SCQuilters Virtual Quilt Show

In one of my many other lives, I'm a moderator for the big Southern Cross Quilters Yahoogroup. SCQuilters has a fairly basic blog, as well as the Yahoogroup, the smaller spin-off Yahoogroups and the real world activities like local meetings and Retreats.

On the blog, we've just begun holding a Virtual Quilt Show for our members. Members are seding in images of their quilt that they're most fond of, with some words about it. You can check the blog out here or just the Virtual Quilt Show here.

Winter blues

Just recently, I remembered why I'm not keen on winter. Can't be doing with cold weather - it seem to get right into my bones.

The one thing I really like about winter is that I get the urge to knit. When Jennie visited in June, she was knitting this scarf using short rows, which results in beautiful triangles. I got quite excited, because I haven't knitted anything with short rows for ages. So I tried out the technique on some variegated yarn I had left over from another project.

Of course, I didn't have enough of it for a scarf but it made a beautiful piece of cloth, which will get used for something, sometime.

Then I started thinking, "what if?" My first "what if?" was using short rows to make diamonds along the centre of the knitting. I knitted the initial triangle, but then, after the next triangle, I slipped stitches to the centre and knitted a double-sided version, for the centre diamond. Then I slip stitched to the end and knitted the second side triangle. It worked as I imagined but I wasn't thrilled with the results. The join between the changes in direction was much more pronounced, perhaps because there's a lot more distortion in the knitting and therefore tension on the stitches. If I used textured yarn, that probably wouldn't be as obvious, but I found the process quite tedious. It's not exciting enough to show in a picture.

My second "what if"? was to change the stitches. Obviously, a scarf needs to be double-sided, so the pattern uses garter stitch. The interest is in the changes in the direction of the rows and the variegated yarn. I tried a rib with a dropped stitch pattern in one triangle, doing it both sides of the knitting, and that worked very well.

I was using leftover plain knitting yarn as a test swatch, so I could see the effect, and I think it would even work like this as a scarf, without using a fancy yarn.  But it would be even more interesting in a variegated yarn, though the pattern would be lost (and difficult to achieve) with a textured or fluffy yarn.

All this is really procrastination. My next project is a vest for the man in my life, to be knitted in Bendigo Woollen Mills 5-ply Classic, but it requires some fiddling around to get the pattern right. I guess I'll bite the bullet this week and do the planning...

Craft & Quilt Fair, Darling Harbour

Darling Harbour was fascinating, as always. An amazing array of 400+quilts, at an incredible standard of work. The prizewinning quilts can be seen on the guild website, as always - they are very prompt at getting up a virtual quilt show of the winning quilts. The best of show, Rings and Roses, is a real show-stopper - a Double Wedding Ring quilt with a sort of colourwash effect in the rings, hand pieced and appliqued, hand quilted with trapunto. I have never seen so many ribbons on the show winner! The Narelle Grieve Award for Excellence in Amateur Hand Quilting, Best Traditional Hand Quilted, judge Kay Haerland's personal choice and the Hangers' Prize.

It was pushed to second in the Viewers' Choice by a very powerful quilt, Soldier On by Lucy Carroll, which also won first prize for a Pictorial Quilt. made in support of a military charity, it shows a wall of poppies leading to a doorway through which two soldiers are disappearing into the light. A remarkable piece of work.

The other prize winning quilts are also very special. One that spoke to me was Flower Songs II, by Eileen Campbell. There's so much to say about this quilt, as there usually is about really great quilts. I was struck by the way she didn't use a dark background on the upper right hand flowers, as a less experienced quilter (like me!) might have done. I liked the way she unified the three flower motifs with the delicate chain of flowers meandering across the face of the quilt, in a way that looked accidental, not overplanned. And I especially liked the quilting, which, in between the flowers, was detailed, exquisite renditions of flowers and butterflies, with very judicious use of coloured thread. It left me gobsmacked.

Among other quilts that appealed to me was In a Crazy Flap by Rae Cashman, machine quilted by Jo-Ann Phillips, which was a redwork quilt using images of flappers from the 1920s. Beautifully done and a lot of fun! Helen Godden's Zen Magpies also blew me away. I must admit to being a secret Helen groupie - I don't think I've ever seen a quilt by her that I didn't love. Two magpies, one in full song, gaze into the sky, which was rendered in a huge swirl of quilted patterns. My catalogue tells me she used more than a 100 different designs. It really has a sense of joy about it.

