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The last two weekends I’ve been working on the piecing of the hexagon spirals. The first task was to produce a full sized cartoon on brown parcel paper. Since the sketches were 30 cm square, I decided the easiest was to scale up to a 30 inch square. No complicated maths to do then. I don’t think I’ve mentioned this up to now, but the spacing between the rings on the sketch is based on the Fibonacci number sequence, so I didn’t need any complicated scaling ratio to mess up my figures.
It is always a surprise to see the sketch at its full size. This time the a-ha effect was to see that the inner ring was going to have some small fiddly pieces to sew together. So I decided that for these pieces I would use foundation piecing. At that size no-one is going the notice the difference between a straight seam and a gently curved seam. And of course you can only make straight seams with foundation piecing. I also remembered that you get a mirror image if you’re not careful with this method so I did a bit of sampling using tissue paper and some scraps of fabric. The obvious place to divide up into larger blocks was along the colour spirals. The next two images show the front and back of my foundation piecing sample.
As you can see I was trying to do too much at once. If I had left the bottom piece on the foundation, when doing the piecing for real, I would have ended up with an inserted corner piece to sew together. That might be fine for one piece, but not when you have 12 such seams to sew later. I had forgotten that you need to divide up into rectangular blocks, when using foundation piecing. Shows the value of sampling. Marie was proud of me!
When I started doing the piecing for the quilt top I used “stitch n tear” as the foundation. It is more robust than tissue paper and has the added advantage that it sticks to my design wall. Also it is much easier to remove than paper, which always leaves lots of tiny scraps behind, even after hours with the tweezers. (The first time I did any foundation piecing was on a wall hanging kit that provided paper foundations. I speak from experience  ) After tracing the foundation from my cartoon, I turned it over and retraced over the lines. This prevents your design turning out as a mirror image. The wrong side (second lot of pencil lines) are the sewing lines for the piecing. I have a white table top so that I was able to see the original lines through the “stitch n tear” with no problem to trace over them again.
The other thing you need to plan in advance is how the seams are going to lie. When you come to sew the blocks together you want the seams to lie in alternate directions so that you can butt them together and get accurate joins. I, of course, only realised half way round the first circle that I had failed to take this into consideration. After some reluctance and a boot to my behind from Sqeze – sorry an appeal to my conscience – I ended up resewing half my blocks to reverse the lie of the seams on them. Like all these things it didn’t take nearly as long as I expected, because most of the construction time is actually thinking and making choices and not sewing. I only had to repeat the sewing part.
Here’s the state of play currently displayed on my design wall. Things may well change once I get started on the next ring out. It is quite tricky to get a pleasing transition across the colours and rings. I may be doing a little tweaking yet.
The second ring out is partly constructed using the foundation piecing technique for the smaller blocks. The larger blocks at the bottom of the ring are constructed with normal machine piecing. I’m using tissue paper pattern pieces and a dressmaker’s wheel to mark the fabric as shown in this posting (3rd sampling technique).
I so liked the skin of the website that Sqeze built for our Use Your Eyes blog, that I decided I wanted the same one for my own blog. No sooner said than done. Site admin alias Sqeze has spent this weekend giving me a new skin too. I hope you all like it as much as I do.
The artwork (that changes) across the top is all taken from my textile art and quilts. Sqeze wouldn’t let me have my father’s eyes on this one, which I am quite sad about. I have to nip over to Use Your Eyes or into the library to see the twinkle in them. If you’re interested, my dear reader, you can see them here too.
Can’t seem to stop buying more books. These are my latest two purchases. I already have one book by Jennie Rayment about creating texture by various folding techniques. After finding the table of contents and some of the photos on a web site I decided that there was enough new stuff in this book to make it worth buying another. These techniques use up a lot of fabric, but certainly add plenty of textural interest.
Sneaky Amazon of course recommended more books to buy and I couldn’t resist this one by Claire Schaeffer. When I’ve finished by C&G course I am hoping to find time to do some more dressmaking. I’ve taken 2 tailoring classes in the past so not all of the techniques in this book are new to me, but it is an excellent guide to couture sewing techniques and there are plenty of new tips and techniques to justify the purchase. You also get an interesting glimpse into the workings of the ateliers of the Haute Couture.
And finally if Haute Couture and tailoring interest you, you might like to take a look at the English Cut blog by bespoke savile row tailor Thomas Mahon. Not one of my regular reads, but one I return to at infrequent intervals.
