On Sunday I dyed three metres of fabric for the backing and the binding. So I’m all set up for this coming weekend, when I intend to get started on the quilting. I shall have to take a trip into town on Saturday to stock up on thread as I don’t have all the colours I need. I’m looking forward to that because I’ve found a new shop via the internet that looks very promising. I think it may the same shop I’ve used in the past, but moved into bigger and better premises. After the trip I should be set up with everything I need to complete the quilt. As the coming weekend is also a long one (Monday is another public holiday here in Germany) I’m hoping to make good progress.

It feels good to be working on a large piece of textile art again.

Update (2011-06-11):
Been to the shop this morning. It is the same one as I have used in the past – TOKO Kurzwaren in Frankfurt am Main. They moved to the new premises at the beginning of the year. The new shop is double the area of the old one and also much lighter and airier. They have added some fabrics and buttons to the range of goods they sell. A big improvement – I hope they continue to stay in business.

I spent 57€ on thread a few other bits and pieces that I needed. It’s amazing how it all adds up.

After some more thought and revisiting my favourite quilt artists I realised that I am more drawn to non-realistic than realistic or abstract themes, so I hardened up my ideas and started to concentrate on squares and grids. I felt this was a bit wider than just Amish quilt designs and had more possibilities to make it my own. I worked for a couple of days on a mind map, which turned out pretty huge. Elizabeth said I had enough ideas that I was set up with a series of series! Here is a brief summary of the mind map. The main branches are

• Amish layouts
• colour schemes
• quadrilaterals (all shapes that have 4 sides)
• designing my own block (dividing the square with lines)
• ideas for variation in the squares – lots of sub-branches here – exploring texture, colour, adding layers
• other ideas (looking at tartans, de-constructing grids, …)
• quick look at elements of design

Then along came the next lesson with various exercises for working on your ideas to arrive at potential designs. One of them was to go out with a camera and look for images that correspond to your theme. Since it was such a nice weekend we decided to get outdoors and enjoy the weather. An hour of walking around in Bad Homburg looking for grids and squares resulted in over 100 images. I chose a few of them and printed them out in black and white. Today I set about simplifying the images into sketches that might be worth translating into fabric. It wasn’t as easy as I thought and some of the images that looked interesting as photographs, became quite boring when reduced to a line drawing.

Here are my the results of a few hours work this afternoon.

The first exercise was to analyse the work of some favourite artists to understand their themes and how they varied the idea of the theme. I thought I’d share these findings with you. We were to look at two painters, two quilters and two artists from another medium.

TWO PAINTERS

Claude Monet has always been one of my favourite impressionist artists. He worked on many series all based on particular objects e.g. wheatstacks, Rouen cathedral and places e.g. London, his garden at Giverny. He was principally interested in how the light changes an object and painted things at different times of the day and in different seasons. I found this excellent website showing many paintings from his series.

I discovered the works of Alexej von Jawlensky at a retrospective exhibition we visited with friends in Wiesbaden. (He lived the last part of his life in Wiesbaden.) There was a room full of his face paintings (Jawlensky actually calls them Köpfe – heads) that really made a lasting impression on me. He produced many works based on faces which became increasingly abstract with time. They become studies of shape and line. There is a good overview of this development here. While researching online I found these line drawings on the MoMA, New York website. His drawings particularly use few lines to portray a face.

TWO ARTISTS – DIFFERENT MEDIUM

Photographer Alain Briot takes amazing landscape photographs mainly in the American South West. He uses light to create wonderful atmosphere. Two galleries particularly appeal to me:
Antelope Canyon for the light, texture, shape and line. The colours are also amazing.
Blur Portfolio – Trees and cacti reduced to abstract shapes, with lots of line, again the colours are gorgeous.
I first discovered Alain Briot when thinking about developing a personal style. He has an interesting series of articles on the Luminous Landscape photography website.

I had to include the paper artist Isabelle de Borchgrave, who produces costumes and objects from paper. These are 3D works. Her costume series are themed by era or place and include all the accessories, made from paper, including lace, jewelry and shoes. She currently has an exhibition Pulp Fashion at the Legion of Honor Museum, San Francisco that I wrote about just a couple of weeks ago. Isabelle shows the most amazing attention to detail.

THREE ;.) QUILTERS

David Walker – In the Beginning Series based on the egg shape. Great colours that really sing. The development of the series is by changing the colour scheme, the shapes remain: the egg, curved and straight lines. Lots of contrast.

Valerie Goodwin – Cartographic Quilts a series based on maps – geometric shapes – squares, rectangles and line. I like them because they tell a story, but are not 100% realistic – maps being an abstract form. Great use of bright colours and contrast too.

I couldn’t just stop at two quilt artists. So here is a very different kind of quilt to the two artists above.
Deirdre Adams – particularly the horizon series – I love the simplicity of them, but they still have lots to tell.
Line, large areas of colour, lots of texture with the quilting. I particularly like Horizon V for the sudden introduction of 3 little houses on the horizon and a “pieced border” on the left hand side. – Variation mainly on colour scheme and the height of the horizon.

