What a difference a day makes, take 2

OK, did I not make myself clear. STOP DYING! Enough. Yes, I like wearing black, but no I don’t like needing to go to funerals. It now looks like there will be a second next week. My partners Uncle has just died from cancer. He was one of the first people to see the potential of my work in interior design. He was kind enough and interested enough to put me in touch with an interior designer he knew. He was also one of the few people to understand my pricing, even though he had no previous experience of quilts or quilting. It meant a lot to have someone outside of the industry understand what I do. I guess this is even more reason to be making fiber postcards for various cancer charities. If you are interested in doing the same leave a comment and I will email you the details of the latest challenge.

I know it is winter, it is the season when things die, but honestly I’ve had enough for now. I’ve just found out that the biker I met at Sandown Quilt Show has died as well. His funeral is Thursday, I hope his family are OK, he was very much one of the good guys and I know he will be missed.

Folks, please look after yourselves, your friends and you family. I am sure we all have people we should have got in touch with, maybe now is the time to do it.

What a difference a day makes

Well things seem to have improved a bit today. I got to have a lovely chat with a fellow quilter, who might be interested in me basting her quilts for her. I’ve got the borders on the class sample and most of the quilting done, and I had a couple of phone calls from friends. All in all a much better day. To round it off we had tickets for a concert, and it was good.

Now to open a can of worms. I have an art question. I recently saw Van Gogh’s Chair for the first time in the flesh. I’ve seen it in books a few times and been utterly underwhelmed by it. I’ve learned that that doesn’t mean much. Art doesn’t translate into books at all well. I could never see the big deal about Rubens until I saw his work not only in the flesh but in context with other work of the same period. Wow, he is amazing. One the other hand, the chair leaves me cold and somewhat confused. I just don’t see what the big deal is. It is wonky, with cartoon outlining and the pipe and tobacco on it look really flat, maybe unfinished, maybe an after thought. So can anyone explain what the deal is? Why is this a great piece of art? I’ve tried asking all the arty people I know but they seem to be as bemused as I am. Is it just luck of the draw? Once you are famous all your work is good by association maybe. In a similar thought I wonder what Rodin thinks of his sketches being on display in the Royal Academy. Some of them look like the very preliminary sketches I do when I am just trying to hold on to an idea. I think I would be mortified if they ever escaped into a gallery. If I ever get that famous, I must remember to burn all my sketch books.

Square in a Square class sample

Finally, I got the sample done. I don’t believe how many things I got wrong today. I can’t even claim it is difficult, it just isn’t. Maybe that is part of the problem, if it had been harder I might have paid more attention and made less mistakes. It does still have an error in it but that one will stay. I guess it shows everyone can have an off day. Tomorrow I will recycle some of the wrong blocks into a border and then get it quilted. This class will be at Patchwork Corner on the 5th December. The idea is to give the people who bought the ruler some ideas what to do with it. This top will be the pattern we work to and is 36″ square. Once I add the extra 9″ borders I think it will be a great sofa throw. While I was taking a breather today I decided to catch up on some blogs I like. Coincidentally I found an article that explains why I am just keeping on working despite the other things going on and the silly number of mistakes I have been making. Have a read, she says it so much better than I could.

For those who have been asking, yes I am still trying to draw. A combination of doing lots of exercises and not having a way of uploading the pictures have stopped me showing you what I am up to. Once we get normal service resumed I will let you see what new work I have done. I have discovered that some things really send me into a flat spin. I can’t see any common theme to them but boy do they stop me in my tracks. It’s weird. I tend to agree with my teachers that a lot for the problems come down to confidence, but how can you be confident you can do something when every part of you tells you that you can’t?

Finally having managed to get some more pictures onto a computer I thought I would share this picture. It was taken without even a tripod so I am really pleased with it. We were at Santa Pod last weekend for the Flame and Thunder show, and the moon came up early while I was waiting to photograph the bonfire being lit. They light their bonfire with a jet truck so it is a pretty good photo opportunity. Enjoy.

Argh, stress does effect thinking

As you may have gathered by the frequency of posts I’ve been having rather a lot of life recently. I think I am mostly coping fine, but every now and again I realize that I am not applying as much quality brainpower as I need to. This morning I have just fluffed a whole stack of blocks. Fortunately I did realize before I ruined all of them, and although what I have isn’t what I need I should be able to reuse them. It’s just frustrating when you have lots of work to do and a brain that really isn’t playing ball. I would love to be able to just wait for life to calm down, but I have commitments I have to meet, and I am not sure life is planning on calming down.

So I guess it is time to remake these 8 blocks, which between them took over 1m of fabric. Alternatively I could go and get my package of fabric from the depot. Hmmm, maybe the break would help and new fabric makes everything better.

Hopefully later I will be able to show you what I have been working on, if the computers want to play. See what I mean too much life happening.

Challenge quilt two, Jabberwock

Sorry it is a bit late but it has been a rather full week. Including one computer giving up the ghost. Of course it is the computer I use to upload my pictures. Not a problem, we managed to get some pictures off the camera. Shame the lighting and focus was so far off. I will take some more pictures once we have the computer sorted but I thought I might as well let you see how far I got, as best I can.

The challenge this month was to make a piece based on the poem about the jabberwocky. It had to be abstract and include texture. Straight away I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to show the Jabberwock as it might appear to the person it was attacking. The rectangle is what you are really seeing, all the embellishments are supposed to be the details you noticed before it got so close. The base quilt is made of a solid panel quilted to be the belly scales and individual scale shapes lightly quilted to allow them to raise up, it gives a good scale texture but doesn’t seem to photograph well. The binding is also made of individual scales which radiate out from the centers of the sides. The claws and teeth are three dimensional embellishments added after quilting. This allowed me to tuck the claws into the scales. The back isn’t the neatest I’ve ever managed, but how much art is judged on it’s back?

