Challenge Memory

Hello everybody, I'm almost done with my piece - but it might take me a few days longer. I should be done no later than the 3rd of October !! can't wait to see what you're all up to ;-))

Sneek peek/also, tardy to the party

When the "memory" challenge was announced I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

Ever since my mother passed away in March, I had this piece in mind.  Thirty-five years ago, I wrote a play called "The Chair By The Window", the titular chair representing the complex mix of love, loss, and betrayal that comprised my relationship with my mother.  The play won an award, and was mounted by the Sears Festival, [does the Sears Festival even exist anymore or was it a local thing?]).

Twenty years ago, I found myself writing the piece again - oddly, and against my will - from my mother's perspective in the form of an unpublished novel, also called The Chair By The Window.

After the intial weeks of shock and numbness wore off, I felt a strong need talk about my mother's and my relationship again, through cloth.  I had intended to make a physical representation of that chair, and since the call was announced, have made sketches, written notes, gathered inspirational images, and created it in my mind again and again. 

But it seems, I don't yet have the emotional distance from her death that I need to bring it to life at the moment.

I have had in mind another piece, which wasn't meant for this challenge, but will serve just as well.  This one has been percolating for at least a year and it's about an aspect of my relationship with my father. 

It involves a man's dress shirt - and really - that's the image I've been carrying in my head for this last year or so - just that image of a man's dress shirt - the kind your kindergarten teacher asks your mother for, so that you can wear it in art class to protect you your clothes.

The other night, it all came together for me and I'll be starting construction this weekend.  But it will take me a couple of weeks to make it, I think, so I won't have my "memory" piece ready until the middle of the month.

Hope that's okay - and I look forward to seeing what the rest of you create.

Thanks,

Kit

Landmarks - Ravages of Time

  

This is my piece for the Landmarks challenge.  I was thinking of the various marks left on the landscape by centuries of ploughing furrows, terracing or marks left by erosion.  The different colours of rocks and soil...

I used a selection of my dyed, printed or painted fabric, this time mostly using natural dyes or rusting.  The strip on the right is rusted silk dupion that had tannin added, which turned the marks black; the mid brown strips  are silk habotai rust printed;  The pieces with purple and brown marks were painted with ochres and natural dye extracts mixed with soy milk as a binder (I think the purple was logwood).  The ochres came from Clearwell Caves in the Forest of Dean.  I wrote about it on my blog here.

The purple cotton strips are just dyed with procion MX dyes.

This is a close up of the piece.  The top photo is more faithful to the actual colours - I took them with my phone which hasn't got a very good camera but is convenient!

I backed the strips of fabric with strips of loosely woven hessian and handstitched them to leave the seams exposed, then I loosely hand quilted the whole thing on to a piece of brown linen.  Not sure how I'm going to finish it (will either fray it more or singe the edges, I think) but as I am late with this piece I thought I'd better post it immediately.

Landmarks - Burren Roads

Late again, so here it is Burren Roads:

First I made a silkscreen of a large map of the Burren which I printed onto dyed cotton.

I took some of the lovely images from headstone and old ruins around the Burren area and quilted them and attached them by hand using really large stitches.

Added some more heads and then quilted the map and background.

Here;s the other head.

This was from an archway decorated with numerous heads, wonderful piece of carving.











Kviste

Hi, here is another new member of the group. My name is Susanne  and i'm pleased to join you. I live in germany  and my blog is  "flicKwerk" .
The theme "landmarks"brought lots of ideas, but after looking up for a definition at wikipedia, i decided to interpret it in this meaning: Originally, a landmark meant a geographic feature used by explorers and others to find
their way back or through an area.
Every other year or so i'm in Norway for cross-country skitours, and when you are there out in the white nowhere, you're happy that some people did their job and marked the track with "kviste". This are big branches or very small trees, stuck into the ground to guide you to the next cabin. Man-made landmarks, and for me "kviste" is also a synonym for wonderful days in the norwegian mountains.

 

I never made such a pictorial quilt before, and i had some ideas to make it more abstract, but first it wanted to be made this way. Maybe there's another version following...
On the left is a piece i found in my stash, a leftover from another project, representing the tracks in the snow, on the right the snow-covered landscape, with the tracks along the waymarked route. Between both parts is a buttonholes placket of a old bedsheet, this stands for the cozy cabin and the good sleep that waits for you at the end of a long and cold day.

