I did say I liked pressure

I’ve realized today that there are two shows I want to enter with deadlines of the 1st October. So I am going to have to get a wiggle on. The pieces I want to enter are both well planned so it might be possible. Though to complicate matters they are both in the US which means I have to get them posted by about the 23rd. I’ll just have to see what I can do.

Before this revelation I did finish the rain quilting on Bridge 3. I think it looks much better but I haven’t taken any pictures yet. Sorry

Bridge Three

While I was waiting for my paint to dry I worked on what I had planned for today. Bridge Three. I finally managed to get the freezer paper to stick eventually. I put the paper onto the ironing board first then the fabric on top and finally the teflon pressing sheet. It wasn’t’ the best bond I have ever managed but it held long enough. I am still hoping I might get them all quilted tonight but it isn’t really likely.

Hmm, having uploaded the picture I have a problem with this top. The far tower just isn’t straight. I think I will have to have a fiddle and see if I can improve it.

Postcard Prototype.

I’ve finished quilting the prototype for the fabric postcards. It is definitely a mad project. Not a bad thing though if it gets me motivated. I’ve taken lots of pictures to prove it really has been done on the longarm. It did look very funny. I started by painting the letter onto plain black fabric. The paint is something I found at the festival of quilts. It contains real aluminum and copper and claims it will tarnish in time. I am not sure from reading it if it only tarnishes if you put another product on it, my guess is it will but it will take a bit longer. Please remember that this is my first serious attempt at feathers, and at this scale a wobble of 1mm is very noticeable. For a lot of the quilting I was guiding the machine either from under the quilt with my left hand or with a fingernail against the hopping foot. I should mention I was running the machine pretty slowly and taking a lot of care. I had never noticed how much the machine wobbles as it moves, on this scale everything suddenly seemed lumpy and quite heavy. My machine is normally very free moving suddenly was hard to move and very slow. I think the feathers I drew on paper were better than the ones I ended up quilting. By the last bit it was seeming a lot easier and I think I was just getting the hang of it. So hopefully the next one will be better. I did think part way through that this isn’t the best way to learn a new technique, aren’t you supposed to start quite large and use a matching thread. Well if it works for me I won’t complain. I am planning on making a couple more letter F quilts before I get done to the set for the challenge.

Now the question is, how small a quilt can be quilted on a longarm?

Fran Jones strikes again

I had a plan, for the whole day, everything I was going to do. So there I was having brunch, reading a book about illuminated letters when the phone rang. It took me a minute to understand who was calling. It was Fran’s husband. I was thrilled to hear from him, thanks Mandy for telling him about my blog. He seems such a sweet guy.

While at the festival of quilts I was handed a flyer about ‘Donne per donne’ fiber art cards for women after breast cancer. I was interested, but I tend to work big. I couldn’t see what I could do that small. I filed the flyer, but largely put it out of my mind. Then it hit me, Fran had told me that I should quilt everything on my longarm, no matter how small… You can see where this is going can’t you. I’ve got to do some postcards, and they just have to be quilted on the longarm. So with these words ringing in my ears I hang up the phone and see the book. So now I have a mission, illuminated letters, postcard size, done on the longarm. Two hours later I think I have a way to do it. Well I have one design I can draw, so theoretically I can make it on the longarm right. So this is all Frans fault, but I suspect she would find the very funny, and of course now I’ve told you all about it, I have to do it don’t I. Wish me luck, I know I like to do the impossible but even so…

Bridge two

I figured out what I was doing differently with my freezer paper and got it working again. I can’t claim to understand what was going on though. ‘Bridge One’ was made by ironing the freezer paper pattern onto the front of the fabric then ironing fusible web to the other side. It worked great. This morning I was trying to put the freezer paper onto the fabric after the web, and it just won’t stick. When I realized this it seemed too silly to be true so I tried it the other way again. Bingo it works fine, with the same piece of freezer paper that won’t stick to the pre-fused fabric. Any ideas? I sure don’t I just doesn’t make any sense to me. Still I got one more bridge prepared today. I have another one ready to do tomorrow, then I think I will have a mass quilting session, not that these take long to quilt. They are only about A2, they fit on freezer paper without a join.

Thanks for all the suggestions for further art research, it really helps. I will be working my way through the suggestions as I find the time and money for books. Also it is a new month, and I said I would try and find a gallery a month to visit. I love in London and I think most big galleries are free to get in. So anyone want to suggest where I should be going for the first trip. I am thinking the Tate, partly because it is near the river and I want to try sketching again. I would like to go and see a range of work in one day. I think I remember more when there is contrast between styles.

Update – I think I have a winner The National Gallery, it looks really good with talks and all sorts. I think the best time to go is a Wednesday if anyone else is interested as there are rooms only open Wednesday afternoon.

