Festival of Quilts 2019

The best part of the day - always - is the encounters with old friends. But there were things to see, too.

Works from the 40 years of the Quilters' Guild - these
(by Diana Harrison and Jo Budd) are from my formative years

 Eco dyeing was/is "big"....

India Flint's gallery

In  the "Natural Selection" gallery nearby - the 52 books
 made weekly by Alice Fox

Simplicity and complexity by Lotta Helleberg

"Did you see the pots?" people kept asking me. I did, and they made
me want to get back to stitching! By Fabienne Rey

Liz Hewitt's "Give Me Strength"

Mepuru by Caroline Bell

Inuit wallhanging from Sandra Meech's gallery

Sandra's Antarctic works on paper

From the bojagi gallery curated by Sara Cook, work by
Yoko Kubota 

"Silk Road" by Elizabeth Brimelow - strips of silk,
carefully tied at both ends ... a long thin piece

Another long thin piece (easy to store!) by Janet Twinn

 I went to the lecture by Michael James, but looked at his gallery first and was struck by the monochrome quilts. These were made during the time of his wife's final illness.

Detail showing how the quilting adds to the work

Recent, happier work - he explained how the fabrics were digitally
printed, based on photographs and drawings from India

Karina Thompson's gallery made a 3D labyrinth
out of her piece from the 2013 Saltaire exhibition

Leprous Hands is digitally embroidered

The Fine Art "Quilts" are usually contentious - and now it's become a "textiles" category! These are among those that appealled to me -

 Nearly missed the tiny gallery with five complicated quilts from the Japan quilt show. The detail of the work is astonishing -

Finally, my favourite piece(s), from the Pojagi exhibition, are these "collages"  by Marian Bijlenga - oil paint on used sandpaper -

Letting go of quilts

It's easier to let go of your "old" quilts and quiltlets when you know they're going on to a new life, or are helping a good cause. I met Ruth in a textiles class at City Lit and over the years she has had several "tea and textiles" events in aid of various charities, Greenpeace among them.

This time she's fundraising for Medecins Sans Frontieres. I'm happy to contribute some of the quilts made for Contemporary Quilt's challenges, and also some journal quilts (those will be mounted on board to fit into a standard frame, or glued to deep-edged commercial canvases), as well as embroidery that dates back before The Quilting Years.

Here's the selection so far -

Celtic Connections

Verge Blur

"The Rose in Winter" was in the "Figure it Out" suitcase collection

"And Flowers Almost Poems" incorporates old
silks from a friend's mother's stash

"It was her favourite tipple and it done her in" was made
in 1999, before I knew anything about dyeing fabric, and
many of the squares were appliqued on car journeys.
The long thing shape rather reminded me of a coffin cover
(hardly cosy!), hence the title

The theme for the fabric-printing challenge on the Quiltart list
in about 2001 was "Ten" - I hadn't learnt how to photo edit then, in fact
hadn't moved to digital camera, so it had to be text...

Columns were constructed by randomly pulling strips from
one or another bag of fabric, then sewn together. These fabrics were
mostly samples made in a textile printing class in the late 90s
and finallyput to some use. They look rather geological.

Same construction method; the fabrics are mostly silk,
but don't seem to have been affected by hanging in a
bathroom for a few years!

Made in Calgary or Halifax, Canada, late 70s. Hand quilted.

Sunshine and Shadows; made in Halifax, 1979. It hung in a
staff exhibition at the university and I was surprised to see how
small it looked on the wall!

More pink - the largest of the three, and made in the late 90s.
Enlivened by confetti and some rather "electric" machine quilting.

If you'd like to come along to have tea and cake, and be tempted not so much by my textiles but by the prints and ceramics, photography and smaller items that are being contributed by others, get in touch and I'll send you details. Ruth's home is in Camden (north London) and we'll be there on the last weekend in March and the first two weekends in April.  All proceeds go to MSF.

Neatening the quilt back

My plan for "the footballers" was to darn in the threads - a nice quiet occupation, with a definite end to it and pristine, if painstaking, results.

It's time to think again about this! Yesterday I quickly put together another sample, 8" square. The lines of quilting perforce are interrupted when they come to a figure -

About half the threads are yet to be cut and pulled through to the back.  I worked on the darning-in for about two hours, with this result -  

You can just about see that there are a lot of threads that have been pulled through, but not yet darned in during that session. It is Very Slow Work, and Very Frustrating.

Plan B involves cutting and gluing the threads. Three possible adhesives are on hand -

The white paint looks sloppy; the Fray-Check hurts my eyes; the Gel Medium ("an excellent glue for collage", as it says on the label) seems to work well. It's best if the threads are tied, which can also be a frustratingly fiddly thing to achieve... 1. locate both ends; 2. tie once so the ends lie flat; 3. apply a tiny dot of medium with a paintbrush; 4. cut the ends short; 5. leave undisturbed till dry.

It still takes time, but only a fraction of the time for darning in. The work of about 15 minutes produced about half as many thread-ends as yesterday's two-hour session -

The quilt will be 15 times the area of the sample. It will take quite a while to neaten the back! 

Why not fuse on a false back, you may wonder - well, I just don't want to do that... nor do I want to leave the ends dangling. Thinking this through, I find a nice tension between the "traditions" of what the quilt depicts and the methods and materials used to make it. Quilting is So Not Football. It's miles away from "sport". And yet -- both need precision.

Breaking out

At last, real action on the quilt for CQ's Breakthrough challenge. A chance remark at the Knitting & Stitching show led to the purchase of silver and white textile printing paints. I used potatoes to print these "eggs" -Before printing, section by section, I bonded snippets of bright fabric -
Sometimes they stuck to the potato, but the random blank areas seemed to work just fine. So did the more heavily printed sections. Mostly I used a paintbrush to apply the paint to the potato, but there was also a foam pad in intermittent use. And sometimes I took two prints from one inking. White and silver were used randomly.

Though I'd drawn out a plan for the sections, using three sizes of "egg", it got adjusted along the way, and once the middle area was done, each new section was a new decision - what size egg? how many rows? what colours of fabric?
The size of the black linen (salvaged from some unwanted but hardly worn trousers) was 70x70 - I'd planned to cut it down to 60x60cm, but that would have diminished the piece. So I left it as is, and started printing another piece of black cloth - marked out to the correct size.
Also, I added "breakout" pieces to some of the eggs - and some strips printed on velvet. Those would be caught down by the lines of vertical quilting, about 1/4" apart. This pic shows the quilt before quilting, trimming, and binding.

From the show

These two pieces were shown at the Festival of Quilts last month. They're here now for the record.

"And Flowers Almost Poems" is 140 cm long, 30 cm wide -It's strips of thin plain silk, little bits of heavier flowery vintage silk, strips of dupion stamped with characters like "love" and "peace" (and flower, beauty, grace, happiness, from a set of rubber stamps, put together to resemble lines of chinese poems). The parallel stitching functions as quilting, and with a bit more practice I'll be able to get nice smooth curves - "Rainstorms" was in the "Elemental" challenge--It incorporates monoprints done on fabric with ordinary printing ink (I like the type of mark you get this way) -and it also uses layers of overlapping sheer fabric -