wonders… Hopefully I will be connected before too long…. The good news is that I now have a ‘dirty’ sink so can start playing with dyes and printing again.

I have planned a new class for Birmingham, FOQ, in August and another for EPM, Ste Marie, in September.

I am throughly enjoying living away from the mountains and their snow, yes, it has been wet and windy (the latter really frightened me the night it approached the 120 kph.) but the longer and sunny days make up for it.

I decided to do Journal Quilts again this year, they are more prescriptive than previously and the first 4 have to be made using a sewing technique, I have used appliqué and paper piecing for the first two. They have links to India, the fabric used is sari scraps. The first carried on with my positive/negative thinking from last year and the second one used some pieces I had prepared and not used, it was then saddle stitched with silver thread which was given to me by my sewing machine repair man!

I have done two shows since the beginning of the year, the first was Fil’ Passion at Périgueux. It was a great chance to meet up with other artists. I received some very positive comments about my work, which is always nice and several people called it poetic, there is a first time for everything! I spent the show admiring the Russian rooftops stitched by Le Begonia D’Or I love the gold-work but I think it might have to wait for a future lifetime!

Two weeks later I was at Fils Croisés in Cholet; this was an excellent show concerning interest in my work, I even sold a small piece, I was not only interviewed by the local paper but also by the local television. I also had some very enthusiastic ladies who did a short lesson with me with great results.

 

The extremely helpful sewing machine man even managed to service my machine during the show which was brilliant, I avoided having the lost feeling one has when one’s machine is away from home! Good planning meant that there was also time to visit the Textile Museum which still makes the traditional cotton handkerchiefs and which had samples of old ones, the brown ones were made for those who spat baccy…. There was even one with printed with battle techniques.

And of course there was the centre of Cholet near the hotel..

By walking, almost, daily I am constantly on the look out for interesting things to photograph which could morph in to future designs, whether it is a flower or a leaf, a bit of rusty metal or a building.

This year for Fifteen by Fifteen I am using the subjects to create a series based on the coastline around here. We have a lot of fishing huts on stilts, carrelets, which are very photogenic and I have used them in several pieces. The first Fifteen by Fifteen subject was ‘blooming’ so I used a couple of lines of poetry to kick start me and an old damask napkin and this is the result.

‘Tis the last rose of summer

Left blooming alone;

All her lovely companions

Are faded and gone.

Thomas Moore 1779 – 1852

I also did two hand stitched pieces, one was a carrelet but the other was a lady I saw in the women’s garden in Gunjur, The Gambia a few years ago. I had wanted to ‘do’ her for a while and it gave me chance to play with stitch to create texture while using some loose woven cotton which is the only fabric still woven in the Gambia.

Now the time has come to return to the workroom and stitch.

I can’t believe that more than six months have passed since my last entry. I think that being ‘rootless’ took a toll on my creativity, I spent four months in temporary accommodation and although there was plenty of space in which to stitch I couldn’t immerse myself in my work. I also had the excitement of being in a new environment where there was so much to do and discover, loads of inspiration and I took far too many photographs. I have ideas brewing in my head for future work but just need time to settle down and plan it!

I finally moved into my permanent home in mid August but it wasn’t until mid September that I had more than a week at home, which meant unpacking my boxes, I had meant to do it slowly but I kept wondering where things were and had to hunt them out. In October and November I had a fair amount of English teaching, I can get on with work in progress at such times but to get the creativity going I need empty space in my head. I now have a workroom in which I am really comfortable and a design wall for the first time so I can step back and ponder. I have a plumber coming to look at installing a sink which I can use for dirty stuff so I am not in the kitchen sink with dye stuffs. I am amazed that, when they have space, people don’t have ‘dirty’ sinks but I suppose that with washing machines people don’t wash things any more, or I was conditioned that way as a child ! While I was renting I had no washing machine and did everything by hand and due to the lack of a ‘dirty’ sink I landed up washing everything in the bath. My garage won’t be used as such but is perfect as a wet room, on the chilly side during the winter but not impossible, a great space for cooking up potions…

I really don’t seem to have achieved much work since I last wrote, my 2018 journal quilts are finished and I am up to date with Fifteen by Fifteen with my ideas for the next year’s projects forming in my head. I have almost cut the two thousand plus squares for my nephew’s wedding quilt, I just need to get stitching, and I have been stitching a larger version of a small 7 inch square that I did. I have so many photos and ideas from various travels and the change in location has changed my view on how I work.

My journal quilts this year were pairs of positive and negative images.

These two were inspired by the ebb and flow of the tide and the pols of water which come and go.

I photographed this stone carving and transformed it using two parts of the pattern to create the positive and negative images.

My Fifteen by Fifteen pieces had a series of 3 pieces which I based on a poem and wrote about previously, this is the last in the series which had to be using complementary colours.

The final two pieces for the year were Squares followed by Rearranged, I chose to work the two as a mini series using fabrics I had dyed in indigo and which came from India. I continue to be interested in the the idea of jali screens and used stitching to add the ‘jalis’ to both pieces.

The minus side of the move is the internet connection, or the lack of it, I am on a 4G and I am battling to keep my usage down so that I have full strength connection for the full month otherwise I seem to spend the last week of each month with a speed which is almost in reverse. The result is that I connect for the minimum amount of time and don’t tend to stay on the computer very long so that there is no temptation to go online and read… the result is that I forget to do the important things like up dating this !

I will attempt to do better in 2019 even if they threaten me with a delay of 6 months for installing a line to the house so that I can have a normal connection.

In August I went to the festival of quilts for 3 days, I stewarded a couple of days I enjoy doing this as it actually makes me stop and look at work I wouldn’t otherwise look at. I often hear people being surprised that a quilt hasn’t achieved recognition but they often don’t look carefully, the idea or impact may be very strong but when one looks carefully it becomes obvious why it wasn’t a winner, then again it could be that it wasn’t entered in to the right category so it can’t be a winner, I really think that there should be someway of marking a quilt that is in the wrong category as a lesson to others. Then a month later I was at Ste Marie, I had a quilt exhibited as a result of the masterclass I had attended in 2018 with Denise Labadie.

I also taught for two days, the first class was not full the second more than full which was very pleasing. It was however interesting to be criticised for giving a hand stitch class when more than half of the students thought it would be using a machine, I was worried that I had written the wrong information but when I checked afterwards it would seem that very few of the students had read the information to the end because it was clearly stated to be hand stitch. They did however all go away happy !

 

As I write I am preparing to exhibit and give workshops in January at Marsac and Cholet both of which are relatively near home.