I am also trying to improve my drawing. It has come on a lot from regularly tracing designs I have produced on the computer. I guess it is like longarm quilting, your hands learn the movements needed. The problem is I don’t enjoy it at all. It really is hard work to me. Also at the end of it I don’t get anything from it now. Maybe in some undefined period of time I will but I do like instant gratification instantly. I’ve noticed that a few bloggers are putting pictures of their sketched on their blogs. Doing that would kinda force me to draw every day, but I really don’t think much of my work so I am not at all sure about showing it to the world.

Educational but unproductive.

So, apparently the world doesn’t see this as a day for me to actually create anything. I seem to be fighting all my tools today and I have no idea why. I can’t even persuade my freezer paper to stick to fabric. So instead I have been spending some time with my new (well new to me) art books. I had been thinking that I aught to learn more about art, but the nagging at the NEC meant I actually started doing something about it. So far I have discovered I really like Victor Vasarely, his word and his life story. Having seen how artistic technical drawing can be I think it will be something I will pursue.

Last night my book on Klee arrived. On the whole his work does nothing for me. I haven’t tried reading much ot is yet, so maybe once I do it will be more interesting, but I am not convinced. I do think I could now recognize his work, and possibly work inspired by him, which is really what I wanted. One of his that I do like is Buhneprobe. It has the feel of hand dyed fabric and I like the detail he has added with lines. It is dated 1925, but to me looks like it would be far more recent. The detail is just fantastic, and has me thinking about doing a whole cloth piece where all the quilting is in straight lines. Using cross hatching to put in different shades. It is probably something I will need to do some testing of before I can make it work.

Today, Mondrian, Nature to Abstraction arrived. I’ve been really looking forward to this book. I saw a television program about Mondrian a while ago and was surprised at how much I liked his work. Coupled with the fact I have a new found interest in how abstraction comes about this book just sounded perfect. Again I haven’t had chance to read all of it yet (though liking the pictures seems to encourage me to read more) I am finding this fascinating. I love the fact that I can see how a tree is reduced to it’s essential tree-ness. It is written in such a way that I am starting to think I can do this too. Mondrian seems to be very good at capturing the feel of the subject although sometimes there is very little detail. What I really want to learn from this is how the compositions with colour alone work. I can pick colours and cut squares, but they don’t have the same impact. If I can improve my designs in that area I will be thrilled. I hope that it would improve all my abstract designs if I had a better appreciation of how to select the colours and locations.

I have a few more books incoming and I will probably let you know how I get on with those too. If there are artists I have missed that I should know about please let me know. It is very hard trying to get a good grounding in a subject you know nothing about as you have no way to search for what you don’t know.

NEC – Photos

A friend of mine (Natalia) with a love of maps decided to come along to the Festival of Quilts at the NEC to see ‘Tread Lightly’ It was her first quilt show, and I think it made an impression. She is studying art and kindly took some pictures for me. Being a non quilter helps I think, as she has captured more of the feel of the show than I ever do. I think I am too hung up on the technicalities of the quilts. Here are my favorites from her pictures. I’ve picked most of these because they show people interacting with the quilts, smiling and generally enjoying them, maybe laughing at them, but happy. It is great having someone lurking in the show to take these pictures.

I hope the pictures also give some impression of the scale of the show. The halls are huge, and this year things were well spaced out so you didn’t have to wait to get to most of the quilts. There were about 1500 competition quilts hanging, which took up about half the exhibition space. This year they had also put down a very pale carpet. It looked great and somehow made everything seem more proper. It is a joy to see our work displayed in such a well thought out space.

I chose this particular picture of the nudes largely because it is a great photo of the boat above them. I loved this boat and was thrilled to be able to by a card with a picture of it on. It was made by Diana Brockway from Wales. She had one of the galleries at the show and her work is just fantastic. She is so good at depicting wood, both as object and as trees. I suspect it is her influence that has me photographing all kinds of wood. I feel a need to have a go at quilting something wooden.
This is the rose fully quilted. The rose is all sewn in pink and the background fill is green. Sadly it is so subtle that the camera isn’t picking it up. On the other hand the camera can see stains coming through from the wadding. This is the second time I have had this problem, but this is a different wadding to last time. Is this just something that happens if you use white fabric in a quilt? If I am going to make any more pale quilts I guess this is something I will have to investigate and address. I suppose if I used a bleached cotton wadding that would probably be safer. If anyone has any suggestions, or experience of this I would love to hear from you. I can test every available product but I would rather not.

Listen to your mother.