America Now - Written On The Body

Hi all, new member here (in case you didn't see on the FB page). I'm Kit Lang, I blog at Kit Lang Fiber Art and I'm glad to be here!

When I read "land/marks" what immediately popped into my head was "I claim this land in the name of..." 

As I tried to suss out that meaning over the next couple of weeks, concurrently, I thought about how men are dictating women's rights in the United States - how they've claimed women's bodies and legislated them, and how women's rights are being eroded as a result. 

I thought about all the ways that popular culture and media stereotypes enforce and contribute to the apparent apathy regarding that erosion. (We Canadians are similarly apathetic unfortunately.)

And I thought about how the words used to describe us, the institutionalized enforcement of gender stereotypes, the laws, and societal "rules" that are impressed upon us like markings, like tattoos - like they're written on these bodies that are claimed by men and legislated against by men. 

I thought of these nameless legislators standing on a pile of naked bodies of women with their flag, claiming them as their property to do with what they will  - and that is how this 'land/marks" piece came about.

This piece is part of my Whitewashed series, and so the background is constructed of pieced bricks in "girly" fabrics, quilted and then whitewashed with acrylic paint.  

The cross is made of needle felted roving on a poly cotton background...

which I then stitched to death with several different coloured threads

and the woman - an iconic "woman" with large breasts and exaggerated curves, was made from painted lutradur with stitched tattoos on her body - the names we are called, that turn us into objects, or animalize or otherwise reduce us - 

...along with the names of women who have most recently been egregiously, publicly reduced in the defence of our bodies, as well as some of the items that are on those bills in various states

America Now - Written On The Body, is 55 x 31" (140 cm x 79 cm). 

Thanks, Felicity for an inspiring theme! And thanks for having me in your group. 

Kit

Landmarks Challenge - Burren Walls

My landmarks challenge is based on the stone walls in the Burren.

I've recently finished making a quilt which is part of a group entry for this year's Festival of Quilts. After cutting my FoQ quilt to size I had a good few pieces of quilted fabric left-over, so I decided to incorporate them into my landmarks challenge (waste not, want not!)

The left-over strips were satin-stitched together and I added a very thin binding to finish off the quilt.

6th Challenge - Memory

It falls to me to set the sixth challenge and as I will not have computer access for a while I thought I should post it now so everyone has time to think about it and get started.

I was looking through a workbook this morning and found a photograph of a painting I did about a happy time in my childhood and the word 'Memory' came to mind so that is the theme for the next challenge. (I should say that my childhood was generally happy).

As we have not yet all revealed for 'Landmarks' can I suggest a reveal date for 'Memory' of 1st October?   

Landmarks

Or in my case, land marks.  I have to admit for this challenge that, while I have had various ideas buzzing about in my brain, time has obliged me to combine my Festival of Quilts piece with this challenge. 

I so enjoyed making the piece for the Archi-texture challenge that I felt I wanted to continue to work with some of the techniques I had used there for my Festival quilt and thus for this challenge.

I called the quilt 'Change' and it is about the changes wrought by the elements and the environment and looks at the marks and textures of stone walls and their attendant growths of lichen and moss.

The colours are actually nearer to a warm ochre than the white-ish colour showing in the image.

 

The quilt was made by gessoing the surface and adding newspaper cuttings, lace, scrim and other fabrics and the surface was then soaked and sprayed with silk and fabric paints.  Some of the crocheted lace was a bit too heavy and I was pleased to find that when I peeled it off it left a good ghost image that I could develop with stitch.  I used free machining and hand stitching to describe the stone and lichen.  Some printing was also done with found objects, notably a piece of polystyrene that seagulls had pecked into a lovely texture and which made some wonderful marks.

As usual with these challenges I have a whole raft of ideas that could be developed along the theme of Landmarks.  I just need the time to use them all!  

 

land(marks) earth pleiades

this is my piece for the latest International Art Quilt Challenge:  it was my turn to choose the theme - land(marks).


this reflects two recurring themes in my work:  the landscape of Central Australia with it's red dirt and dry riverbeds and the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters constellation. 

i needlefelted alpaca fleece from local breeders, Melrose Alpacas (thanks Fiona!) onto silk chiffon and then machine stitched with silk thread. It was eucalypt dyed and handstitched onto the black linen background with silk, perle 8 and stranded cotton.

it's 41x33cm

Time Challenge "One Tiny Speck"

Late again, apologies, but yee should be used to me by now.

