Sew2Speak » Textile art

Text on Textiles 2010

Ruth — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 10:40:26 +0000

Big grins are turning me into a Cheshire Cat. Last night I received notification that my Colour Vortex quilt has been selected for inclusion in the special exhibit Text on Textiles 2010. It will be one of 31 quilts in the exhibit, which will premiere at International Quilt Market and Festival in Houston. The exhibit will also travel in 2011 to various International Quilt Festival and Market sponsored shows. The current schedule includes the following shows:

• International Quilt Market/Houston, October 30 – November 1, 2010 (not open to the public)
• International Quilt Festival/Houston, November 4 – 7, 2010 (open to the public)
• International Quilt Festival/Cincinnati, April 8 – 10, 2011 (open to the public)
• International Quilt Festival/Long Beach, July 29 – 31, 2011 (open to the public)

This has given me a nice boost to my confidence. Maybe I’ll be back in the studio soon too. I’ve started thinking about my next piece for our Use Your Eyes challenge on Shadows. Small steps taken!

Unravelling …

Ruth — Sat, 01 May 2010 12:25:27 +0000

… the mystery post. Here is the complete image of the teaser image posted below. To read the whole story behind this piece please go over to Use Your Eyes and follow the challenge there.

Unravelling, 23cm x 30 cm, hand dyed cotton fabric, cotton thread

A teaser

Ruth — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 17:55:21 +0000

Of course I did know what I had to do with my free time. I was seriously behind on my Age challenge on Use Your Eyes. When I saw that the end was in sight for my C&Gs piece I had to keep at it. That left me with 3 weeks to produce my challenge piece.

Not that I’ve been completely idle. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. I came up with quite a few different ideas. Even Sqeze was helping – googling for images and showing them to me. I think it was these that triggered my final line of thought, which I have turned into a mini quilt today.

Here’s a little teaser for you. The complete quilt will be published on Use Your Eyes on May 1st.

New gallery up

Ruth — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 19:48:27 +0000

I’ve added another gallery with images of Colour Vortex. There are more and larger images there than in my previous post.

What will I do now with all my free time?

Colour Vortex

Ruth — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 13:46:00 +0000

Well a 2 1/2 year journey has come to an end. I finished my final assessment piece for my C&G Certificate last weekend. We had to wait until this weekend to get some decent light for photographing as I only sewed the last stitch in the evening of Easter Monday.

I have to admit that when the quilt top was finished I didn’t feel as happy about the outcome as with my Reflections piece. Although I had done what I set out to do, I felt a slight sense of disappointment. I think the Reflections quilt is a very powerful design and making a direct comparison is probably unfair. Reflections has a direct visual impact, but there are not so many details to surprise and delight when you get in close.

Colour Vortex

Colour vortex has a visual impact that is perhaps not so instantly compelling, but I think the quilt has more details to discover when you move in closer. You only discover then that the piecing comprises hexagons and triangles (albeit not straight-edged) and that these piece together to form stars. The quilting is discernible as writing from a distance, but to read all the text you need to get in closer, because the colour of the threads is chosen to fade into either the light or dark fabric.

I could still improve on the quality of my quilted writing, but my piecing is very accurate, my hand sewing is tidy and hardly visible. I achieved the effects I wanted in the composition – the colours increase in saturation as they move in towards the focal point. The rings of colour are well matched so that the shades of colour do form cohesive rings. I enjoy the slight imperfections around the black circle as I believe this adds some tension to the design without which it would be too bland and predictable.

I gave myself a challenge with this piece. I attempted things I hadn’t done before – like the quilted writing – instead of staying within my comfort zone. I think I have shown that I understand the use of colour and can accurately evaluate the values of colours. I could have taken an easier option and produced a quilt that was of a higher standard of workmanship in all areas, but I chose the learning experience over familiarity.

Summing up, this quilt is one that will stand up to closer scrutiny (despite having one error in the quotes, that I noticed too late and chose to leave in, as attempting to remedy it would have left lasting marks on the quilt top) and can stand on its own merits next to Reflections.

Within the next few days I shall be adding a gallery of photos for this quilt. Come back later a take a closer look!

Spirals are taking shape

Ruth — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 18:27:45 +0000

I had a productive last two weekends and have made good progress on the quilt top for my spirals quilt. The coloured spirals are now completed and each colour sewn together. It’s starting to look like a quilt on my design wall. After a break of a week I felt there may be pieces that needed replacing. As I was making up small blocks of colour each comprised of three pieces sewn together I was under no pressure to make an instant decision. I decided to carry on with the fabrics that I had and watch how it developed. By the end of Saturday I was pretty sure that some bits had to be swapped out. One of the orange pieces was too dark, but my problem was I hadn’t anything better. I pondered the problem overnight and then decided to see if I could get a good value using transfer printing.

I had papers ready prepared still from the exercise on transfer printing earlier in the course. So after finishing the ironing on Sunday morning I got them out and had a go. I had yellow and red papers. I started off with the yellow. It seemed to take ages to get any colour to come off and transfer itself to the fabric. Luckily the red was more co-operative. I made a very good match – the advantage of this process being that you can keep looking at the result and then iron on some more colour as required. I also tried to make some green, but it turned out too grassy. Luckily I wasn’t really pushed for suitable green fabric.

This is the view on my design wall now:

When sewing the smaller pieces together that had been assembled using foundation piecing, I realised that they were too stiff with the “stitch n tear” still attached. So I cut around the foundation until I had the foundation as a template for the finished piece and then traced around the outline with pencil or tailor’s chalk to give myself sewing lines. I then removed all the “stitch n tear” before sewing the bits together.

This piece shows the orange fabric that I produced using transfer printing. It’s the largest piece of “real” orange in the photo.

This final image shows how far I was at the beginning of this weekend. The offending piece of orange fabric is the outermost orange hexagon. Not only was the colour off on this piece, but the printed lines on the fabric really didn’t match well with the other mainly hand dyed fabrics. Not all of the fabrics I used are my own hand dyed fabrics, but where I did use commercial fabrics they didn’t have definite patterns on them.

I think I can be pleased with progress to date. The next biggest headache is going to be how to quilt it. I’ve no really good idea as yet.

Quilts 1700 – 2010

Ruth — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 20:55:00 +0000

I’ve written before about the exhibition Quilts 1700 – 2010 that will open on Saturday at the V&A Museum in London. This last week the Guardian has had some interesting articles about it. Lucky journalists who get to see a preview of the exhibition before the madding crowds get there.

And madding crowds there probably will be according to this review:

Already, it is one of the museum’s most successful exhibitions, with 8,000 advance ticket sales; quilting groups from the US, Australia and Japan have made block-bookings with local hotels.

Germaine Greer has her own take on it here – mostly autobiographical, but she does mention the exhibition in the last paragraph!

If I am underwhelmed at the prospect of a show of quilts at the V&A in London, it may be because nobody cared to rescue the great textile heritage left us by hundreds of tribal peoples. The great resources of the rich nations have been used instead to preserve work that isn’t a patch on it.

It’s worth reading some of the comments too. She still manages to stir up emotions.

And finally you can get a sneak preview of some of the quilts here.

Two rings on my design wall

Ruth — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:46:04 +0000

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).

Use Your Eyes

Ruth — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 20:37:17 +0000

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.

Grey scale sketch

Ruth — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 14:59:58 +0000

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.