When you mother told you to put things away as soon as you were done with them she was right. I’ve just spend the last hour looking for my quilt receipt and ticket for the Hever show. I had it yesterday, I copied the address off it to label my quilt. I then decided to leave it on my desk. There is no point putting it away on the file when I was just going to take it out again a week later now is there. Hmmm OK maybe there is a point, I would have been able to find it. After going through the bin for the second time and having taken everything off my desk except the bookcases (those who know my desk will appreciate what this task involved) I concluded I must have accidentally posted it to the US. Not really the sort of thing you want to have to confess to the organizers really. Fortunately that conclusion would have been wrong. I had taken a sewing machine off the desk yesterday to make more space to draw. Under the presser foot of that machine was my paperwork. Sensible, in a very dim sort of way. So whatever you’ve just left, go and put it away, you know it is the right thing to do. My paperwork is now in the quilt show folder where it should have been in the first place. I did discover that the guys have learned something about my filing system, they both told me to check the quilt show folder, as that must be where I had put it. Doh!

Two sides to everything

Having had a moan here yesterday it seems only fair that today I contradict myself. You should go out and interact with people you never know where it might lead. Today I had to pay for my storage unit, which I do by going in person to the office. I like getting to know the people looking after my belongings. Last month I remembered to take in my portfolio to show the staff, while I was buying the boxes for shipping quilts to the NEC. Today when I went in they started asking questions about exactly what I store, I don’t think I have anything I shouldn’t there but it is still a bit concerning. It turns out that the BBC are filming a documentary about what people store and they wanted interesting characters. They have now put me forward. How cool? It could turn out to be good publicity. I can’t remember where I found the advice to tell everyone who will listen what you do, but it is very good advice. You just never know. I am quite sure that even if nothing comes of this the staff at the storage unit always have the idea of promoting my art in the back of their minds, which one day could pay off. So some of the people out there are great, and well worth going and talking to.

What a day!

I had to brave the town center today, which is never a good start to the day. On the other hand how else am I going to post my quilts? It’s been a while since I was there, probably about 3 months, and in that time is has changed again. There are more cheap shops, more street traders and more mess.

- Interlude, there is a program on the television about Leonardo Da Vinci. They started by saying that people can only be good at art or science. Leonardo is the only exception. Pardon? I know a lot of artists who are also scientist, and I would say the best scientists I have met are good because they have a creative streak. Maybe this means all of us who can do both will be as successful as him? Lets hope so.

Anyway where was I. Ah yes the decline of Harrow. The most annoying thing for me is the complete lack of manners. I know I just make myself sound old, but when I was a child running into a lift, crashing into someone already in there and causing them to drop things would have been an issue to my parents. Sadly not anymore. After I pointed out the problem to the parent, they did ask the child to apologize, which it didn’t do, but neither of them helped me pick up my packages. Having posted my packages I tried for lunch. I am standing in a queue when a young lady walks up to the front of the queue and asks the server, “Got barbecue sauce?”. The chap serving replied “yes” and her hand shot out palm up. Well, clear I suppose, not entirely polite, but she had probably just finished standing in this very long queue and was irritated by forgetting the sauce. When I got my food the only clear table happened to be next to this young lady. She was eating food from another stand, so she hadn’t been to that shop at all she had just wanted their sauce. Seems a bit mean not to give them any money then not even treat the staff politely.

I had to get home. I find watching humans very depressing, if I stay home I just get to talk to you guys, much more civilized. As you can imagine I now needed to create something to take my mind of the world outside. This is what I came up with,I am not sure how clear it is, I guess some of you will tell me. Can you see what it is? I do rather like it but there are limitations. I used a faux trapunto technique with 2 layers of 6oz wadding. I don’t feel it is fat enough. I really like the effect I got with ‘Skelehand’. Is it possible to make faux trapunto that fat? The thread is a very subtle pink, which works really well in real life but not at all in the photos. I am going to have a go at doing a dark version, with black fabric and red thread. I will also try putting in more wadding. If that still isn’t enough I guess I will have to go back to stuffing everything properly.

Proving that quilting really can make the world a better place, well it calms me down so I see all the good things. I collected a fantastic writing/drawing board from a nice lady in Hammersmith via freecycle. If you haven’t heard of it I strongly suggest google. It is an effort to keep usable items out of landfill by giving them away to people who want them. On arriving home I found that Bonnie McCaffery had put up her VidCast, and I make a very brief appearance on it. She has given a quick overview of the show at the NEC. Disturbingly there are several things on her video I didn’t see at all. I know she was at the same show as me, so I can only assume I missed a lot. It always happens but I thought having spent four days there I might have seen most things. I have to admit to being very chuffed that she likes my quilt enough to want to put it and me on her video. Suppose I had better go and finished the background quilting on the new one.