I was pondering this one for several weeks playing with ideas while doing all the other stuff that occupies my time.

I feel really small and humble when I think of the age of this large rock we call home.

And I'm beginning to feel time slipping away so fast.

I'm still waiting to grow up and become one of those adults and I was most upset last week to find out I was still at college when one of my students was born!!

I thought I cann't be that old, then did the math, and realised yes you are.

So here it is, been playing in Photoshop again.

Used the last piece of the A3 transfer paper I found and transfered onto white cotton.

Made my sandwich and started quilting.

Here's the original image:

The quilting didn't go very well as the transfer paper started disintregrating. I put it onto fine cotton this time, bad mistake !!

Here's a close up you can just about see some of the background layers peeping through.

Final closeup and time to move on to the next challenge.

It's about time!

Well, better late than never, I hope.  Oh my, but I struggled with time with this challenge.  The idea developed quite organically but the realisation of my idea presented me with a lot of technical challenges to solve, and it's quite a relief to have completed it, albeit tardily.

So, my time piece is - a time piece!

It is a quilt (or two) and it works!  For more about the inspiration, the process and the problems, please follow this link.  Now to get thinking about Felicity's challenge, Land/marks....  Hopefully my time prompt will help me with this.

next challenge - landmarks

the next challenge theme is landmarks or land/marks or land marks or land(marks) - however you want to characterise it.

due on 15 july...

my time piece

here is my piece for the latest international quilt challenge.

 i wanted to demonstrate a process rather than explore an idea or a feeling so it is about the effects of time and weathering cloth and stitch.

i machine stitched strips of vintage linen, silk and cotton; then hand stitched lines of running stitch in silk and cotton thread. there are also a few loose clusters of french knots as a vague reference to the pleiades - my favourite constellation.

 i then stitched a labyrinth of copper wire which i hoped would weather and verdigris and colour then colour but quite early in the weathering process it became clear that this wasn't going to happened so i intervened with a stout piece of rusty iron. once the piece was rinsed of potential nasties and left to dry in the sun for a day or two i outlined the rust marks with red thread and burnished the centre with some copper and pale gold paintstick.


this piece took much longer than i anticipated:  it needed much more macerating in the garden that i thought and we have had remarkably fine weather for most of the time it was out under the feijoa tree.... here it is before rinsing and gussying up....

Timelapse

Well, here is my piece, 2 weeks late, but better late than never!

As I said on my blog, I was thinking of the passing of time and the different seasons that I had been observing in some reedbeds each month throughout the year.  I related it to the timelapse video function on some cameras and on programmes like Springwatch, where the camera takes photos of a slowly moving or growing thing at regular intervals; the resulting photos are then made into a video.

I thought about the different colours of the reeds throughout the year; I first considered making it circular like a clock but decided that that wouldn't fit the subject... so I made it long and thin.  Mostly I used a base layer of cotton fabrics and then layered it with sheer fabrics, some of which were leftovers from my Reeds series.  It is bonded and stitched on to a foundation of lutradur and the raw edges left intact.

Here is a detail of the lower right hand corner:

Survival

How appropriate this theme has turned out to be for me, because time has been even more of an issue for me this past month than usual.  And that means I am late with this challenge, and it is not even finished yet!  But this afternoon I am leaving for Singapore for a few days work, and so no further quilting will be done, at least until my return, so I thought I should at least post a progress picture:

I have actually been having a wonderfully creative time since my last post, so I am really not complaining!  I attended the 4 days of the Australasian Quilt Convention here in Melbourne, and did a fabulous 4 day course with Kay Haerland on "Realistic Landscapes". http://kayhaerland.com/  Such a talented quilt artist and generous teacher!  AQC is without a doubt the highlight of my year!

The following week I was very fortunate to do a 3 day "Abstracting from Nature" workshop with Jane Sassaman www.janesassaman.com/ at Kraft Koulour kraftkolour.com.au/  So from realism to abstraction in the space of a week.  I reckon the creative part of my brain was glowing when I went to bed at night!  However, I am not sure that I really made the leap into abstraction....

For the IQC theme of Time, I had planned a long banner of the different life cycle stages of a dandelion (snap, Angela!), and have completed the design on paper, but have yet to do anything about transferring the idea into fabric.

