quilts

June ’26

Posted on by carolinehiggs

Arriving home from holiday a couple of weeks ago I was ready to start producing some new work. Things have not gone quite as well as planned, I did get up to date with my journal quilts and complete the next piece for FifteenbyFifteen but then things began to go down hill. While I was on holiday I was bitten by a tick, two visits to the doctor in four days and I was given antibiotics against Lyme’s disease and another tablet against allergy, the latter would work well as a sleeping drug, I keep falling asleep ! This coincided with record temperatures, it was like a hot hair dyer blowing but without the air circling, to control the itch of the bite and keep it from being burning hot I was packing it with an ice pack, so I spent the most part of the week doing very little in a darkened house.

I had planned to get back to painting fabrics for several projects but it was, and still is, far too hot so I got out last year’s pieces and picked one to work on. I am often asked how long something takes to complete, that is always very difficult to answer, how long is a piece of string? The photo shows the project in question, the fabric was sized, painted and dried for 4 weeks before having the final coat added. Yesterday I auditioned threads for hand sewing, that resulted in dyeing a selection, they had to be over-dyed to get them dark enough, washed dried and would on to supports. Twenty four hours later I am now ready to start sewing and the hours have already flown by. When dyeing threads I always take a selection of threads because they all turn out differently, these are all cotton threads and dyed with procion dyes.

Recycled cotton sheet coloured with natural earth pigments, hand dyed thread

Since I last wrote I have worked my journal quilts and completed the first 4 FifteenbyFifteen pieces on the subject of time. The fourth can not yet be disclosed, that will be the end of July. I have travelled twice this year, once to the UK to meet my newest nephew and visit friends during which time I visited the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter to see the Grayson Perry exhibition, I was disappointed, I had seen some of the work and I fund it expensive for what it was, the textile section of the museum was interesting. I also saw some great costumes, at Killerton House, including a mourning dress worn by Queen Victoria.

Three roman landscapes on recycled linen

First two journal quilts, May and June, depicting roman mosaics using one colour.

Fifteenbyfifteen: Time N° 2 depicting a few lines of Shakespeare’s Time. Recycled cotton sheeting coloured with earth pigments and over painted, hand stitched and commercial fabric machine stitched and hand stitched with the word time.

Like as the waves make to the pebbled shore, So do our minutes hasten to their end, Each changing place with that which goes before, In sequent toil all forwards to contend….

Fifteenbyfifteen: Time N° 3. Tide and time wait for no man. Old linen table napkin coloured with earth pigment and highlighted with inktense sticks. Man and board appliquéd and the wet suit has the saying written on it in continuous text, copy of a tide timetable on organza, fading with time.

The second break was for walking but there was also a lot of inspirational art firstly in Aubusson at the tapestry centre then in many churches of the Haute Loire there were murals, some better than others. At la Chaise Dieu the religious tapestries were amazing.

I have had three exhibitions, one solo on the Ile de Rè for ten days and two where I had a displayed the Gaspart exhibitions , Lagord and La Rochelle. I am now working towards a new body of work, hoping for cooler drier weather so that I can create new backgrounds. I did manage to paint some fabric on the beach on the Ile de Ré during my lunch break while I was at my exhibition.

This last piece, which was exhibited with those in the other images at the A.N.C.R.E. Maritaise, Ste-Marie-de-Rè, is coloured with earth pigments and the orange and green is continuous text written ink “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air” (Thomas Gray; Elergy, written in a country churchyard)

My inclusion of text is as result of being in the middle of a very motivational online course with Claire Benn and is aimed at using text as a texture. I am halfway through and need to find the time to continue because it is challenging me to try new ways of working.

October ’25

Posted on by carolinehiggs

At the end of April I set off to Portugal to walk 200+ km along the coast. We had a nasty surprise at the outset because due to a power outage in Spain and Portugal our flight was cancelled just as we had arrived at the passport and security check. At 9.30 pm we found ourselves, and all the others on the flight, without our plane to Porto. Having had a doubt during the afternoon I had researched other means of getting there which is how at quarter to one in the morning we found ourselves getting on a bus, we had to change at Bilboa but it meant that we would only arrive 24 hours late and miss the first day. It was a long haul, the first bus was comfortable but the second had no suspension and the Spanish and Portuguese roads are not the smoothest but we finally arrived. Ten days of Atlantic coastline was magical and until the last couple of days really wild. After the third week spent exploring the Algarve I came home with a head full of ideas and the creative juices began to flow.

A sea view and a piece which resulted from the trip.

I had only a week at home before going off again for 5 days but in that time I decided to sign up for an online course with Claire Benn through the Fibre Arts Two platform. The trip was to the other side of France where we had great weather and visited Arc-et-Senans an old royal saltworks with the most stunning architecture and Besançon and its citadelle amongst other places.

