Basically there were 3 levels for the judging – excellent, satisfactory and needs improvement. Not much grey scale in there, but I suppose it makes for more standardised judging. I didn’t get any “needs improvement” so that was a relief, but didn’t help me much with my search for areas to improve on. One judge gave me half and half excellent and satisfactory, the other about 2/3 excellent to 1/3 satisfactory. Where they both agreed, was that my technical skills were excellent, e.g. piecing, quilting technique, etc. The latter pleasing me no end as I personally feel there is certainly room for improvement there. Both gave me an excellent for “original in design” – another big boost to my confidence – and in fact one of them noted that one of the best features of the quilt was that it was very original.

So what are the areas that need improvement? Well both agreed that the “visual impact” and the “integration of all design elements” were only satisfactory. So obviously I need to do something about both of those. I wish I could find more photos of the quilts in the exhibition, especially of the winners. I would like to be able to compare mine to the others to see where the differences lie. I suppose I shall have to revisit the principles of design again and try to analyse what worked and what didn’t work in my quilt and repeat the exercise for other quilts that have been singled out by others as being top notch. This is where it would be useful to know which quilts were the winners. It’s one thing to know what was not up to scratch, but it’s quite a different thing to work out what needs to improve.

I have a googlemail account, but even trying that option, google then wanted me to set up a blogger account, which I don’t want. So I didn’t. This has happened to me a couple of times in the last few weeks. I have written to the authors if I could find a way to do so, but rarely get a reply.

While writing this I just had a reply from Helen to say she has altered the access to allow the Name/URL option. It was not part of the default options. So at least I now know that it is probably a nasty attempt on the part of these big internet providers to get you to sign up to their groups. I won’t though. I’m still adverse to leaving an electronic trail of myself all across the www. I’m not anti the web. In fact I use it a lot, but I do think that we are all becoming glass people – totally see-through and baring our souls. Me, I prefer to have a bit more control over how much of myself I give away to the world at large.

So having got that off my chest, let me recommend Tea and Talk for Two. I think it could well be a blog that turns out to be worth eavesdropping on

Planning is guessing. Unless you’re a fortune-teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy. (…) Writing a plan makes you feel in control of things you can’t actually control.

Certainly I think 2011 is going to be a year for me where long term planning is not going to be possible. We signed the contract with the builders to start work on our house in Spain last Thursday. Building work has to start within 15 days of us signing. There will be potentially a lot of things happening on that project that will require my time and attention. So I’m not making any long term plans concerning my textile art work.

To quote Rework again:

Give up on guesswork. Decide what you’re going to do this week, not this year.

This week is the first week of a course I’m taking at Quilt University called Inspired to Design with Elizabeth Barton. That’s what I’m doing this week and for the next five weeks!

So I am torn between the need to keep the pressure on to create – which means producing art for exhibitions and juried shows – and trying to find my own unique style. My problem with creating for shows is that most of them have themes and I’ve not yet found the answer to fulfilling the requirements for the themes and at the same time finding my own voice.

The visits this summer to two major textile art exhibitions helped me get some more clarity into my thinking. Looking at other people’s art work has enabled me to take a couple more steps towards finding my own style. Up to now I have been more of a gatherer than a hunter. I’ve taken quite a few technique courses at QU and the C&G course is designed to have you trying out different methods and styles. I feel now is the time to become more focussed. But how to do this?

I have been giving some thought to two possible ideas, which are probably different aspects of the same goal. I’ve been thinking about motifs and working in a series. Up to now I have not wanted to work in a series, because I thought it was too restricting. When you start out it is a good idea to experiment and try many different things. It is probably a natural progression to then move on to working in a series. Certainly many artists (in all media) do so.

The first impulse came from the article “Finding your unique design” by Terry White in the Aug/Sep 2010 Issue of Quilting Arts. It is subtitled Variations on a single motif. The idea being to find a motif that you like enough to work with to create your own design vocabulary. This quote from the article sums it up quite well.

By focussing on a single motif and playing with lines and shapes, one can explore personal style changes and develop new styles.

Another article on the Textile Blog about wallpaper patterns gave more food for thought. I like tessellations and repeating patterns. I think that was what originally attracted me to patchwork quilting. With the emphasis on textile art these days I suppose I felt that you had to be figurative rather than abstract to be taken seriously. The exhibition Color Improvisations changed my thoughts on that front.

This week I discovered this gallery of photos by Melody Johnson on Picasa about working in a series. This set me off thinking about working on a series of quilts. So I did some more research and found this squidoo lens about working in series. Take a look at the 12 good reasons to paint in a series. The arguments and ideas can equally apply to textile art. Explore the links too!

Maybe I’ve found a way to move forward now. When my work/art balance gets back to something more manageable I hope to be able to take up some of these ideas and start making quilts again. Instead of just thinking about them.

And all this is still part of Frankfurt – admittedly the very outskirts of Frankfurt – but there are also a considerable number of large office buildings 500m up the road. Sometimes when I’m walking to the office I ask myself 3 reasons why I am happy today and I count one of the reasons to be that I can see natural things and enjoy them on my way to start my day in front of a computer. This is a trick I learnt on a training about selling. It is a way to get yourself into a positive mood and sometimes I need that boost when I don’t have a particularly pleasant day in front of me. It’s good to remember that we always have some reason to be positive about our lives.

