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.

Knitting and other pleasant pastimes

I love to knit. Every winter, I can't want until the humid weather goes away and it gets cool enough to pick up my knitting needles. I learnt to knit when I was seven (remember those knitted squares I talked about here?) and there's hardly been a year when I didn't knit something in the winter, except for those few manic years when I was studying days, working nights and raising kids in between. So when I bought some luscious wool from Bendigo Woollen Mills this year, in a gorgeous purple colour that's right in fashion right now, I was in seventh heaven. Pattern, gosh no! I had a picture of what I wanted , and I am woman, I can make anything!

So I cast on merrily and knitted what I thought was the pattern. Nope, not quite right. So I pulled it back to the basque and tried again. (Me, knit a swatch? Why?) Nope, still not quite right. And again. OK, time for plan B. I'd bought a copy of the gorgeous new Knitter magazine and there was a pattern I'd made years ago, that one where you knit double rib, cast on extra stitches and then drop them, so you get a beautiful wavy pattern. OK, that's so easy, I'll do that one. Not using their pattern, of course, which was made in cotton for English summer wear.

I knitted the back and one of the sleeves, and then it dawned on me slowly that this pattern uses way more yarn than a normal jumper. I knitted grimly on. Nope, it was clear to me from halfway up the front that there was not, in fact enough yarn. A quick email to Bendigo assured me that no, that yarn was now discontinued, even though I only bought it a couple of months before. A quick check on Ravelry for surplus yarn- no dice. Out it all came again. (Isn't it good that it knitted up so quickly?)

On my travels around the Quilt and Craft Fair in June, I found a pattern at the Bendigo stand that was just what I wanted. The First Time Around. So, older and ever so slightly wiser, I bought that pattern even though, like most knitting patterns, it wasn't designed for Fat Ladies, just so I could see how they did that pattern. Easy! A short while later and I had my first (and only) jumper this year.
Isn't it pretty? It just needs a press and it will be ready to wear. Next year.

A taste of what I've been doing

Here's a little taste of my latest collaborative project. I'm doing book pages with the Fibrecircle group and this is the very first page I did. Of course, I forgot to photograph it, so I've had to wait until it was being swapped to grab a photo. It's for Helen's book, which has the theme "Faraway Places". She supplied poems as inspiration and I chose this one by Oscar Wilde:

The almond groves of Samarkand
Bokhara, where red lilies blow
And Oxus, by whose yellow sands
The grave white turbaned merchants go.

And from there to Ispahan
The golden garden of the sun
When the lone dusty caravan
Brings cedar and vermilion.

I know where Samarkand is, but where is Ispahan? I discovered that the name refers to the modern city of Isfahan or Esfahan, in Iran. It looks like a fascinating place to visit. It was originally the capital of the Elamite Empire, of the Medes (612-549BC). Then, after some time in obscurity, it was the capital of the 10th century Seljuk dynasty, a Turkish empire that was fascinated by Persian culture and spread from Anatolia to Spain. The third golden period for the city was the Safavid Empire, in the 16th century, under Shah Abbas the Great. The modern city still contains many beautiful buildings reflecting this diverse history.

I looked at lots of photos of the city, and then made a sort of compilation sketch, using shapes from the bridges and an image of one of the mosques. For my colours, I was mostly inspired by a description from a traveller of the 1920s, Robert Byron, who wrote, "under avenues of white tree trunks and canopies of shining twigs, past domes of turquoise and spring yellow, in a sky of liquid violet blue… across bridges of pale toffee brick, tier on tier of arches breaking into piled pavilions; overlooked by lilac mountains… Isfahan has become indelible." Helen supplied the beautiful hand-painted background fabric, and I painted the mountains and buildings, and suggestion of road.

It was a hard work to photograph. The image has lost most of the detail of tiles on the mosque and the river on the right. But it does give a bit of an idea.

And now for something completely different!

Last week at Fibrecircle, we spent the day graffiti-ing fabric. We'd planned ages ago to do it, and this week, after the seriousness of all the ATASDA AGMs, seemed like a good time to be childlike again. We used a piece of donated fabric, and each person moved round the table so every part of the fabric was drawn on by everyone. Then we cut the fabric into equal parts.
Here's my section:
Isn't it fabulous?

Now I have to do something with this fabric by early next year! I am toying with adding colour - graffiti is usually coloured in flat areas, or maybe adding more texture (which I can do by stitching). Will I use it whole or cut it apart? I'm sure you'll see more of this over the coming months.

More about the book

Once I'd painted the cover picture, it was April 1 and I started work on the pages. April 3 was the first quarter of the moon in April, with the full moon on Apr 10, and the last quarter on April 17. The new moon fell on April 25. I won't show all the pages here, partly because that would be tedious to look at, but also because, when you are working quickly on the final sheet, not all pages turn out as you imagined! Here are some of my favourites:
The first page I did -

April 6, a Fibrecircle meeting day - paper tissue collage
April 11 - undeciphered scripts This page shows a page of the undeciphered script of the Indus Valley civilisation, with the letters of UNDECIPHERED SCRIPTS hidden among it. On this day, I was thinking about the parts of everyone that are hidden from view, that appear unexpectedly.
The next two are pair of pages about limitations, associated with the changing season, the waning moon and my life at the time.


Tissue poppies for Anzac Day, for those dead in war and the new moon, with the words of the poem that begins "in Flanders Fields the poppies blow", written at Ypres by Dr John McCrae, who himself did not survive that terrible war.
A fantasy landscape, just playing around with colours. Painted with Setacolor paints over the original blue background.

It actually took me until mid June to assemble the book in its final form. I added colour with Prismacolor pencils to the end papers, and added text.

This was a brilliant project to do, I really had a ball. It was structured enough that I wasn't trying to find things to make each day, but free enough to let me follow whatever elusive thread captured my attention. I learnt a huge amount by doing it, although I now see ways I could have done things better (of course!). I think I got way more out of it than I would have done making a quilt (or a bag) for the challenge. If you want to see the other challenge pieces, they're on the Kambra Challenge blog.