By Ruth
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.
By Ruth
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.
By Ruth
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
By Ruth
I’ve been doing some design sketches and experimenting with ideas for my final assessment piece for my C&Gs.
Marie, my tutor, had this to say about Reflections
This is the standard of work you have been aiming for, now you have reached a level that you can build on to become the practitioner you hoped that you would become, many congratulations. You have a style here that suits your personality and I agree with your comments on finding your own creative voice.
and
Now you can start to think about the quilt, you have set yourself a very high standard, I would love to see you push your boundaries even further, you have proved yourself capable of far more than we have seen previously.
So I have to raise the bar for my final piece. My current thoughts revolve around:
- hexagons
- metamorphosis
- colour to black and white
I found a useful resource on the web, where you can produce you own graph paper using various shapes. I used it to make my triangle graph paper for sketching.
By Ruth
I sewed the quilt label onto the back of the quilt in the afternoon of New Year’s Eve as the final task to completion. So I did complete it in 2009. It wasn’t particularly my goal to finish in the old year, but it was a nice way to close the quilting year for me.
Looking back I see that I started the work on this quilt in mid August 2009. It has been more than 4 months in the making, which is the longest of any of my pieces to date – I think even longer than my CHF piece, although I spent more of my free time working on that piece. However it has been time well spent. I have learned a number of valuable lessons and have produced a finished piece that I believe has pushed out the boundaries of what I can achieve. It has been a valuable step on the road to finding my own creative voice.
I am very pleased with the way the wall hanging turned out. It is how I imagined it to be in my mind’s eye. It is also a piece that reflects my personal style, which I think I am becoming more clear about as the course progresses. I like the more abstract, geometric type of design. Although I like looking at figurative artwork, it is not something that appeals to me from the personal design and creation aspect. I am happy that I managed to find a theme that is based on natural world (as the assessment brief stated), but that I have been able to use to fit my own style.
I used a new to me technique for binding the quilt and have found a new and valuable technique to add to my tool box. I was particularly pleased to have learnt this technique, because it produces a good sturdy edge (as Marie my tutor had told me) and allows one to achieve an excellent finish without having the additional element of a binding in the design. With my wall hanging I don’t feel that a traditional binding would have been an appropriate finishing for the quilt. I found a really useful tutorial on this technique by Brenda Gael Smith over at Serendipity Patchwork and Quilting. A big thank you to Brenda for her generous sharing of experience.
Please take the time to look at some more images of my quilt in the gallery. I wrote a little about the process of creating the quilt there too.
By Ruth
I first read about the quilt being made by the prisoners in the high security wing of Wandsworth Prison in the Autumn edition of the magazine Intelligent Life. You can read the article here online.
It has turned up in the news again on Times Online, as the newspaper is supporting the charity Fine Cell Work in its Christmas Charity Appeal, that is involved in the production of the quilt.
The quilt is to go on display in the V&A Museum in London in the Quilts exhibition that is to run from 20 March – 4 July 2010. The exhibition will show British quilts from 1700 to the present day and will show quilts from the V&A textile collection not usually on display. Sounds like it will be worth a visit, if one is in London.
By Ruth
I have been off work since Monday. The weather has been pretty foul. Lots of snow and then the temperatures rose and we had rain on freezing ground. We braved it out on Tuesday and did all the shopping for Christmas. Since then I have had time to work on my reflections quilt. I was working on the quilting design, but decided that some of it would be too insignificant if only a thin quilted line. So I decided to use some 1/4 inch strips. I sewed them on using a twin needle and because the wrong side never looks very pretty with a twin needle I sewed them onto the quilt top and the batting.
Here are some photos:
This one proves that I do own something other than my red cardigan, which seems to feature in a lot of these shots
The quilt top with its added strips. I am pleased with the results.
A closer shot of the strips.
By Ruth
Frohe Weihnachten
God Jul
Boas Festas
Joyeux Noël
Buon Natale
Feliz Navidad
Prettige Kerstdagen
Hope there was one there for everyone!
By Ruth
At the weekend I finished the quilt top for my wall hanging assessment. The brown fabric works fine – enough contrast and quite how I imagined it. I am currently pondering how to do the quilting. As my C&G tutor Marie said: it would be great to link the quilting design with the initial inspiration in some way. Those are my feelings too. There was less variation/texture in the dyeing of the yellow fabric – it was different fabric to the blue, less crisp in the hand. It was interesting to see what a difference the fabric makes to the results of the dyeing. So I think I need to add some more texture with the quilting. Current thoughts circle around ripple effects. I need to go back to the original sources to get some more inspiration.
I briefly considered turning the quilt inside out with the backing and batting – I think known as the pillow case method – so as to have nothing showing around the edge. But on thinking about it, I decided that with a quilt this size, the quilting could alter the dimensions and take it off the square so I’ve decided that it is best to go the traditional route and quilt first and then use a binding. I wrote along these lines to Marie who suggested I used a turned back binding, similar to a facing. It wasn’t a method I had come across, but it is sound advice. I can avoid have a binding showing on the quilt front, but I can still quilt first and then square up and bind. Marie says it gives a tremendously sturdy finish to the quilt.
This quilt is taking much longer to produce than previous quilts, but I think the effort will be worth it in the end.
By Ruth
Thursday evening I received a phone call from out neighbour to say I should send Sqeze round – there was a large parcel for me in their hallway. They had kindly taken it in for us. Sqeze came back with a ginormous parcel, which turned out to be three parcels taped together and wrapped in brown paper: dolly and her box, my workbook and the digital photo frame.
Dolly has joined her sister on the window sill in my studio. Shamefully her sister is still naked. I’ve not got around to making her clothes yet. Perhaps the proximity to her fully clothed sister will reproach me into clothing her too.
It was good to get everything back, but I’m not sure what to do with it all. At the moment everything is distributed around my studio, I shall have to think what the long term solution should be. I’m still toying with the idea of somehow re-cycling the box into some other art work. For now I can contemplate it when I’m at the ironing board.
