Festival of Quilts

Last weekend was the Festival of Quilts at the NEC in Birmingham. I'd never made a quilt before but I needed something to work towards so I made a piece and entered it into the art quilt category. For regular readers you will know that this pieces is called Not Lost but Still Searching and looks something like this:

My Art Quilt

The piece and title are about how I felt at the time I was making it. Things in my life were all coming together and starting to make sense and I no longer felt lost but still felt, and feel, that there's a lot ahead of me (in a good way, it's exciting!) In mythology, crows were believed to be the carriers of the soul and to be unaware of time; able to see past, present and future simultaneously and so they seemed a fitting motif to adopt as they are able to see the bigger picture.

Seeing the quilt alongside all the others was a slightly weird experience, the venue is huge and there is loads going on. I really liked some of the stuff but I did find a lot of it a bit samey and traditional (which isn't in itself a bad thing but it doesn't float my boat.) There was some technically brilliant work and some great ideas and I really enjoyed looking round. I'm pleased I entered and went down to see it but I don't think it's something I'd do again. If I did, I would roll my quilt before sending it as unfortunately the creases didn't fall out which definitely didn't add to the display of the piece!

On display, with creases!

I also did a piece with my Textile Group at The Heathlands Project and that was also on display. The guys were all really excited about it being on show and want to do another one next year (by which time I will hopefully have recovered from the stress!) It was great to see our work up and we've had lovely comments about the colours and how much fun it is.

The Forest

On display

I had also entered another exhibition called Textile News: Freedom and had work selected for that show early this year. The opening venue was the Festival of Quilts so I got to see that as well before it goes off to Moscow and various other places. The person who organised it, Gudrun Heinz, was there and it was great to meet her. She was very enthusiastic and told me about some of the other entries and came to see the Heathlands quilt as well. For this show the pieces had to be 30x30cm maximum and the theme was freedom. I made my piece in January and it's a special piece to me because it kick started me working again. I looked at the idea of breaking free and portrayed a bird flying up and away. The piece is called 'Rise' and looks like this:

Rise. Dyed and pieced silks with hand stitching

Rise, detail

So, that's my work from the Festival and here are a few of the things I saw that inspired me! Some of them I liked the imagery, some the humour and some the ideas.

Flying High, Claudia Watkins

The Fun of the Fair, Blackheath High School

Everything Stops for Tea, Anjie Davison

The Fun of the Fair, Kings Sutton Primary School

Billie Joe Armstrong, Charlotte Bailey

Detail of above

Spoon Fed Love, Maria Thomas

Olite, Janine Visser

I got Stitched Up, Hayley Brooks

A Sketch in Time, Susan Chapman

Profusion, Mary Morris

Finished!

Magikal Forest Quilt. Made by the textiles group at The Heathlands Project

So, The Magikal Forest Quilt is complete and has been posted off ready to be exhibited in Birmingham. We did a presentation of the quilt in the morning meeting on Thursday and all the guys were really impressed with it and asking what we were going to do next year! It's been great watching the piece develop and everyone was impressed with how it's turned out and we're all excited about it going on display. I'm still seeing stitches when I close my eyes but it's been worth all the hard work.

Ladybird

Snail

Tigerpillar

Let the Quiltage Commence!

Constructed quilt

Last Thursday we began the actual quilting of the quilt, so to speak. That is, I've sewn all the layers together and as a group we're machine quilting the piece. This is proving interesting as we don't have a quilting foot and it's quite a big piece to manoeuvre around on a small domestic machine. But, we shall overcome and it is really starting to take shape and look good.

Detail: Quilted Flower

Detail: Quilted Dog

Quilt-Yet more progress

Detail: Tigerpillar

Finally, the first layer of 'Magikal Forest' is complete. Everyone has sewn on their additions; a host of ladybirds, a pair of love birds, flowers, dogs and snails to name a few. All the members involved with the project have sewn at least one of their patches on and then due to time restraints I spent my Thursday evening sewing on the rest. I'm really excited about us making it up into a quilt now, it looks so good. We got lots of positive comments about it at the tea party yesterday (see previous post.)