And I liked The Pleasure of Piecing, by Mercedes Forbes, machine quilted by Sue Rowles. It was inspired by a quilt in the Powerhouse Museum collection, I suspect possibly these blocks in an unfinished quilt. The Powerhouse also has these similar blocks. Mercedes' colour choices were a little softer and I think she used the same fabric, or similar fabrics, in the triangles where the block sashing meets. I liked her colour choices and I liked the block, which seems to be a colour variation of #264 in Brackman's Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns, with the sashing as an extra feature. The block was called, somewhat unimaginatively, The Pinwheel, in the Kansas City Star, where it appeared in 1934, a century after the Powerhouse blocks were made.

It was pretty obvious that the trend to reproduction quilts has not really waned yet, though it was interesting to see quite a few pieced quilts in what could be called "country colours", that wouldn't have been out of place in a quilt show fifteen years ago. There were also some quilts in the "modern quilt" aesthetic - very light or white backgrounds, with greyed colour tones in the distinctive colourways. It's always interesting to watch these changing ideas in the quilting world, as new concepts about quilting are added to the quilters' lexicon.

You may remember that I was also involved in the ATASDA exhibition and sale. The display looked great and generated a lot of positive comments from people, especially about the "industrial" theme, with gave a modern and little bit edgy feel to the textile works on display. I manned the stand on Thursday afternoon, chatting to people who came through. It was a lot of fun. Some of my dyed socks and scarves sold too, which was a bonus.

I felt that, overall, the show numbers were down during the week, compared to past years. It will be interesting to see how things go next year, in a different venue.

Darling Harbour Craft and Quilt Fair

Here are some of my pretty things that will be on display and for sale at the ATASDA stand at the Craft and Quilt Fair at Darling Harbour this week.

Silk scarves...

... bags from break down printed cloth...

...hand dyed adults' and kids' socks...

 

...and our special hand-dyed reusable gift bags, that let you save a tree and make the wrapping part of your present.

   

ATASDA will have a wonderful range of textile art works to see and buy, and artists will be demonstrating all kinds of amazing techniques morning and afternoon.

I'll be on the stand on Thursday afternoon, Why not come by and say hello?

Some new scarves

Just a quick update on some scarves I've dyed in the last month.

Well, "in the past month" is a misnomer for some of these, which I started last year. This one was begun in July last year, when it was tied with string and dyed in a pot of ironbark bark. The result was a bit grey and boring so I wrapped it around some galvanised washers and redyed it in wattle flowers. The flowers were a bit less yellow than I'd hoped, though it did liven it up. But not enough, so I overdyed it with a pink-orange and yellow. Now I like it!

This one was also dyed midyear, with blocks tied on it, in a wattle flower bath. The result was the dreaded fawn, so I tied some teardrop-shaped wooden beads into the ends with cotton thread and redyed it in a bath  of Samoan hardwood sawdust. It gave a stronger pattern but it was quite dark. So I overdyed it with yellow dye, to lift the pattern.

This one was also dyed naturally, with diamond blocks in a bath of Eucalyptus cinerea, which gave me a pale orange and white scarf. I thought it could look better, so I overdyed it with turquoise fibre reactive dye, which brought out the angular pattern more strongly.

This one had some unknown gum leaves clamped on it with blocks and was dyed in the Eucalyptus cinerea pot. The leaves did very little other than add muted texture to the pale orange of the scarf. It was a bit lacking in excitement so I overdyed it with fibre reactive dye in a mixture of warm colours. It livened it up a  but but emphasised the dark pattern from the leaves. I think it may need some block printing or something to strengthen the ends and make them look a bit less brown.





This one is a silk tissue length, which was dyed pale blue in the waste water bucket. Then I twisted it back on itself and overdyed it with dark blue and purple. It's very delicate and pretty!

These two seem positively simple by comparison. This silk habotai scarf was dyed with a mixture of two greens, yellow and turquoise.

This silk tissue scarf was dyed in the waste water bucket, over the course of a dyeing session, as an experiment. I took it out several times and retied it differently, so it picked up the changing colour in different ways.