But...as I was working on this quilt, "Survival", I realised that it is really about time, so I hope it is not cheating to adopt this as my challenge quilt.  Not just because of the lack of time I have had to make the dandelion quilt, but because this quilt is about the really difficult journey towards survival (of individuals, families and communities) after a disaster.  It is inspired by the devastating "Black Saturday" bushfires, here in Victoria, just over 3 years ago.  I don't really feel comfortable providing an "artist statement" about the different elements, and hope that it is sufficient that the quilt speaks for itself.

Surprisingly, this is actually the result of the Jane Sassaman workshop.  I know, hardly abstract, but this is actually a very meaningful quilt for me, and I am pleased with it so far.  I will post another photo when it is completed.

TIME FOR CHANGE

I have been thrown a bit by the new layout but I shall do my best.  The work is a diptych inspired by the need for change.  I have used a decontructed Union Jack for the background, reflecting the chaotic state of the nation.  The figures were made in fabric from my own sketches & then scanned onto the background.
The captions on the placards refers to the so-called 'pasty tax' & arose from an article in the paper when a lady from Helston stated that she was thinking of putting these words in her pasty shop window.  (For non-UK members the 'pasty tax' was the name given to our government's decision to put VAT on hot pasties which had been exempt previously.  This appears to have hit the renowned Cornish pasty particularly hard).

The 2 pieces together are A3, printed onto computer transfer paper & quilted.

My progress so far...

I have just written a blog post which includes my thinking so far on the Time challenge... basically I have just changed tack completely but hopefully I know where I'm going now....

It is at the end of a post about my latest artwork which is why it is on my own blog rather than here ... Watch this space!

"Time" - Tempus fugit

When I learnt about the challenge theme "time", thoughts about how we all have a certain amount of time in our life, in our days. I found this beautiful fabric with the clocks on it - and I knew I wanted to use it. Next came the idea of certain incidents in our lifes - happy ones, not so happy ones. Big ones, smaller ones - and the clock fabric was cut, another fabric was inserted. Nice! Next thing that came to my mind was - a river. So I added some "river fabric" - Yes, I liked it! but still - it needed a bit more of that "time" - thing. How about an hourglass? - yes. But I wanted to give the impression of looking through glass ? - so let's use a very thin sheer fabric! for the sand, I used beads. Some of them are sewn onto the piece, but most of them are just "filled in", so they can move around. The edges were treated with my favourite method - zigzag with decorative yarns.

A detail shot - shows off the stamped letters "TEMPUS FUGIT"

Working on this challenge piece was exactly what I had hoped for ;-)) I had a lot of fun, I got a lot to think about, and I like the result. Besides that, I'm not absolutely happy with it. Maybe that's the reason why I already ordered another piece of the fabric with the clocks on it? I have a bigger version of it in mind ... And I can hardly wait to start with it! Now I'm off to look at the other challenge pieces ;-))

Time - Andromeda

I'm sorry to be a day late posting for the Reveal but time did get away from me a little with this challenge.  The main reason for this was my initial difficulty in settling on an interpretation and then my choice of hand stitching for the bulk of my project.  As it is I am cheating a little as I havn't actually finished the edge of my piece but I will get that done in the next day or three.

When I started to think about 'Time' my brainstorming produced a long list of possibilities.  The words of a Simon & Garfunkel song came to mind, 'Time, time, time  See what's become of me.......' and a hymn I think , ' Time like an ever rolling stream bears all our fears away.  They die, forgotten as a dream dies at the break of day'.

I thought of passing time, time past, holiday time, a stitch in time, old time, part time, daytime, night time, dreamtime, time travel, lost in time...... The list went on and on.  Then, on a visit to Greenwich Royal Observatory I was reminded that there are much larger measurements of time than seconds, minutes and hours.  I was particularly struck by an audio visual installation that stated that the light from the Andromeda Galaxy takes so much time to reach the Earth that's it's journey is measured in light years.  The view that we see of the Andromeda Galaxy is brought to us by light that left it approximately 2.6 million light years ago. 

So, with this thought in mind I chose to make my piece about the Andromeda Galaxy.

I have been wanting to explore the colour wash method of construction for sometime and so played with this a little by using a range of my hand dyed fabrics of various textures ( cottons, velvets, bamboo and something unidentifiable that had been tossed in the dye bath) together with a couple of commercial fabrics.  The piece was put together with curved piecing as a reference to the spiral nature of the galaxy but I think I could have been even more adventurous with the curvatures.  I layered the top onto polyester wadding and then hand stitched/quilted in a spiral from the centre outwards.  I felt the spiral stitching would reflect the spiral nature that I think is attached to time and I used hand stitching because it would take physical time to complete.

