Susan's Quilt Meme

Susan started this meme over on her blog. What you've done in bold, what you want to do in italic, the rest plain.

Here's mine. I can't believe how many of these things I've actually done!
nine patch

log cabin

curved piecing by hand

curved piecing by machine

hand applique [ needle turned ]

hand applique tacked edges

hand applique with fusible / blanket stitch

reverse applique [ hand or machine ]

Afro-American improvisational style quilt

Tivaevae

machine applique

trapunto

whole cloth

english paper piecing by hand (and I hated it with a passion and am never doing that again!)

american piecing by hand

american piecing by machine

strip or string piecing

kaleidoscope or mandala [ not stack and whack]

stencilled quilt

hand quilting

machine quilting

McTavishing

quilted commercially with a longarm machine

3D folded flowers

made a quilt on commission

sold a quilt other than a commission piece

taught quilting at any level

stack and whack

stack and slash

Anjii's Angles

embellished with embroidery, beads, etc

celtic applique / bias work

Amish style quilt

Cathedral Windows

stained glass quilt [ any method ]

had an original design published

written a quilt book (does editing count?)

scrap quilt

baltimore applique

sampler quilt

japanese design

foundation piecing

crazy patchwork

silk fabrics

cotton fabrics

woollen fabrics

colourwash

row by row

1930s or feedsack fabric

1880s reproduction fabric

tea cosy

item for an animal

hand dyed fabric [ yours or someone else's]

round robin

quilt-as-you-go

non-traditional quilt

traditional quilt

miniature

full sized bed quilt

sashiko

seminole

quillow

bag

patchwork or quilted clothing

pillow

christmas themed, [ quilt, wallhanging, stocking, etc ]

medallion quilt (underway anyway)

raffle quilt [ all or part ]

I-spy

baby quilt

landscape quilt

participated in a group challenge

exhibited a quilt overseas

made a prize winning quilt

Rites of Passage

I didn't get time to stitch today, but I did do some more planning work on the Rites of Passage piece. Like everything else, it's due on 2 Jun. I'd already decided on the image of the fale, to represent our time living in Samoa. It's such an archetypical Polynesian image! But I wanted to do more to represent how living in that country changed me, and why this image is representative of a rite of passage. I played with adding words and adapting the image in various ways, but I wasn't happy with anything I came up with. Finally, I had a brain wave. The Samoan image does not have to be the whole 6in square. Incredible! I had adapted the original 6in x 4in image to a square, but I could use overlays, strips, anything around it. (Sometimes things are so obvious, once you've gone all round the gardens!)

I finally decided I wanted to emphasise the sense of passage, of change, which is what the time in Samoa means to me. Doorways! But what kind of doorway? There are practical difficulties, as most everyday doorways are tall and skinny. I'll need a special sort of doorway, then. I hunted through our photos (and with two photographers in the family, these are not few), until I found this image of an archway in Richmond Castle in England.


I cropped and played with the image in PhotoPaint, to leave me just the archway. I superimposed the result onto my fale image.


I like the juxtaposition of a very European doorway on an island scene, which expresses some of the dissonance I felt living in a third world country, in an alien culture. It's hard to set aside your assumptions, that western worldview, and see what is really happening around you. At the same time, instead of being in the dominant cultural tradition as you are at home, you are the outsider, the palagi. It gave me a huge understanding of what it is like to be the outsider, the migrant, the one who is different, in our own culture.

Like Honey from the Rock

I've done more stitching on this piece today and it's starting to come together. I've added a quite intense purple red, which is starting to bring it more towards the purple end of the spectrum. It's interesting that it still looks so brown! Most of the colours to come are purples, moving towards pink.

Heartland postcard

I knew I had a better example of the Heartland postcards! This was what the ones I swapped looked like:

It's deceptively glitzy because the organza catches the light so much, and you can't really see the frayed "grass" as clearly.

Like Honey from the Rock

I finally started stitching this piece yesterday. On Monday, I attached a fairly lightweight cotton wadding with basting spray, and added soluble Vilene, to give it some substance for stitching. I attached the mineral images with basting spray too, instead of fusible webbing, to cut down the thickness but I think perhaps I was a little light with the spray as they don't seem very firmly attached, and I even had to touch up one section with a glue stick to make it hold.

By Tuesday night, I had added most of the darkest darks in the foreground and it looked like this:


Today I added some of the lighter darks and mediums. At this stage, it's still quite brown in the photo but the colours are quite purple and the medium values will be more purple again. I want the yellow of the veins in the rock to stand out vividly from the surrounding rock.

Heartland pieces

Postcard from the Heartland 3/14 6in x 4in

I was talking to Carol today about these pieces, so I decided to share them here. They are quite old now, as I made them in 2005. The postcard above was for a swap with friends, so I used it to try out ideas for the Up Over Down Under piece. Up Over Down Under was a joint exhibition between ATASDA and the Fiberarts Guild of Pittsburgh. The remit was to make a textile art piece that was no bigger than 12in x 12in (x 12in deep). One Square Foot of Heartland didn't make the cut for Pittsburgh, but was shown here in Australia in the Overflow exhibition. It was inspired by photos I took in the background of my parents' house in Broken Hill, during my dad's last illness.

One Square Foot of Heartland 12in x 12in

They are both really hard to photograph because the organza overlay reflects the light. I painted fusible webbing with acrylic paints in the vivid orange-brown that is typical of the red soil country. I adhered it to a cotton background fabric that had some texture and shading, which appeared in places through the fusible webbing. I added the rocks in cotton fabric, and gently adhered a layer of organza over the top. I stitched the rocks very heavily, often using two top threads of different colours to get the speckled effects on some rocks. Then I burnt and cut back the organza over the rocks and in some other places with a soldering iron, which bonded some parts and left others free. I frayed the cut organza edges, to give the effect of fine grass in between the rocks. Finally, for the UODU piece, I constructed small plants like the ones in my photos. This was what interested me originally - the contrast of these tiny vivid green plants against the orange of the soil. They were stitched freehand onto Romeo, which was then washed away, and attached by hand stitching to the background.

When I look at these pieces now, I can see obvious problems with composition. But One Square Foot of Heartland was the first art piece I ever made specifically for an exhibition, and of course it's important to me because of the personal history attached too.

Happy 80th Auntie Pat!

No textile work today, because we were celebrating Auntie Pat's 80th birthday up in our beautiful Blue Mountains. I did take yet more photos of trees, which I'm interested in at present. Cousin Megan's garden has some beautiful blue gums and her neighbour has this spectacular red gum. (I won't bore you with the other tree pics!)

While I was painting yesterday, I decided to add a brown wash to Like Honey from the Rock, just on the section that was too light in tone. The painting browned it down quite a lot, which doesn't worry me, but it has also brought the tonal value closer to the other rocks. It will be partly covered by the mineral image, but I am happier that it won't be obviously lighter.