• they were made in a class to learn a technique
• they were made in a class to a particular theme (e.g. based on nature, landscape etc.)
• they were made for a particular theme in a call for entries

As this end to inertia quilt was started as an entry to a juried exhibition on a particular theme, and if not accepted would never find a place on the walls in my house, it is coming down from the design wall and the fabric will be recycled. I here publicly eat my hat. This is the first quilt I’ve started that won’t get finished. At least it never made it to the significant UFO stage.

I know all the wise ones say you should just keep going and doing a little bit. So I did a very little bit yesterday. I put together all the green fabric I have excluding commercial prints and the reds and purple red. I find it easy to put the reds and pinks into a colour gradation in order of value. The greens are much harder. I laid them out on the floor (fabric and the floor seem to work for me) and took a photo of each set. I then converted to black and white on the computer. I got the reds right, but the greens were a little more hit and miss. It is surprising how the bright greens turn out to be quite dark in value in the black and white image. I find it hard to believe somehow, but I guess the computer doesn’t lie – what’s in it for it?

The idea is to sort the fabrics according to value and then use fabric from each pile according to the value required from the value studies that we produced. It will be interesting to see how this method works. It makes sense to me and it is something I haven’t consciously thought about for the quilts I’ve made up to now.

It is interesting to see just how a different value scheme can affect the look of the sketch.

We are also learning how to evaluate our designs. This has been quite a valuable exercise, as it is not something I can remember being given much guidance on in the C&G course. Of course we covered all the aspects of design, but I didn’t feel that I actually gained much in how to apply the theory in practice.

Lesson 3 is about using value and colour and although I’ve not started doing any of those exercises yet I’ve read through the lesson and found some interesting information in it that I hadn’t picked up anywhere else.

Here are a few examples of some of the things I’ve been doing:

The panels are constructed using the fused appliqué technique. It is a useful technique for collaging with small pieces of fabric, but I don’t really like the way the finished piece becomes quite stiff. I am using Steam-a-Seam, which I can buy here in Frankfurt, and not one of the newer lighter fusible webs. So maybe I would be happier with the results, if I used a different product, but I’m not really sure that it is a technique I want to use extensively. I have found that the needle on the machine gets gunged up with bits of the glue and that you get permanent needle holes in the fabric when quilting, which don’t disappear with time.

I’m not sure how this piece fits in with my other quilts. It seems to me to be quite a departure in style if not in colour. Still I had fun making it.

You can see how the others interpreted the theme of shadows over on UYE.

I have been playing around with it in Photoshop Elements. One of the things I often do is convert the image to black and white. Then I play around with the various filters until I find something I like. I’m by no means an expert user, but you can’t do much damage if you don’t save the changes you’ve made to the original photo. One of the filters I like is posterize. I first learnt about this at a course I took at Quilt University – Realistic Fabric Portraits. You can choose how much you want to simply the image by varying the number of levels. The lower the number the less detail you get and the more simplified the resulting image will be. This is the result of posterizing the original with 4 levels. I’m not sure now if it was black and white and then posterized or the other way round. I suspect that the posterized image was converted to black and white.

Another filter that is sometimes useful is to find the edges – either accented edges or poster edges. This image was created by applying the poster edges filter to the original and then just printing it in black and white. If you don’t want to be bothered converting to black and white, printing is the easy option.

These two images gave me a starting point to get into the studio and start playing with fabric.

Finished once

The offending piece

This morning my eyes were still misbehaving, so I had to bite the bullet and take out the offending piece and add a new one that was less distracting. I can’t understand why I didn’t spot it before, but I suppose the white gaps didn’t help and also, of course, the black was missing. Although the original piece did have some texture to it, it didn’t show up from afar and the colour was too flat as well as too dark.

This shows the new improved quilt top. I know that there are bits around the black, which are a bit jaggedy too, but I didn’t want a completely prefect blend. I felt that would be a bit too bland. I like the slight imperfections. Around the black they are not too distracting and do not draw the eye too far away from the focal point. As they are balanced on each side the eye tends to flit backwards and forwards and so remains in the right area. That’s my theory anyway and I’m sticking to it (for now!).

Finished twice

Problem solved

To attach the black circle I first drew a circle the correct size on some freezer paper and then ironed the cut out template onto the black fabric and cut around with a generous seam allowance. After clipping out little triangles all around the circle in the seam allowance, I pressed the allowance back over the paper template. With the template still attached I centred the circle from the wrong side of the quilt top, with the circle underneath, and pinned it in place. From the right side I hand sewed it in place using stab stitch like in needle-turn appliqué, adjusting where necessary to get the best placement. (Another good reason not to start faffing about getting fussy about the colours near the focal point ) When all was sewn and pressed I removed the freezer paper and voilà an almost perfect circle that I could not have achieved with machine piecing. Sometimes hand sewing is unavoidable.