We had more snow overnight on Saturday and woke to white again on Sunday – not that we had many other colours beforehand except grey and a bit of vegetation finally peeking out. A good day to stay home and get on with my final assessment piece. I pulled all my fabric out onto the floor and started sorting into colour gradations.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that I have almost all the colours I need. While I was sorting I found my transfer printing samples from earlier in the course and realised that this will be the ideal way to get the paler tints of blue and yellow that I might need. I’m not really in the mood for hours among the buckets right now, so I was glad that I shall probably get away with no extra dyeing for this piece.
This was the view on the floor in my studio after I had cleared away the fabric that I won’t be using.
At the beginning of November last year I started trying to get a group of people together to work on challenge themes to produce a piece of textile art. On November 14th the website Use Your Eyes was launched thanks to the hard work of my DH Sqeze. The group has had some fluctuation in members in our short life span to date, but I hope we are now, for the time being, stable numbers.
Our first theme was Carnival and we published the results on the blog yesterday. Ash Wednesday being the first day of lent and the end to the carnival season. I am interested to learn what our next theme will be. Seeing my idea take on form, and most of all, the exciting results the group made of our first theme will encourage me to try harder myself next time, to push out the stops a bit more.
I was browsing the Guardian newspaper website and came across this set of truly amazing images.
Entitled Hiding in the City the artworks show the Chinese artist Lui Bolin camouflaged against city locations in China and the UK. I really had to look quite hard to find him in the final image of the series.
I first read about Valerie Goodwin in Dec 2009 /Jan 2010 issue of Quilting Arts. Her quilts appeal to me. I like the bird’s eye view and her use of colour. She is an interesting quilter as she has a degree in Architecture and teaches classes in architectural design. She has a web site and a blog.
I was interested to read on her blog that she is teaching a class called Cartographic Constructions like her blog. In it the students are first taught the basics of traditional quilting. And 12 of the 14 are men. I was quite surprised at that as it was an elective class. Maybe some of them will catch the bug and there will be a few more male textile artists out there.
We are holed up here in snow so I have some unexpected time on my hands. But not that much since we spend a good few hours each day shovelling snow away, so that we may be able to get out before next Easter.
I had some more feedback from Marie suggesting that maybe my black hole was a little too small. So I experimented with cut out circles of black tissue paper over the centre of my last coloured sketch. In the end I decided to increase the size quite considerably.
I then drew another sketch and painted in the circles using acrylic paints and a grey scale. Using the coloured pencils hadn’t really given a good impression of how the colours are supposed to darken as they disappear down my black hole. This will help me to decide how many gradations I need to dye of the colours, after I’ve looked through my stash.
After feedback from Marie I have decided to go with the idea of spirals and colours fading to black and white. When I saw the sketches up on the computer screen, even before any comments from Marie, my instinct was to go with the spirals. As Marie pointed out – the metamorphosis ideas, which were influenced by Escher’s tessellations have been done before. I got a little side-tracked from my intention to go with my own designs and ideas.
One of the original sources of inspiration was a series of portraits in a magazine article, where the photos faded from colour images to black and white. The idea appealed to me. The lyrics from the Elton John song Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me kept buzzing around my head too:
I can’t light no more of your darkness
All my pictures seem to fade to black and white
I also wanted to use hexagons as the basis of the piece, as I like them as a shape and find there are lots of interesting designs one can make with them. Of course I did a bit of googling for images to get some inspiration too, but I didn’t come up with that many interesting images with hexagons. It would seem others are not so inspired by them
This is the current state of play:
It is still quite a rough sketch, but I have the dimensions sorted out now ready to do a full sized cartoon. The finished piece will be a 30 inch square. I intend using my own hand dyed cotton fabrics again, with the exception of the black, where I will use commercially dyed fabric. They can get the best blacks I think. I’ve not had much success at dyeing black, so why bother when you can get a better colour ready dyed. The colours are arranged in the order of the colours of the rainbow, but I have combined the blue and indigo into one spiral.
I got up very early on Sunday – for me. We were booked onto a guided tour around the Botticelli Exhibition at 10:15 in the Städel Museum in Frankfurt. Just recently we have been to a couple of guided tours around exhibitions and have really enjoyed them. So it was a relatively small price to pay to get some culture. It had the added advantage that we got a parking space practically outside the exhibition and beat most of the crowds to see the exhibition. It is very popular.
The tour was well organised with everyone being given a headset and the tour guide using a microphone. So despite it still being quite crowded we could still hear everything well. The tour lasted about an hour and took in 6 or 7 of the paintings, which was quite enough. The choice of paintings was also very good to cover a wide range of the works. The tour guide was obviously knowledgeable and told us lots of interesting background information, including some about how the exhibition was organized and how the paintings were transported.
 Idealized Female Portrait, Städel Museum, Frankfurt
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Ruth | Category: 