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



A FRAGMENT

Hurrah! I seem to be in good company in the lateness stakes. After much huffing, puffing & searching, here is my offering. It is based on sketches of parts of my favourite cathedral of all which is Durham. It is also influenced by some work I had been doing on distressed banners & flags.

It has painted & dyed muslin over printed fabrics & the squares are from computer porinted flags of my own design. (There is too much art work to show this). It is bound with twisted 'cords' of muslin overstitched to the edge. Free machining completes the piece.

I have my idea organised for the next round, I think, so there should be a prompter response!

Sue: Architexture - Memories of Marrakech

This was a challenging and frustrating challenge for me - not because I was not inspired by it, but because the combination of flu and ME/CFS after Christmas really floored me, and because I was unable to locate either my photographs of a very enjoyable and inspiring visit to Marrakech or the fabrics and threads I have amassed with the intention of making some textile art based upon the trip.  Marrakech is an extreme experience.  We stayed in a riad inside the old Medina, away from the modern   generic European architecture, so it was quite an immersive experience, too, and I loved it.  This is just scratching the surface of my repository of ideas and intentions based on the Cinnamon or Ochre City, but I have enjoyed revisiting in my mind while working it.

There were a number of striking features to buildings in the old cities I saw.  The pine-cone topping of walls fascinated me, and the use of ceramic tiles to introduce geometric pattern and colour to interior -walls.  Buildings tend to have plain exteriors clad in earth-pigmented stone or daub, but through the door one enters another world, peacefully arranged around a courtyard which lets in natural light, being open to the sky.  Walls and floors tend to be colourfully tiled in mosaic patterns, with carved plasterwork and shuttered, grilled windows adding to a richness of pattern and texture.  The best courtyards echo to the sound of running water flowing into a small plunge pool, surrounded by lush plantings of roses, bananas and sweet flowering jasmine.

I used a stencil and Markal sticks to give an impression of tile patterns, and took as my central feature the wonderful Almoravid dome of the Koubba, an ancient wash-house in which the faithful would perform their ablutions prior to prayer in the no-longer-standing mosque.  It is a stunning building, inside and out, which is now well below street level as the city has grown and redeveloped around it.  When we visited, there was a mother cat suckling her kittens in the shade of one of the external walls of its enclosure: the city seems to belong to the feral cats as much as to the people and the mopeds.

I wanted to convey the sense of enclosure within walls and the decorative interiors hidden by the dull exterior walls.  This is a land where the evil eye is feared, and wealth and good fortune traditionally not flaunted in order to avoid attracting it - except, of course, there are always subtle ways of showing off!

Again, I've roughly worked to a squared-off A3/A4 size, and used machine quilting on commercially available cotton fabrics, apart from my hand stencilled tile fabric.

lumen

here is my piece for 'architexture' ....

 lumen is a three dimensional hand stitched textile piece with layers of sari silk, hand dyed machine stitched cotton and sinemay. it was stitched with cotton and silk thread using sorbello stitch, running stitch and french knots. inside the piece are 'sticks' i made of cotton string soaked in black gesso and paverpol.

i had lots of ideas for this challenge mostly to do with cathedrals, skylines and gargoyles. but none of them fired my imagination until last week when i was surfing around the internet and got into a cross referencing spiral around the theme of liminal space and thresholds (which was another image i was toying with). there was a link to the word 'lumen' which of course, Alice-like, I followed and found the anatomical meaning of the word.

A lumen (Lat. lūmen, an opening or light) (pl. lumina) in biology is the inside space of a tubular structure, such as an artery or intestine.
which made me think of Kind Dog's 'heart event' as the hospital people called it, which happened nearly six months ago. of the inside of his arteries and how they were stitched back together lined with mesh. and how this has certainly saved and extended his life.

so while this is not an orthodox interpretation of the architexture theme it is certainly of a structure, a space, a construction.

it is lumen

Architextur - and an introduction

It was just a short time ago that I became a member of this group ... and when I read about the theme that was due on Feb. 24th, I had to grin. Because - I had already done a quilt to that theme! About a year ago, and it measures about 1 m square.

"Architextur" was the challenge of the MainQuiltFestival in 2011. The quilt was due Dec 2010, and I was late, as I'm quite often. The quilts were not allowed to be shown before the exhibition, so I worked on it secretly and blogged only little bits of information. In the end - that quilt never made it to the exhibition, because I messed up, big time. DH and me were able to save it, so at least it became hang-able. It now lives in our office /guest room in our home.

