Early Christmas present

My quilt group had its Christmas party last week, and we gave each other our Christmas presents. Since October 2009, we've been making each other quilt blocks in our chosen colours, every month. You may remember we did the same thing back in 2008? This time, Karen chose red and white blocks, Lorinda chose blue and yellow blocks, and Sharon asked for shabby chic Birds in the Air blocks. I chose batiks on dark blue so I received these 39 gorgeous blocks from the girls. Here's how they looked laid out on my floor:

They're sitting on the paper bags they came in, so you don't really see them at their best, but I don't see myself taking better photos this coming week, on account of there's some small religious holiday happening soon. They really do look brilliant, and I've made some more blocks along the way, to bring them up to a more useful number. I'm not sure how I'll set them yet, but I'm thinking they need more dark blue background, to make the colours really pop out. I haven't actually quilted the last one, so there's no rush!

Here are the blocks for the others:

Sharon's Shabby Chic Birds in the Air blocks

Lorinda's Blue and yellow blocks

Karen's red and white blocks

Don't they all look great? The amazing thing is that we so rarely use the same fabrics, even though we all tend to shop locally. I guess it shows how much choice we have in patchwork fabrics these days!

More fabric drawing

I'm really enjoying drawing on fabric, even when I don't actually have a plan for what I've made. I have a large collection of paint rags, some painted or printed deliberately, some the by-product of painting sessions, but most a combination of the two. I trawled my folders today and found this piece:

It's a bit boring, but it's been hanging around since 2006, so I decided to use it for drawing today. Here's how it looks now:

You'd hardly recognise it as the same fabric, would you? I was planning to cut it apart but I actually like it as it is. Back into the fabric folder, I guess!

Another t-shirt

I've been busy making things for the ATASDA Open Studio on 6th & 7th November. Here's another painted t-shirt. This one is inspired by my granddaughter Kate.

The Open Studio will be held at Epping Creative Centre, Dence Park, Epping, in Sydney, Australia. Lots of interesting work from talented textile artists - should be fun!

Aaah

For one reason and another, Saturday was quite a stressful day for me.
When I got up on Sunday morning, this is what I found on the kitchen bench next to the newspaper:

Isn't that lovely? I guess he really is a keeper.

Wandering around Paris

As I mentioned earlier, I spent a few weeks in France recently. I didn't especially go looking for textile-related things, but they seemed to find me, as they usually do.

One place we always visit in Paris is Hotel des Invalides. It's not so much that we have a passion for Napoleon's tomb, although that is pretty impressive. But the accompanying museum calls us back every time. It's the only museum I've ever visited which has medieval armour shoved casually into piles - here a stack of pikes, there some mail, over here a collection of helmets glaring fiercely at passers-by. And cannons of every description guard the central cloister. They do have more formal exhibition spaces too, of course, but the casualness of quantity grabs me every time. This time, we visited their excellent WWI and WWII exhibitions, which we'd previously missed. They have a chronological pathway you can follow, beginning with late nineteenth century exhibits, or you can amble about in your own order.

I was fascinated by the military uniforms. Many of them were surprisingly stylish for something that was essentially utilitarian. It's always hard to take good photos and most of my shots were for my own interest, but here's a page's uniform from the late 19th century.

All that work, so you had someone to fetch your drinks and take off your boots! The fact that armies had pages is itself an interesting comment on how warfare was waged in those far-off days.

And here is the embroidered traycloth for Marechal Petain's guards. Not, I gather, for the Marshall Himself but for the chaps detailed to look after him. The mind boggles.

We quilters know a lot about commemorative fabrics, but did you know there was fabric made commemorating the end of WWII? Here is a Victory dress, made in France just after peace was declared in Europe. I'm not sure if it was ever worn, and I can't somehow see it as the height of fashion, even in those times, but someone went to the trouble of making it.

Another place we go back to again and again is the Louvre. This museum is just the most brilliant place, and one of my favourite places in all the world. It's vitally important that you have A Plan when you go there, partly because it's huge, and partly because you can get sidetracked so easily from the things you wanted to see. Our plan this time was to have a third try at the Egyptian, Greek and Etruscan antiquities, which have been unavailable each time we've visited the Louvre. Just unlucky, I guess. This time we were in luck, and they were on display in the fullness of their glory. All of them. They have a lot. Many happy hours could be spent looking at them, more happy hours than we actually had, to do them justice. But we tried.

