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Sorry about the title – it’s a bit naff imho, but that is what the Guardian chose to title the gallery of photos showing the work of inmates in Her Majesty’s Prisons. You can see the finished quilt ‘Wandsworth Quilt’ made by inmates at HMP Wandsworth that was produced on commission for the V&A Exhibition Quilts 1700-2010 as I posted about last December. I know I keep returning to this topic, but it caught my imagination somehow.
In the gallery there was a link to the website of Fine Cell Work. It is certainly worth a visit. There is some very fine needlework displayed there. If you are looking for a gift for someone who appreciates handwork you might well find one there. The testimonials are positive. I have to admit to being tempted by the needlepoint and tapestry kits. There are some lovely designs.
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.
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.
I have to admit that I wasn’t quite sure what all the fuss was about when McQueen’s death last month hit the headlines. He wasn’t actually on my radar, although I wasn’t completely unaware of him. A little research showed that he certainly designed some wonderful fashions.
But when I saw this gallery of images on the Guardian website this afternoon, then I realised that a giant in the industry had left us. His final collection is was truly amazing. Read more on the Guardian website here.
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.
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