This trainstation was the inspiration for the quilt. I commute to work every day, so I see this building quite often. The fabrics are hand-dyed, and I transferred surface textures from different parts of the station with paintsticks. As our station is an pretty old station, you can find lots of different patterns - I had fun, and was even joined by a little guy who helped out ;-))

The piecing of the quilt included some troubles, but I was able to solve them. I started quilting the top in the fine light lines, and everything was well. But (you knew there would be a but, don't you?) - than I started to quilt the dark strips. I wanted them to resemble wood ... and I did dense quilting ... more like "intense machine stitching" ... and when I realized that my quilt was now happily waving at me, it was too late. So, no quilt of mine at that show - but by pulling it taut over stretchers, it did not go to waste.

Ok - now some information about me. I live in the southern part of Germany with my husband and two cats. English is not my first language, so I might make mistakes ... sorry for this !! When I'm not working for a paycheck, I'm chasing my creative dreams. Quilting became my creative outlet about 15 years ago. First I sewed traditional quilts, but soon those got a twist towards a more modern style. In 2009 I started art quilting - and I never looked back. Recently I realized why quilting became so important to me, the link to that specific blog post is here. And this is the link to my blog - I try to blog at least 3 times a week. I'm glad to be now a member of this group - looking forward to our next challenge!

Archi-texture (Hundertwasser style)

This piece was started in a Sandra Meech workshop a few years ago. It was inspired by Hundertwasser and its a mixed-media piece.
The background is made up of painted papers, which I then free machine quilted. The binding is made of purple fabric, with blanket stitch used to add beading around the edges. I didn't manage to get an A3-sized piece done this time, instead it's A4-sized.

My Archi-texture piece

I seem to have been focussing a lot on bricks and stones and general architectural marks in my printing over the last few years so I decided to make a piece using some of the various fabrics. My plan at first was to do a sort of free-form log cabin but since I didn't bother to consult my C&G sample this went a bit awry rather quickly!

As one of my reasons for participating in this challenge is to try out new techniques, I decided to use freeform rotary cutting and also a self-facing rather than traditional binding (using Kathy Loomis' excellent tutorial.)

The fabrics are a mixture of cotton, silk dupion and another sort of silk which was a right pain. They had been printed at various times with a selection of fabric paints, thickened procion dyes, thickened natural dye extracts, and rust; mostly with thermofax screens and/or found objects.

One curious thing I have noticed about my design process over the last few months is that I seem to end up rotating most of my finished work 90 degrees before I'm happy with it, and this was no exception. I must have some sort of curious lopsided mind!! That's probably why most of my work ends up a strange shape as well!

An Archi-textural Urn

After one heck of a lot of deliberation and changes of mind I finally found the perfect design for me to produce something quick and effective for my Challenge piece.

I printed this section of the design onto Lutradur, placed fabric behind it which is from the Stonehenge Collection by Northcott, outlined the shapes with rayon thread then painted a light layer of puff paint on the raised sections before zapping with the heat gun.  And here's the result...

I couldn't capture the exact colours but they are more of a pale aqua, pale pink and grey.  I think it does look better in the flesh though!

Archi-texture

Don't look now but I'm actually here for this challenge's reveal.  See, I do stay home sometimes LOL
 

 I'll start from the end which is the piece I've reached by today's reveal date.  At the moment it's  called Archi-texture I as I've forgotten the name of the building that inspired it but it is all about decaying surfaces and is only one of the directions this challenge took my thoughts.

After enjoying the process of the Pojagi in the last challenge I was keen to carry on exploring layers and the idea of looking through. On a train journey from Cornwall I had plenty of time to let my mind wander and notes I made at the time include suggestions of monoprinting on cotton; building up layers of print on top; sponging; painting over stitched, quilted fabric, discharging, painting again; scribbled stitching.  As the train slowly approached London we passed a Macdonalds' with its iconic arched logo and that turned a light on.  Having recently seen Karen Turner's work I thought about layering fabrics over a textured basecloth and cutting the arches through to reveal the texture below.  I think that would have been a fun way to go but when I got home and started looking at my photos of texture and architecture I found an image I had taken in Leicester near the New Walk Museum of a very decaying building.

As you can now see the image at the top caught my imagination and I decided to explore that with surface design on fabric.

Using my own printed , dyed and discharged fabrics I cut and bonded the pieces to batting layering one or two sheers with text on them below the dyed net curtaining that forms the 3 neutral columns.  My free machining/quilting skills are distinctly lacking but I used a variety of stitching to describe the cracks that you might see as a building deteriorates.  The 'quilt' is A3 size and there is no binding, the backing was turned through and the edge closed with top stitching all round.

The beauty of this challenge, as with the preceding ones, is that it has opened my mind up to so many possibilities and so many ways to interpret the texture in architecture and I could and hopefully will carry on exploring for many months to come.  I am hoping that the next challenge will lead naturally into related areas of work and I still have to come back to how pojagi and archi-texture can come together.