See this fabric? Ordinary looking, you think? A simple tabby weave linen, with a twisted fringe. It's from the 20th Dynasty in Egypt, so we're talking about 1100BCE. About three thousand years old. Pretty amazing for a medium that is generally considered ephemeral. I guess most of us who work in textiles are accustomed to the idea that what we make won't last forever and, let's face it, it's probably won't survive for three thousand years. This isn't the only example of Very Old Textiles in the Louvre - they have quite a lot of ancient Egyptian textiles.

Like this dress. It's very simple, but those lines across it are actually pleats, which I guess are what allows the wearer to put it on and to move once they have it on! This dress was discovered at Assyut, in middle Egypt, and dates to the Middle Kingdom.  That's about 2055-1650BCE, so this garment is anything from three and a half to four thousand years old. The middle Egyptian excavation I went on (twenty years ago now!) found a similar dress, which was dated to the end of the Old Kingdom-early First Intermediate Period - so that's about twenty years older than the oldest date for this dress. Styles didn't change much, so Egyptian women were clearly not fashion victims, out in the boondocks of civilisation, anyway.

And then there's the jewellery. No, not the flashy gold stuff - this is more your everyday dress wear. These ones date to the Middle Kingdom - three and half to four thousand years old.

These ones are New Kingdom - three to three and a half thousand years old:

And this beautiful beaded curtain is positively new - it's from the Late Period, so only about two and a half thousand years old.

And all that was just the beginning of the trip. I may share more later...



Going all girly

Last Saturday was Kambra Challenge day. I've mentioned this annual challenge here previously. We've been challenging each other for more than a decade now, and the results are always fascinating and unexpected.

I couldn't make the unveiling this year, which was a shame, because I really wanted to see what the others did with our challenge fabrics! They were eight dyed fat eighths from Lisa Walton at Dyed and Gone to Heaven:

Challenging fabrics, aren't they? They're so very... what's the word I want? Oh yes... pink.The challenge, from Donna, was to use these fabrics, plus a single print fabric. The group reactions were predictable - I don't think we've reacted with enthusiasm to any challenge yet! The problem was to avoid something really cloying.

However, the one group in the world that really loves pink is small girls, and I just happen to have one of those in my family. Granddaughter Kate is rarely seen without some pink about her person, so she seemed the logical person to receive my pink project. I wanted to make her something she would use, but I just didn't love the fabrics enough to make her a quilt. So a small project was needed.

It was quite hard to find a fabric that worked well with the pinks but wasn't too sickly. I didn't find any commercial fabrics I liked, so I decided to paint and print my own. I used Setacolor paints and an Indian woodblock.

And here's my project - one side:

...and the other:

 

Kinda cute, isn't it? I'm pretty sure she's going to love it.

 

If you want to see the other Kambra challenge works, they're over here on the Kambra Challenge blog.

Time to play

Back home again, after a fantastic trip to France (of which more later). It's so terribly hard to get out of holiday mode, don't you find? I managed to wring a few more days out of my holiday but this week, my computer is reminding me of things I ought to do, and the usual activities that fill up my days are happening, so I can't really pretend any longer.

One of the things my computer is insistently reminding me about is the ATASDA Open Studio weekend, which will happen on November 7 & 8 at the Epping Creative Centre, Dence Park, Epping, where most of our meetings and workshops in NSW are held. The idea is for ATASDA members to showcase their work, which is not only different from more traditional kinds of textile work, but different from each other's work as well.  Normally, this would just be a reminder to me to show up on the day, but in a fit of madness, Fibrecircle decided to take a table for both days, to show off our work and maybe even sell a few things. So I really need to make a few things, and maybe (gasp) finish a few things, so I can show people the kind of stuff I make.

So today, I drew and painted a kid's t-shirt. As you may have noticed, I'm rather interested in graffiti lately. (I must say I was disappointed in the Paris graffiti I saw - perhaps I just wasn't in the right places?) I've always been interested in layers - palimpsests on old documents, sgraffito work, walls with patterns marking traces of past occupancy - basically, traces of what went before and the interesting things that happen when you superimpose unrelated things. Graffiti is part of that interest, I guess, since graffiti artists seem to have no concern about what's already on a wall before they add their work, and even sometimes seem to incorporate it into their designs.