The interesting thing about these is that I sold them almost immediately to family members. I've never had scarves disappear so quickly!

Pleased as Punch!

I wonder where that expression comes from? Punch and Judy, I guess, so maybe I'm not that pleased! But I am pretty happy. You see, I sold some stuff. OK, selling stuff is always good but it's more the who than the actual selling. The Fibrecircle group rarely shows work at ATASDA, although we are all members, so we decided to take a table at the March meeting to show, and maybe sell, some of the things we make. We were completely blown away by the positive response from other members. Remember, these are people who "make stuff" themselves, and they are very textile-savvy people. So it was brilliant to get such a great reaction and, yes, to sell things to this market.

So what have I been making lately? Most of my energy (read:lethargy), post-Christmas, has gone into making a bag for the Fibrecircle challenge. We each chose four paint chip cards, sight unseen, and we had to make something larger than a postcard, using only those four colours. It's something that quilters often do, to challenge themselves, but I haven't seen it done much among textile artists.

My paint chips looked like this:

I think I was very lucky in my selection. My only reservation was that they might be difficult colours to match, so I might find it hard to get materials together. My dyeing skills are coming along apace, but I'm not yet at the point where I can dye a specific shade with 100% confidence. I scoured my whole stash, fabrics, yarns, threads of all kinds, and assembled a bundle of things in the colour range.

Strangely, the colour I thought would be hardest to match, the rusty red, was easiest! Turned out, I made my daughter a corduroy pinafore (for US readers, a jumper) in the exact colour, back when she was about ten, and I had quite a few remnants left over. This is more than twenty years ago, so I guess this means it's pretty much vintage fabric now? 

The turquoise was also fairly easy to match and, as well as a stash quilting cotton, I was able to dye some cotton fabric. The difficult shade was the green. In the interest of finishing this bag before I died of old age, I decided to hand embroider my corduroy fabric, since threads are easier to match. Hand embroidery also suited my January energy levels. I drew designs inspired by Jacobean embroidery freehand onto the cloth with chalk. Here's how it looked with the embroidery mostly done.

Once the embroidery was done, there was the usual modular assembly. I'm not sure I've talked about that specifically before, so I'll add a how-to shortly.

I interlined the bag with Shapewell interfacing and the flaps with a heavy Pellon material, like thin Timtex. The top zipper was from my extensive zipper stash, coloured to match the red fabric, but I found I needed to buy the turquoise zipper for the front pocket.

It's wasn't quite finished by the due date,because I could only buy gold D rings and I found I had only silver rivets left. That being remedied, here it is:

Isn't it purty?
Off to do some dyeing now! I have been dyeing a stack of stuff, which I'll share next time.

Four days til Christmas!

Where did the year go? If I look back on my blog, it was clearly filled with interesting and creative times! In January, I was weaving plastic strips into a bag. By March, I was making earrings and a bag, as well as getting the travelling suitcase exhibition on the road. From May until August, I was constantly doing breakdown printing – a fascinating process! And from August til now, I was dyeing like a madwoman, both with native plants and with fibre reactive dyes. And painting fabric, which is my fall back activity.

At this moment, I’m putting together the last jumper I knitted in the cool weather, making another bag, piecing quilt blocks by hand and dyeing anything that stands still long enough. Oh, and I have weaving on the loom. No wonder that I haven’t paused to update the blog recently!

So what’s been happening in the last month or so?

First of all, my friend Jennie brought me back some gorgeous presents from Canada. First, there was this beautiful trivet, which, contrary to expectations, is made of glass! It’s very light and a truly gorgeous colour, and of course, has the Canadian maple leaf.

Second, she found this fantastic French Canadian cookbook at a stall. Its title translates as “from the garden to your table”, which is very much my food preference! It tells you, in French, about the various fruits and vegetables and then gives you interesting recipes to make with your produce. I haven’t made anything from it yet, but some of the recipes sound delicious.

Third, she gave me this beautiful calendar of Inuit art from Cape Dorset, a village on Dorset Island in Nunavut in Canada. The style of art is simple but it has a luminousness and delicacy that I love. You can read about the history of this artists’ cooperative here and see their work here .

