September Blog
It has been a while since I blogged and there are a things to catch up on. I am going to do it in two posts – work I have done and work in progress.
Monet’s garden
I am still in love with my ice dyed fabrics and will be part of a three corner evening at my local Exeter Quilters in November.
The question was/is what to do with the fabric? When there was a call for some extra A3 quilts for the Contemporary Quilt Group’s suitcase exhibition with the subject of your favourite artist, I thought Monet and my fabrics! (He is only one of my favourites).
I researched his garden paintings and came up with a design. This was to be machine appliquéd.
It took days to work out which fabric should go where and most difficult was finding sections the right size.

Mexican Wave

South West Textile Group were exhibiting at The NEC Birmingham with the theme ‘Strip Show’ and members were asked for a long narrow piece in bright colours. Eventually, I decided to wrap dowelling with strips of my own dyed fabric. Placement was a problem and I ended up using a wave formation and thought of the colours we had seen on our trip to Mexico.

Svinafellsjökull Glacier.

Having had a lot of fun, I was now ready to really put my heart into serious work again. I had been saddened by so many stories of global warming and thought that the recession of glaciers provided a visible and terrifying measure of what climate change was doing.  We had visited Iceland a few years ago and the Svinafellsjökull Glacier.  I began to design and work to this theme. I had also been moved by the story told to us of how 2 German youths disappeared while hiking in the region, another tragedy.

I blew up some of my photographs for reference and went through my stash of dyed fabric bringing out any colours that I thought would work. I also dyed and painted more. As usual the laundry room was covered with painted, dyed and rubbed fabric scraps.  I made a sampler of all the techniques I was auditioning.

 

Shapes and forms emerged and I had to fit them all together. Once again I found it like solving a cryptic jigsaw.

Then at last the real thing

That’s all for now, hopefully before long I will be sharing my current work.