My graffiti designs are not that complex - they're time-consuming to draw and paint, and are much less layered than I'd really like. I think there's more to do with this idea, if I stay interested.

Anyway, here's the t-shirt.

It's a kid's size 4 and I'll probably be selling it and other stuff like it at the Open Studio weekend.

And there's going to be an election!

News to you? Either you don't live in Australia or you've been living under a rock. (Is it a large rock? Can I come and join you?) I am so over this election campaign. I never thought to hear myself say this, as I've been interested in politics all my life, so I am shocked at myself.
But this is such a non-campaign. I've rarely heard so much said about so little.

I have another plan. How about every ballot paper, House of Reps and Senate, henceforth includes the option None Of The Above? If NOTA wins (as I suspect this time, it might), we hold another ballot in four weeks. But no-one currently in parliament is allowed to run again for at least five years. 
No-one.
Yes, this does mean they can't run next time either.
Goodbye Tony.
Goodbye Julia.
Wayne and Joe, you're out too.
Sorry, Bob, you might have done better but the electorate didn't like you enough either. Maybe you could ponder what it means to run the country as well as saving the world?
Now, who is left that might just have an idea about where this country might go? There must be someone... (and no, Nick, it ain't you.)

And how about we change the way we do things? No more having weeks of, "will they call an election?", followed by two weeks of "yes we did, but we aren't campaigning yet", and then tarradiddle US-style Campaign Launches where every creaky ancient politician is dragged out of retirement to tell the wildly-applauding party faithful, and the omnipresent cameras, just how great the latest batch is. And then two weeks of being as nasty as possible to the others, without actually stating any policies that might distinguish one from another. No more. Hooray, I hear you say? But what would we have instead?

Nothing.
From the minute the PM steps out of the Governor General's office, no party may advertise.
No new policies may be launched to public fanfare (or, more likely, indifference).
Anyone kissing other people's babies in shopping malls will be arrested as a child molester. (Hey, anyone else would be!)
Any politician who holds a press conference about *anything* is immediately disqualified from running.
Let's see the politicians running *from* the cameras for a change. With a paper bag over their heads.
Let them sit quietly in parliament wondering if they've done enough.

Extreme? Not really.
Guys, if you didn't bother to tell us what you stood for before the election was called, we don't believe what you say you stand for, once it has been called. Sorry, but we just don't.
You've had your chance to show us what you stand for, what ideas you have, what vision you have for Australia, during the past three years. If you didn't bother, you don't deserve our vote.

Me, I just wish I could vote None of The Above.*

*Opinions authorised by Nola in Bennelong for the entertainment of regular readers

Now we return you to your normal viewing. Thank God for textiles!

Actually, I've been quite busy...

... though much of it has been on real world stuff and not involving lovely textiles.

However, I have not been idle. I finished a jacket I've been knitting this winter, from yarn I bought at the Sydney Craft and Quilt Fair in 2009. OK, I know I didn't 'fess up to buying it back then, when I was crowing just a smidgen about how little I bought. But, in my defence, I did buy it at the very end of the last day I was at the show, after it had been calling to me all day. And since the Exotica stand was immediately opposite the Bendigo Woollen Mills stand and the tub of yarn was right where I could see it all day, I think it was just meant to be mine. And that's all I have to say about that.

The cable was down the front of a jacket on the cover of The Knitter, Issue 3. That jacket had other cables and was knitted in quite a different yarn. Why make it the same way as the pattern you actually really liked in the beginning? That would be obvious.

I'm not sure if it's a hard cable or I'm getting dumber (I do have my suspicions about that) but it took me several tries to get it right. I hate those cable patterns with weird deformed X's and Y's that all look the same. For some reason, I kept cabling back when I meant forward (or vice versa) and it wasn't until I stopped knitting and worked out what it was I would do, if I were making that cable *without* the pattern, that I actually saw what I had to do. So, strangely, it seems I am much better working without a pattern than I am when I follow one. Scary thought...

So here it is, my very classy masterpiece.

