Tuesday 2 November 2021
A square for the Forthline project
Monday 1 November 2021
The Endeavourers #15, A quilt inspired by a newspaper headline - "B****y Covid"
This is my quilt for the latest quarterly challenge from The Endeavourers. Our challenge was to make a quilt inspired by a newspaper headline.
My quilt doesn't need much explanation - it represents the majority of headlines at the moment, and pretty much sums up my feelings!
My 'headline' is painted with fabric paint and I quilted in black round the letters, which are based on a font called Impact. There is a double layer of batting under the white 'paper' which is stipple quilted. The background newsprint is quilted in random geometric shapes inspired by the print. I liked the way that the asterisks look vaguely like the Covid virus under the microscope!
I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling uninspired to be creative recently, and it was very good to have this challenge! As usual I'm looking forward to seeing what has inspired the other members of the Endeavourers. You can check them out on the group blog where you can also find links to each individual member.
Saturday 1 May 2021
The Endeavourers #14, Colour Theory: The Spirit of Summer
The theme for this quarter's piece was Colour Theory, and what a massive and complicated subject that is!
Essentially it's about describing and explaining relationships between colours and why we find some satisfying. As quilt makers most of us have probably come across the 'Colour Wheel' at some point - we often use it as reference when considering which colours might go well together. The particular wheel we are familiar with - the subtractive colour wheel, which is based on mixing pigments, and uses the primary colours red, yellow and blue - only represents one way of describing the relationships between different colours. There are other models which depend, for example, on whether you are considering the properties of light - the additive colour wheel - or the physiology of the human eye.
As I was feeling my way round the enormity of the subject, and at a bit at a loss, I thought about making an abstract quilt using two colours with a particular relationship. However I couldn't get away from a picture in my head of pink blossom against sunny blue skies and I really wanted to make that quilt.
The Spirit of Summer
Monday 1 February 2021
The Endeavourers #13, Memories - "Treasure box"
While I was wondering how to translate this idea into a piece, I thought about the treasure box I keep under my bed, as I'm sure many people do, and about the way the objects in a collection like this represent their owner's individual memories. The collection as a whole is more than the sum of its parts too and also reflects the owner as a person.
In fact a person is like a treasure box - we are all treasure boxes! Together the box and its contents symbolise us as the keepers, and the product, of our memories. So here is my imagined 'Treasure Box'.
: a little Douglas fir cone and a larger Scots pine cone. My own treasure box has a cedar cone which is a reminder of a very long ago family picnic with my Grandma, during a sunny summer holiday. I thought that a fir cone might seem like a trivial thing, but in terms of memories represent something very significant.
: a dried corsage/buttonhole saved from a happy or romantic occasion - a wedding, or an important dance, maybe.
The box is reinforced with some stiff tapestry canvas, which I happened to have in exactly the right quantity, and is made from black velvet cut from a torn old favourite jacket. Sewing it all together was crucial to the idea but I did occasionally wonder why I was putting myself through this torture when it would just have been an awful lot easier to wrap fabric round a cardboard box!
For final decorative details I used cold tea to age the corsage (dipping in the carnations, and then putting some of the damp tea leaves on the fern and leaving to dry) and I used watercolour on the rosebud and shells, and to add shadows to the quilting on the fossil. It took a while to think about how to make each object but as the box and its contents symbolise a human being and their memories it felt very important to try to make everything look as precious as possible.