Arc et Senans at sunset from the gardens.

Again many ideas and I felt ready to spend the summer producing some new work. Doing the course on-line motivated me, Claire is an excellent teacher and I found myself rethinking how I work. I was using earth pigments and recycled fabric and it all felt so right. I love stitching whether with the machine or by hand but we were encouraged to look at our work and see if we needed to stitch, it is a different approach and it really made me question what I was doing. I have used the long dry summer to experiment and start to understand how I can achieve the results which inspire me. I still have a long way to go but it is so exciting!

Now have gathered together some new work which was exhibited a few weeks ago at the local Fete des Arts where I was exhibiting for the fifth time at my friends’ house I was curious to see how my ‘new’ work was accepted. 

Once the exhibition was over, less of a success than previous years probably due to the weather, I headed off to the Gers region for two weeks. The first week was with a walking friend, the second with the club. It is a beautiful area and almost each village has some curiosity to discover.

Some of what we saw along the way, churches, fortified villages, transhumance (sheep walking three weeks back home from their summer pastures in the mountains), ecclesiastical stitching etc.

I have continued to keep, more or less, up to date with my journal quilts for the UK Quilter’s Guild Contemporary group and also with my work for the Fifteen by Fifteen group, and, needless to say there is also some new work in the pipeline as soon as I have time.

Below are three of my Fifteen by Fifteen pieces on the subject of decay. The last two used earth pigments for the base colour.

Damp November

Posted on by carolinehiggs

Here we are at the end of November, the time has flown by since I last updated. At the beginning of October I spent a night in hospital for planned sinus glitches that was followed by a light dose of shingles so it was relief when I set off for the UK at the end of the month to visit family and friends for three weeks.

For once I was around for the journées de patrimoine and I went to the Mairie in la Rochelle to see the textiles on display, these comprised of a life size contemporary embroidery (cross stitch) of Aliénor d’Aquitaine celebrating 900 years since her birth and some rather wonderful wall tapestries.

The last Saturday in September saw me invited to teach around a hundred ladies at a friendship day for France Patchwork south of here near Angoulême in the Charente region, a little hectic but I believe that everybody went home happy with what they had achieved and I failed to take any photos!

At the beginning of October I hung 17 pieces at Le Sauzy, a parish hall which holds many different types of events . The hanging space is well lit and I was delighted to be invited to exhibit my work for a couple of months.

The UK was foggy, damp and cold but there was plenty to do and see. I made use of my National Trust membership to visit two lovely properties, Oxburgh House in Norfolk and the grounds of Knightshayes in Devon. In the former were the most lovely embroideries, rich leather and burnished velvet wall coverings which were a real surprise. The bed hangings arrived at Oxburgh around 1761 and were removed in the 1950’s and taken to the V & A which has loaned them to the National Trust.

The grounds of Knightshayes are fantastic and many of the plants are labelled, there were a surprising number of plants flowering and luckily the rain stopped for our walk around the woodland garden. The were some woven willow structures of wildlife secreted amongst the trees.

I also visited Country and Eastern in Norwich which has a collection of South Asian artefacts. Not only were there old textiles on display but also stunning carved wood and some enormous windows and doorways. I was particularly drawn to the Pakistani and Indian pieces. The building is an grade 2 listed old roller skating rink with the most incredible wooden roof. It opened as a rink in 1876 but a year closed due to financial difficulties and had a chequered career until it was transformed to its present use in 1993. There was so much to see in the museum section and to buy but I managed to keep my hands firmly in my pockets.

En route between friends I visited the Honiton lace museum, they had an interesting display of lace from all over Europe showing the different styles, then also drawers of lace in chronological order some of which was so fine and intricate. The first piece is the Esther Clarke flounce which was made for the Great Exhibition of 1851. I also managed to find my grandmother’s old house which I hadn’t seen for sixty plus years but which I recognised instantly.

On the stitching front I haven’t done much, the quilt I made for god-daughter’s wedding present was finished on time and was safely delivered, it was large and I had trouble photographing it, I had to hang it sideways on the washing line, hence the photograph is a little strange. I embroidered some of the panels and tried to keep to the colours that she liked to try and keep in harmonious. The whole piece was hand quilted.

I finished the last two pieces for Fifteen by Fifteen on the subject of Children’s books the first was The Adventures of Robin Hood and the last will be divulged later as we have not yet had the reveal. I am now trying to catch up with my journal quilts, September’s is posted and the last three for the year will be done very soon. All the quilting took up a lot of time and I now want to get back on track with creating, I need to make some new work, not that I have any exhibitions planned for 2025 as yet, because I have sold some of the newer pieces and I prefer to exhibit new work when I do exhibit.