It has a moss stitch band, which gives the edge some definition. Here's a close up of the tricky cable:

Not that tricky, is it? The problem was that little outer curve on the larger twist, which cables the other way. Of course it does! Obvious, isn't it? It really is a lovely cable. The yarn colour is a beautiful greyed purple-maroon, somewhere in between the colours you see here. Evidently, it's one of those colours that are impossible to reproduce electronically...

I also found another garment I knitted earlier, in the workroom this week. I'm not quite sure why it was in the workroom, because when I tried it on, it fitted beautifully and looked great. I think I had some idea that the zipper wasn't put in well, or that the neckline didn't sit right. I am rarely my best critic when it comes to finished garments.

This one was based on a picture in a magazine, possibly Family Circle, which I cut out back in (ulp) the seventies, because I loved the shape of it. I think it was meant to be knitted in Herdwick - remember those yarns that were all heathery, in neutral tones? The unattributed designer was inspired by the garments of the 1940s, and it had something of the feel of a bomber jacket. The yarn I used is actually reknitted. I know, nobody does that any more but I loved this yarn so much, I couldn't bear to say goodbye. It would have been a Patons yarn, probably Totem, which started out as a medium silvery brown. I knitted it up in the late eighties or early nineties as a traditional gansey, the fishermen's jumpers from the ports of the UK. From memory, I used a design from Whitby, the port closest to the place my mother's forebears emigrated from, in the mid nineteenth century. They came to South Australia and their marriage was the 51st in the new colony.

I wore that jumper for years, but alas, a moth decided it was the perfect home for her new babies. I washed it and set it aside because I really didn't want it to be the end. By now, the yarn had aged to a lovely silvery beige, the colour of a well-weathered fence. Eventually, I unravelled it, setting aside the spoilt part. I modified my basic cardigan pattern to something I thought would end up similar to the picture from the magazine. It doesn't look quite the same (I think that one had a collar) but I'm very happy with how it turned out.

There's a neat little shaped slot at the neck, which I don't think was on the original either...

...and it has a ladder pattern up the sleeve (not visible in the main photo).

It actually looks great when I'm wearing it but I don't think you need to see that!

Playing with photos

I haven't been blogging much lately, becaue I haven't been marvellously creative. Most of my time and energy has gone into The Maharajah's Garden, the travelling suitcase exhibition for ATASDA. The two suitcases of textile artworks, Saffron and Jasmine, will travel all over Australia from March 2010-March 2012, visiting schools, groups and galleries, for no more than the cost of onward registered postage. There's more information, and hopefully soon some images of works, on the ATASDA web page.
However, I thought I'd share some images I prepared for the Fibrecircle group recently. For a long time, our list of things to try has included manipulating photos on the computer to use in our textile art. That's something that's a bit difficult to work on in a group situation, so I made us a little sheet showing some of the effects you can get with the same image, using effects that are found in most graphics programs.

The base image is a view taken at Fountains Abbey, UK in 1995. The second image shows that original image Inverted. Inversion on a black and white image puts the darks where the lights were, and vice versa - like a photographic negative. On a coloured image, it also inverts the colours to their opposites on the colour wheel. Here the greenish shades of the original have become purple. The third image shows the original image Posterised. Posterising an image cuts down on the number of tones, making it more flat and poster-like. You can see in the image the various tones in the original have changed to green, grey, yellow, black and white. I really like Posterising images, because it really changes the mood so effectively! It's also a fun way to see what's really there. Sometimes our eyes get hung up on the detail of an image, and Posterising really cuts to the chase.

While we're playing with Posterising, it's often quite interesting to Invert, then Posterise. In these images, the photo was inverted, as in the second previous image, and then Posterised with different settings, emphasising different tones.

I mentioned black and white images. This is the same image converted to black and white, using different levels. The third image is the first one Inverted. You can see that playing with the settings of the conversion gives quite different moods and emphasises different elements of the photo. Inverting the black and white image changes where the light falls. I find converting to black and white is often a useful step, if I want to take shapes from an image. It seems to clarify things, and often is a good intermediate step in changing a photo to a line drawing.

Most graphics programs are designed to improve not-very-good photos! So you usually have some means of correcting exposure. Playig with exposure settings can also significantly change the photos you want to use in your art. You can often set a light source, and of course over- or under-expose to create a mood. The first image above had a light source set at the actual light source (the door at the end), while the other two were over- and under-exposed.