The tail is very curved, and sticks out a long way from the wall. It is stuffed with wadding I inherited. I would have liked to have been able to have it hang at an angle but when I tried it pulled the quilt out of shape and still hung straight down. I think this is something I will come back to, maybe I can come up with a way to avoid this. Perhaps by using a stretcher frame? The wings are the only part not quite finished. The ribs are stuffed but not fully sewn closed. I will do that and then hand sew the webs between the bones. I am going to use the belly fabric for the rest of the wings. The wings will then be sewn into place over the stitching for the binding, which is how the tail is held on. This method seems to be pretty secure and unobtrusive.

As ever comments would be welcome. I think in a normal week I would have had time to finish this quilt, but it would have been tight. The wings took a silly amount of time because they are so skinny to turn and stuff. Anyone know at what point an abstracted image becomes abstract?

Another crafter leaves us

Sonia Beatrice Shooter nee Tregaskis, painter, stitcher and engraver left us this morning at 1am. She will be greatly missed. Her supplies will live on and create new pieces of art.

Time Travel, and perfectly timed support

Ok, so what has blogger been up to? My last post seems to think I posted it Friday, and yet I already knew what I had done over the weekend. Kinda strange really, and of course I would claim it is currently Tuesday but I think blogger will say it is Wednesday.

Firstly, I would like to thank Nellie for her very kind email. Unfortunately it came through with an invalid return address so I will try and find the correct address tomorrow. I just wanted you to know it was appreciated now. Today has been one of the days my brain doesn’t play ball on the drawing front. It had been going so well. I drew two recognizable trees with scribble and that was good. Then came an avocado. Crunch, just like hitting a wall. I can’t see how I am supposed to be able to achieve that. I did call on my artists technical support line, and I now see what I am supposed to do, but not how to do it. Major crisis of confidence followed. Then coming home to such a supportive email was just what I needed. So I guess over the next couple of days I will be returning to the avocado. Sometimes it does seem like the world is helping me go in this direction, and that’s a really great feeling.

It’s been a pretty productive day on the quilting front too. My challenge quilt is now quilted. It just needs the embellishments adding and the binding putting on. I relished in time that I need to put the binding on first if I want to use the sewing machine, as once I have the embellishment’s on there is on way I will be able to get it under the arm of the machine. It is going to be a very wacky piece, but I think I will rather like it. I hope I can enter it into the NEC next year in innovative small. We shall see.

Me and my bright ideas

So I have this great plan for my challenge quilt. It is really good honest, well I think it is. It sprang into my head ready to go, and it doesn’t look too tricky. On the other hand I seem to have greatly underestimated the time needed to make it. The body of the quilt is only A3 and is complete, but the embellishments are taking forever. I think I put in nearly 8 hours yesterday on them and so far another 2 hours today. I think another 5 or 6 might do the trick, but this is supposed to be a fast quilt. Whups. I guess it has been a learning experience regardless. I now know one more thing that will take longer than I could ever have imagined. The quilt has also consumed a surprising amount of fabric, something else I will be aware of next time I try something like this.

Che design.

A friend recently moved house, and I thought I would make him a wall quilt to make it feel more like home. I was planning on making a motorcycle. It helps he rides my ideal bike. Unfortunately it didn’t want to play. It is very fussy and needs lots of detail. There isn’t room to hang a really big wall quilt. So when he mentioned to someone else that Che would make a great quilt, I had my solution. This is the design I have produced from the iconic photograph. I was concerned that the design should be what my friends wants, as he is an artist and this is an important image to him. He pointed out that this is one image that however badly it is drawn it is still recognizable. Indeed it does seem to be. It is always hard to judge a pattern full size, this one is 26″x32″, but now I have it on the screen I am pretty pleased with it. Now I just need to trace it onto freezer paper and get to work.

Creative weekend.

I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to post, sorry folks. Being the last Friday of the month, meant the new fast fabric challenge was issued. This month the theme is Jabberwock, abstract and texture. For me this is a fantastic theme, right up my street. Interestingly the idea appeared almost fully formed, I’ve only made some very subtle changes to my initial concept. I’ve made the background and I have a lot of the details well underway. As before I don’t feel I can show anything here until it is finished, but given the deadline is Friday you don’t have too long to wait.

I also had my first drawing lesson on Friday. It was an interesting experience. My teacher thinks that my problem is confidence or a lack there of. Apparently I am very hesitant when I need to draw anything. I wondered at the time if it was just having someone watching, but it seems to be true even when I am working on my own. It’s very odd, but hopefully by knowing there is a problem I can try to fix it. I also tend to work quite small with drawing, quite the opposite to my quilting, so I am trying to use charcoal for drawing. It forces me to not only draw larger but also make more confident strokes. I have to admit I don’t really like it but it does seem to help so I will try to stick with it.

I seem to have spent the whole weekend alternating between trying to draw and preparing the challenge quilt. Another fun aspect of the challenge is that I am using the same fabrics as last month which has saved me making more mess, and in fact helped me tidy up.

To get the week off to a good start, our two person quilt entry at the NEC is in Popular Patchwork. I guess it will be on sale in the shops in about a week, as a subscriber I get mine early. It is a nice little piece, showing both of the quilts, but they are upside down. Fortunately they are just geometeric patterns so it doesn’t really matter. I was also pleased to see the magazine photographer found them quite tricky to photograph. It does seem that my preferred designs and colours are about the worst things to reproduce. Black and white both hide your quilting and white never looks white once you take a picture. Still it is exciting to see another quilt in the magazine, and very nice to have it pointed out that ours was a true joint effort. We both worked on everything.