Meanwhile, I’ve been doing some more discharging, with thiourea dioxide. It will be the last time for 2012, because it’s an outdoor activity, due to the toxicity of the chemical, and it’s getting too hot now. It’s a shame because I have a pile of fabric I want to use for this process and I really love the effects I’m getting.

 I began with screen printing, using a paper stencil on the screen. I really like the interesting effects I get with very simple repeat patterns done this way. It takes an ordinary piece of dyed cloth and improves it out of sight. I made up a Thiox solution and thickened it with DR33, to make a print paste. The Thiox needs to be used quite quickly to be effective, so you need to be set up, ready to go, when you do this step.

This is the pattern on my screen.

(Ignore the blue tinge; in this photo it had a block out agent applied after printing, so I could save the negative of the screen and use it again next time.) As you can see, the pattern has been cut freehand in strips and taped on. My cloth was cotton that I’d deliberately dyed dark with leftover dye at the end of a dyeing session, thinking it would discharge in an interesting way.

Once it was printed and steamed, it looked like this:

It's amazing how the eye makes the lines join up, even when they don't.

 

I don’t have a “before” photo for this fat quarter of cloth, but it was also dyed very dark with a mixture of colours in a dyeing session. It was printed with a second screen in the same way as the first.

Then I moved on to printing. I bought an interesting potato masher that I thought would be good for this process. I used it to stamp onto another fat quarter of cloth from an earlier dyeing session.

 

Here's the dyed cloth:

...and here it is discharged:

It’s rather good, isn’t it? I think it makes a better print block than it does a potato masher!

I also wanted to experiment with adding colour to the discharge process. I didn’t have any appropriate dyes, but I did have some powdered pigment, which I used to make up paint for my kids, about twenty-five years ago. I wondered if it would be permanent on discharged cloth. I mixed some of the blue powder into the discharge paste and stamped with the potato masher again, onto a piece of dyed cloth.

 

It looked very dark when it was wet but once it dried and was steamed, it became much lighter, so I guess I’ll need to add a lot more powder to get intense colours.

I'll be experimenting further with this combination, when the weather cools down.

I’ve also been doing some natural dyeing. The Fibrecircle group got together for a dyeing day and the results are on our blog here. Here are some of mine that I really like.

Silk paj, tied on square blocks with E. cinerea leaves in the folds, dyed in ironbark E. sideroxylon bark and ferrous sulphate.

  Silk paj,concertina's in three, folded with cinerea leaves and tied onto Tricia's parallelogram perspex blocks, dyed in a bath of helichrysum petiolare and alum.

Silk paj, tied on tongue depressors with green twine, dyed in a bath of Eucalyptus pilularis Blackbutt wood shavings and alum

This one has delicate green markings from the twine that haven't showed up well in the photograph. I love it!

Silk paj, pleated and tied with green twine, dyed in ironbark and ferrous sulphate. This one wasn’t used at Tricia’s, because the twine was obviously bleeding green dye onto the cloth and we were concerned about contamination. But there was very little green on it or in the dye bath.

These three wool skeins came out in an interesting way. I pre-soaked a scarf which had brown onion skins tied into it, and I noticed that the water was coloured. So I left two wool skeins, 2ply and 8 ply in the water for a couple of days. They both came out a gorgeous pinky colour. Then I dyed them in cinerea, wrapped around tongue depressors. So there are areas of dark pinky-beige and then darker areas from the cinerea.

 

This darker one was tied the same way but with green twine, which darkened the colour significantly.

And then there’s the Drimarene K dyeing.

 

I over-dyed some prevous eco-dyed and fire-reactive dyed scarves. This scarf had beads tied into the ends, and was dyed yellow and orange. The mokume areas weren't very successful so I retied them and redyed. I really like it now!

This scarf was eco-dyed with machine stitching along the ends. It looked pretty ordinary, so I clamped it with large metal washers and over-dyed it with blue fibre-reactive dye.

It's much improved too!

 

This one was bunched and tied and dyed with diluted fibre reactive dyes.

 

I dyed more socks too (I'm loving these!):

…and a tee and shorts for my granddaughter.

I did a whole lot of other stuff too, which I expect will show up here sooner or later!

So another year is almost over. I wonder what the next year will bring? I’m foreseeing lots of creative messy times!