Most programs have a number of distortion options. These are just a few - the best bet is  to play with your software and see what you can do with it. These are Ripple, Distorting upwards (you can go in any direction), Blast or wind effects (and the same image Inverted), Wind effects Posterised, and Faceted. Ripple and Faceted look rather like water reflections - or as if your image is about to disappear!

The first three images here use the Emboss function, which is found in most programs. It changes the image to look like a low relief. By itself, it's pretty boring but if you Posterise it as well (two different settings shown here), it really emphasises the shadows of the embossed image. The images in the second row show Tiled (or Puzzle) images, with different values of disruption. I haven't found a way to use this function in my textile art yet (other than patchwork) but it's interesting!

These images show various kinds of blur. Gaussian blur, Motion blur, Motion blur Posterised, Zoom blur with the focus above the light source, Zoom blur  with the focus below the light course and Zoom blur with a narrower focus, off centre left. I like the way that the door at the end becomes ambiguous - perhaps a figure?

These images play with the Equalize function. Basically, it's a brightness adjustment, that changes all the bright areas of your image to the same level. The first image has been Equalized, the second Equalized and Inverted, the third Equalized and Posterised, to further flatten the image. Compare the third image here to the third one in the first set of images, which was simply Posterised. Different effect, isn't it? If you were going to emphasise the two images with stitch, you'd take them along different paths.

Last of all, changes in hue can really affect the mood of your image. The first has the hue manipulated, the second has changes in both the hue and the saturation and the third in hue and exposure. Each has its own mood.

This is just a quick gallop though some common possibilities. It really isn't a substitute to playing with your software to see what you can achieve. But keep in mind, you can spend hours playing with images like this, but how useful is it if you don't take that next step and actually print one out to work with?

And, gee, I've been quilting too!

Of course, I'm nearly always quilting, in some form or other. I don't always remember to put up what I've done. Remember those swap blocks I did with my quilt group back in... can it be 2007? I've finally put them together into a quilt top. I did say you wouldn't see it until it was a top, which was a pretty rash thing to say, considering I have unfinished quilt projects dating back to... um,  1996, I think. Maybe earlier. (Hangs head)

But here they are, together at last. Of course, it may need to have a border added yet. I'm still thinking about it. Well, that's my excuse for not immediately beginning the quilting. I'm planning to hand quilt it, on the basis that hand quilted projects get finished because they aren't fighting for their time on the machine, along with the garments I make and the machine embroidery and the bags and... well, you know, all that other stuff.

It's the first quilt I'll have that's made from all reproduction fabrics. I love the look of these modern-antique quilts, but when I make a quilt myself, I blend all those wonderful repro fabrics with other fabrics in my stash - whatever works together. So I've never actually made a quilt with all reproduction fabrics. It's also a fabulous reminder of a group of friends who've been meeting together now for more than a decade. And guess what? We're making swap blocks again this year. I've chosen batik fabrics and dark blue backgrounds, which should be striking! Why did I choose batiks? Well, I have this box of batik fabrics, many of which I bought.. yep, in the nineties! So as I make blocks for the girls, I'm making myself a block too, from my own fabrics. Of course, it's not making a dent in my batik fabric stash at all.

Which brings me to something I've been thinking about for a while. I suspect I'm not the only quilter who has an obscene amount of fabric. Somehow, even when you're on a Low-Fibre Diet, as I've been for some years now, fabrics still find their way to your door. I've just bought a bunch of fat quarters for the swap blocks we're making, because somehow it seems mean to use all fabrics from my stash, some of which were definitely not bought yesterday. Only new and glossy will do. And of course, people give you fabrics, because it's your birthday or Christmas, or they are cunningly downsizing at your expense... So my stash is increasing at a greater rate than I can use it. So far, so ordinary.

But really, isn't this just another example of what we women in the developed world do? We buy Stuff. We buy more Stuff than we ever have a hope of using, and we can't pass it on to our kids because they want their own new Stuff. We buy things to replace other things that work perfectly fine, because the one we just bought is new and shiny, because it has brag factor, because it shows we have a lot of money to spend on Stuff. I've thought for a long time that the rampant consumerism of the society I live in is obscene, when there are so many in the world who have almost nothing, and I consciously choose not to buy new things unless I really need them. But fabric is somehow different. It's as if I give myself permission to exempt the fabric I buy.