I used a Madeira Rayon for the quilting and then used a gorgeous metal thread from the Illuminations range at the Thread Studio to make reference to a beautiful infra-red image of the Galaxy that I found here.  Finally, I added some small beads to suggest some of the stars that contribute to the galaxy.

The finished size of Andromeda is just over A3 and I am thinking of facing it instead of binding it and will probably give it a curved edge rather than square.  As with the previous challenges I am left with pages of ideas to take forward from this theme and may develop it further for my Festival of Quilts entry, but maybe I won't use quite so much hand stitching!

Time Waits for No Man

My piece for this month's challenge is "Time Waits for No Man".


For the background fabric I had an image of a clock-tower from Graz, Austria. The piece was an experiment on transferring a photocopy using oil paints and gum arabic which I made about 3-4 years ago, and has been left bundled up in a scrap bin every since. It just shows that you should never throw away any samples or textile experiments, they'll come in handy some day!!

I then tried to find some clock or time-related fabric in my stash. Turned out that I nothing that I could use, so instead I gathered some watches from around the house (had to take some of people's wrists) and then just copied them onto fabric.

I didnt even scan the image into the computer - just copied it straight onto the fabric and paper. As another experiment, I didn't pretreat the fabric, just sellotaped a piece of white fabric onto the copy paper and sent it through the printer. I don't think the image would stand up to washing, but it worked fairly well for this purpose.

 I then bondawebbed this piece of fabric and cut out the watches. These were then appliqued to the quilt top and edge stitched in white thread, to further outline the watch shapes.

Alphabet stamps were then used to add the letter "time" all over the quilt top. The phrase "time waits for no man" was also stamped on to the piece.

After doing this, the piece was looking a bit bare and lacking something, so I decided some painted bondaweb was needed. The bondaweb was painted with acrylic paints using colours used in the quilt top e.g. brown, blue, red etc. 


Strips of the painted bondaweb were then added to the piece.

Pocket watch printed onto Extraorganza

I also collected some images of old pocket watches off the internet and printed them onto a sheet of "Extra-organza". I bought a pack of it at Festival of Quilts a few years ago and finally got around to using it!

The piece was then machine quilted using a variegated brown thread and two fabrics were used to make the binding.

Ticking Clock...

 My piece for this month's challenge is called 'Ticking Clock' and features a dandelion seed head.  As a child we used to 'tell the time' by blowing the seeds off the plant.  Depending on how many blows it took, that was the hour...only it was never correct!!

I used two weights of Lutradur, 8" x 11", one heavy (130) and one medium (70).

On the heavy one which would be underneath, I used a white Inktense block to cover the sheet in white, then when it was dry painted an iridescent sparkly paint over it.

On the medium sheet I used two or three different shades of green Inktense blocks and blended them.

With a fine pencil I drew the outline of the dandelion clock onto the green Lutradur and used a soldering iron to slash & burn on the design.

When laid on top of the heavy Lutradur the white showed through. 

I finished it by stitching the seeds using Madeira Rayon thread in bright white and embellishing the background with a Madeira metallic thread. 

This is the first time I've used Inktense blocks and found the colour amazing.  I don't have the facilities for dying here so this is the next best thing for me!

Architecture Challenge Piece

A week or two later than promised but its done. When the piece was printed I was amazed by how suitable this piece would be for last challenge, just cannot get the Burren images out of my head!

Ancient Arch

I love ancient ruins, the skill involved, dreaming of what the structures were like in their heyday, oh the romance of it all !
Played with images in photoshop for a few days, layering, cutting and stretching till I came up with image below which I printed onto A3 transfer paper which is about ten years old (one of the problems of hoarding), wasn't sure if it would work.

Next was what fabric should I use? While looking through my white collection I came across this :

Some textured cotton, so transferred image on it:

As the transfer paper was so old I wasn't sure what would happen, a few pieces lifted but was very happy with transfer as the texture of the fabric came through as a hoped:

Once the quilt sandwich was assembled using polyester wadding, I started machine quilting with some variegated thread and then bound the piece with black to finish.

Close up one

Close up 2