The pictures aren’t brilliant because they were taken with my mobile phone, which is quite old now, so is not a state of the art phone camera.

Update 29.08.10: Yesterday evening I was told that these plants are burdock – of dandelion and burdock soft drink fame – at least in the UK.

• There is an important difference between the type of ink your printer uses. It is either dye-based or pigment-based. You need to know which.
• There are some solutions on the market that claim to permanently fix the dye-based inks to your fabric. The most well known of these is the Bubble Jet Set from C .Jenkins Company. I say claim as I have not tested these myself.
• The fading and the unevenness of the fading on my pigment inks seems to be due to crocking. Pigment inks cannot take abrasion very well so the colour rubs off.
• Pigment inks seems to have a better fade resistance when in strong light sources.

So the conclusion seems to be you need to consider where you will be using the printed fabric. If you are aiming to do a lot of washing then you are probably best with dye-based inks and using one of the fixatives. If you are not making something that will be washed then pigment-based inks appear to be the better option.

Gloria Hansen has a good article on her website about inkjet printing on fabrics.

These are some of the stockists of either pretreated fabrics or the chemicals to treat your own fabric for using with dye-based inks:

• C. Jenkins Company There are some good articles about the process and the difference between the types of inks on the site too.
• Color Textiles Inc
• Soft Fabric Photos The FAQ page is quite interesting too.

There is another interesting article on Gloria Hansen’s website about pre-coats for inkjet printing. The article mentions inkAID products. These products seem to be better suited to pigment-based inks.

The FAQ page on the inkAID site has the following information:

Q. Can inkAID be used to precoat fabric for printing?

A. Yes – inkAID can be used to precoat fabric for a variety of purposes, including collage, banners, or stretched art. Your best choice is to use inkAID White Matte precoat, which is water resistant and can be machine washed. For best results, you should use a pigment-based ink for this application. Don’t use any inkAID Clear precoats, as they are water soluble and cannot be washed.

I am still not clear as to whether this means the fabric is also washable with a degree of permanence after printing. This may be an avenue to pursue, but I’ve not done anything about it yet. It sounds like an interesting product though.

What is most annoying though is that the printer is “intelligent” and thinks it knows when the ink is used up. It then refuses point blank to print anything. Last week it forced me to replace and throw away all 4 ink cartridges that were still half full because they were “empty”. I don’t use the printer all that much, so sometimes months go by before I want to print something again. I don’t know if this contributes to the darned thing thinking the cartridges are empty or whether it is just another way of getting more money out of you. The printer itself wasn’t too expensive, but the ink cartridges are – when I only get to use half the ink they contain, which in my case was equivalent to about 20 pages. A set of 4 Epson cartridges costs €31.

We also have an HP Color Laserjet 2550L colour printer. It gets used almost as infrequently, as we don’t do a lot of colour printing. I did use that printer for any colour printing I did during my C&G course and we only had to replace the yellow toner cartridge once in about 3 years. It is still going strong now. It is also less prone to paper jams – I can’t actually remember if we have ever had one. The toner cartridges for the laser printer aren’t cheap either, but each cartridge is supposed to print 5000 pages. Colour cartridges cost €85 each, black is slightly cheaper.

So I am doing a little experiment. I have printed the same image onto 2 pieces of cotton using the laser printer and the inkjet printer. I am going to throw them in the washing machine each week when I do the washing and see how the colours hold up. Then based on these results one or other of the printers will go. We really don’t need 2 colour printers in the house – along with a B&W laser printer.

I have been looking at the works of Andy Warhol recently as part of some research for a new piece of textile art. As these are colourful and I had one to hand I used it for my experiment. The artwork is not mine.

Here are the two pieces straight from the printer. The laser printer piece I ironed as I thought it may help to fix the colour to the fabric. (Laser printing is based on heat being applied to fix the toner particles to the paper or in my case cloth.) The laser printer produces slightly darker images on cloth and they seem to be somewhat sharper too.

Left laser print, right inkjet

Watch this blog for the results of my experiment in the coming weeks.

Although it would be nice to find a short cut to this goal, all the reading I have been doing makes it clear that the only way forward is to keep producing art. Even if it is sometimes more of an onerous task than something that is always enjoyable. So once again all points towards getting into the studio and just working on something.

I didn’t find a vast amount of literature out there on the subject of achieving your personal style. It seems to be a subject that doesn’t attract a lot of comment or advice. I found one excellent article though, that really resonated with me as to what is meant by personal style. It is written by the photographer Alain Briot and published on the site The Luminous Landscape. It is actually the final article in a series of four. All of them are worth reading. (I found them a bit tiring to read online as the site chooses to use white text on a black background. Can’t understand why this is so popular.) If you like the South West of the USA then you will also love his photos of the area, which can be seen on his personal website.

Before I found the article by Alain Briot I came across these eight articles on the Helium website. They may be of interest too, although much as I would like to think that by doing a few exercises, as suggested in some of these articles, you can short cut a route to your own style, I can’t help thinking this is just wishful thinking. A bit like all the How to Get Rich Quick books – more of a scam and a way to for the authors to get rich fast than a reality.