But fabric isn't neutral. I buy cotton fabrics, and cotton takes water and fertiliser to grow, and often has a significant effect on the physical environment (as any mass monoculture inevitably does). The processing of cotton is not environmentally neutral either, nor is the printing process. I'm not singling out cotton as being necessarily worse than anything else we might buy; it isn't.  But it's cotton fabric that we quilters buy and store away in boxes for the "one day" that will never come.

How can we justify buying all this "product", that we freely acknowledge we will probably never use? For some people, I know this simply isn't an issue. But I've started to think about it and, frankly, I don't like what I see myself doing. I'm not going to take the high moral ground and declare I'm never buying more fabric... I don't trust extreme points of view, even in myself. I just hope I can learn to be more discriminating, more able to resist the siren call of the new.

And do you know what? While I was writing this, I remembered that some friends gave me a box of fat quarters for my Significant Birthday a few years ago. And yes, I found it includes a whole lot more batiks. So I definitely won't be shopping for that quilt anytime soon!

Time

Time is such a slippery thing! It seems like only a moment since we celebrated New Year and in a moment we'll be in March. How did that happen? Of course, I know how that happened. January was full of birthdays and lazy summer days, and February has been Suitcase Month. No, it's not my own travels I've been organising; it's the travels of Saffron and Jasmine, sister suitcases of The Maharajah's Garden travelling suitcase exhibition. About sixty member of ATASDA have made works for the exhibition, and a further 45 have made bunting pieces, to be tied together to dress up the show, or treated as individual works. The exhibition begins to travel in March, first to our Branch meetings in Sydney and Brisbane, and then all around Australia for at least two years. The range of work is amazing. Each work is accompanied by a techniques board, explaining the inspiration of the work and one technique used by the artist. Such a diversity of techniques! We on the organising committee have all found new things to try. Images of the works should be on the ATASDA website sometime in March, if all goes well.

Now the suitcases are just about ready, I feel like a mole, emerging blinking into the light and wondering what to do next! I have managed to find a little time to do creative things this month. I made my graffiti fabric into a bag, using some suede leather scraps that were the perfect colour, given to me by a friend from her stash. She in turn acquired it from someone else's stash a few years ago. The bag looks fantastic...

..but there's a tiny problem. Although I checked the leather closely for faults, it isn't quite the same leather it once was, I fear. As I sewed, I began to notice myself turning a delicate shade of pink. No, not an allergy, just the leather colour, coming off all over me. Like the fool I am, I pressed on, instead of pausing to take stock. Yes, the bag looks brilliant, but it's completely unusable, because it crocks colour onto everything it touches. Not only that, but, despite using the appropriate leather needle, stitch length and thread, the leather is simply pulling apart along the stitch lines. I suspect that leather might be older than I am, and it's decided that it's had enough.

So, I did finish my graffiti bag by the February deadline, but it's going to have to come apart again, once I acquire some new red leather. I am so in love with the look of the bag that nothing else will do!

So the moral of this sad tale is : if things start looking a bit odd when you are in the midst of a creative flow, STOP!! Do not go on mindlessly ignoring the problem. Who'd have thought, eh?

Graffiti art

Remember the graffiti fabric I did with the Fibrecircle group last year? You can read about it here and on my blog here. I decided to add some colour to my piece, so I painted it with Setacolor transparent paints. I used the transparent ones because I wanted to retain the layering of other elements underneath, whether they were painted or not. Here's how it looks now...

I just love it!

Several people who have seen it asked about the colour blending. I wanted to make it like graffiti as much as possible, so I worked on the assumption that most graffiti artists don't actually carry a huge sack of spray cans with them. I figued it was more like primary colours plus a black, at best. So I limited my palette to red, blue and yellow. The blue is actually an opaque paint, which I mixed 50:50 with the base medium, which made it transparent. Where I wanted to blend colours, I sometimes laid down the brighter colour first, eg yellow, and then overpainted it when it was dry. Other times, I painted up to a wet section with the second colour and then brushed the two colours into one another with a damp brush. Texture was added from the drawings over which I was painting.


We are supposed to make it into something before Feb 8, but I'm not sure I can bear to cut into it.