Magikal Forest

Detail: Bumble Bee

Detail: Love Birds

Magical Forest-Progress

Magical Forest

Once again, long time no post but here's a quick one to start off with. The Magical Forest Quilt being created by my textiles group up at The Heathlands Project is progressing well. We have begun attaching the various animals, fruits and flowers to it. I'm beginning to get mildly panicked now as the deadline looms ever closer, I can see a couple of late nights finishing it off coming on! Still, it's looking great and all the guys have worked really hard on it.

Detail-One of many magical creatures!

Complete (I think)

Not Lost But Still Searching

A few months ago I wrote about a piece I was working on for The Festival of Quilts this August. The idea was that I would post about it as I went along so people could see how it progressed. This didn't really happen as although I remembered to take pictures I didn't get round to writing posts about them.

Anyway, I finished it last night so I thought I'd post a couple of pictures. The quilt has four layers and has been dyed, painted, machine stitched and hand stitched. The crows were painted then machine embroidered then applied to the quilt by hand. All the actual quilting was done by hand. Today I have very sore fingers.

The top layer is silk organza; the middle crow is sewn on top of this layer and the other two are underneath it. The organza layer is attached to the other layers with insertion stitches.

Detail of the bottom crow and insertion stich seam

Detail of the top crow

Detail of main crow before attachment to quilt

Magical Quiltage

As well as entering a piece of my own work for the Festival of Quilts I'm also making a quilt with my Textile group up at The Heathlands Project.* Last week we painted up our background and fabric for the tree and today we started stitching the tree (which I cut out) onto the base fabric. The group members designed the quilt themselves and are using the skills they've learnt in the group to make the quilt.

Here is the fabric just after being painted last week:

'Tree' Fabric

Background fabric

Here is the fabric with the tree cut out and pinned on:

Background with tree pinned on

I can't wait to see how this piece works out, everyone is very excited about it and it's great seeing it grow week by week. I do find it slightly odd that in my own work I only use muted, subtle colours and almost always have a very limited palette whereas when I work with other people we always seem to produce very bright, exuberantly coloured work.

* We work with adults with learning disabilities and run a range of projects including art, I.T., horticulture and enterprise as well as a small cafe. We believe in community and environment and all our work centres around developing a better community and environment.

Quilting progress

So, I got my fabric dyed up ready for my quilt. I was really pleased with the colour of the organza but the mid layer was too pale and subtle to be seen underneath it. So I added a bit of detail with watered down fabric paint.

Mid layer of fabric

I also painted some crows onto organza and have begun stitching into them with my sewing machine. I've been using some extremely slippery viscose threads which have a lovely sheen and look great but are a pain to work with as they keep snapping! However, I'm really pleased with how they're working out and I think they will look very good when they're completed and attached to the background. Lots more stitching to go...

Detail of partially stitched organza crow

As the organza is very fine, when I painted it, a lot of paint went through the fabric and I ended up with a cool image on the paper underneath. I think this will be good to work into as the colours show up better on the paper than they did on the fabric, it will be a good base for a drawing!

'Accidental' drawing

Colour fun

Part of the point of me starting this blog was to encourage myself to get making more and to share my work with people. I also intended to use it as a kind of online journal, recording the process as well as the finished outcomes. So far I've not really done that, in fact it would be fair to say that I've not done that at all. So, I'm going to give it a go and see what happens.

I'm currently making an art quilt (by currently making I mean I've been thinking about it and semi-planning it for about 3 months and have finally started on it today) to enter into the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham in August. As I said in my previous post I entered a piece in January for a touring exhibition which is showing at said Festival and it would be really cool to have two pieces on show. It would be especially good as the piece that has been accepted, Rise, is small scale and the piece I'm now working on is large but they are both closely related in terms of both concept and technique.

Organza (top) layer

Base layer-there will be another layer between this and the organza top layer

Today I have been making the most of the sunshine and dyeing the fabric for my piece. I'm using cotton muslin and silk organza, both dyed using procion dyes. I've been bucket dyeing and painting on the dyes, with varying levels of success! I've over dyed the main layer twice but I'm happy with the colour now. I like to work with coloured greys, I like the soft, muted tones it produces. I mostly work with blue and green greys as I think it gives a calm and reflective feeling, giving people chance to think about the work. The fabric for this piece is a lovely soft blue, I'm looking forward to stitching it!