Freedom returns

On Saturday my two Freedom journal quilts returned after their long tour abroad. At the time of sending them off on their travels back in October 2011 I couldn't use them for a blip picture as I had to keep them to myself till the first showing, so I'm making up for that today, now that they are back home. The two freedom quilts were made for the Textile Exhibition on the theme of Freedom organized by the German quilter Gudrun Heinz and you can read more about the tour on her website. I've written about the two quilts myself on a previous blog post here.

I don't recommend not looking at your own work for 3 years or more but in a way it's a salutary experience if it does happen, as you can see it with fresh eyes after such a long time. And although I might do things a bit differently now (which is just as well, as 3 years more experience have passed!) I'm still very happy with them, particularly the one shown above.

Here is where these two small pieces have been: Birmingham UK, Moscow Russia, Saint Petersburg Russia, Murmansk Russia, Praque Czech Republic, Einbeck Germany, Solothurn Switzerland, Gruenstadt Germany, Almaty Kazakhstan (imagine that!), Lipezk Russia, Karlsruhe Germany, Bremen Germany, Salzwedel Germany and finally Bochum Germany.

Included in this list are countries where freedom is not yet a foregone conclusion and just maybe this exhibition of textile art on that theme has made some visitors think.

These little quilts have done a lot for me. They ended up on the Bernina calendar, lead to an interview with me in a German quilting magazine and were featured in the book Connected Cloth.

Another travelling exhibition is off on tour, this time on the theme of Boredom and  it has already been to exciting places, such as Murmansk. If you follow this link and look at the third picture from the top you will see one of my contributions to that tour at bottom right.

Boredom

Do you feel bored now and again? If you are a regular reader of this blog you'll probably have guessed that boredom is not a phenomenon I'm very familiar with. In fact my problem is rather the reverse. Too much to do and too little time to do it in. So when I saw that the theme for the next Textile Experiments exhibition was boredom I felt a bit lost about what to do. The Textile Experiments exhibitions are organized by the German art quilter Gudrun Heinz and I have been participating in most of the past exhibitions on themes such as News and Freedom. She's an excellent exhibition organizer and the various shows have travelled to the most exotic locations my quilts have ever been to, such as Murmansk, Praque, Latvia, St. Petersburg etc. So I knew I wanted to be part of the Boredom show too but it took me a while to get going. I started writing down what I associate with boredom and one of the things I thought of was "watching paint dry". 

This photograph suddenly came to mind then. It features my father and our little cat Roxy (both sadly no longer with us) looking out of the window of our house in Bath. I think it was taken back in the late 1980's. It struck me that rather than admiring the view over the city they could equally well be looking at paint drying. That led to the production of the first little quilt (sized 20 x 30cm). The background is made out of machine pieced slithers of silk fabrics (all from a skirt made from Thai silk which had always been too large for me but that I bought because I loved the colours). After piecing I splattered it with acrylic paint. I machine appliqued the two figures to this background and added the text as well as the hand beading. The edges of the quilt are machine zigzagged.

That left me thinking about the other journal quilt and this time I looked up quotations about boredom. I found one by Leo Stein that reads: "Boredom is an emptiness filled with insistence". I thought about what people do when they are bored and came up with doodling. This brought me neatly to the fact that I recently discovered the doodling I had done in an old school diary which looked remarkably much like stipple quilting.

Perhaps I was always destined to become a quilter. It certainly keeps me from getting bored!
The background is the same as the previous piece as is the size. I doodled on a piece of hand painted fabric, cut out the doodle and applied it to the background (using Bondaweb). It was machine appliqued with a double buttonhole stitch and hand beaded.  Then I stamped on the quotation as you can see above. The edges were finished in the same way as the other piece.

All the Boredom quilts that were selected for the exhibition were shown for the first time at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham back in August and have also been on show in Riga, the capital of Latvia since then. After that they will be going to venues in Russia, the Czech Republic, Germany and other places. They will be travelling for quite some time and can also be bought. These travelling exhibitions organized by Gudrun are getting more and more well deserved publicity and you can read about this one on the Sewn Europe site here for instance. A picture of the above piece is included! A CD of all the pieces in the Boredom exhibition can be obtained from Gudrun as well as CDs from the previous shows.

The previous exhibition which was on the theme of Freedom is still on the road too and to my delight I recently discovered a picture of this show in the newly published book Connected Cloth by Cas Holmes and Anne Kelly in which my Freedom pieces can clearly be seen (well by me, anyway, as I know them so well!).

Je suis libre calendar girl

It's September and that means that when I turned the page on the Bernina calendar I saw my work portrayed there. As I mentioned on an earlier post my work was selected to be in the calendar last year and the detail that was used can be seen above. The little quilt it came from is below as is the other piece I also entered into the Freedom Textile Exhibition. This is an exhibition organized by the German quilter Gudrun Heinz and although I didn't have to bare all (as some calendar girls do!) I did reveal quite a lot more of myself in the interview Gudrun had with me. 

You can see this interview on the Bernina blog which you reach by clicking here. It is all in German though, but fear not, the English text of the interview can be found on Gudrun's own website here. In any case I find Google is quite good in translating the German text. It doesn't get it all 100% correct but you certainly get the jest of it. The English text on Gudrun's site is spot on, as she was kind enough to hold the interview in English so those are my words. 

I have Gudrun to thank for many things. First of all organizing these series of exhibitions and challenging us with the themes. The next one, if you're interested is on the subject of Boredom and if you want to participate you can find all the info here. Secondly for keeping us informed so well of where the exhibition has been (with full report and pictures) and where it will be going, and these exhibitions are probably going to the most exotic places my work does travel to, such as the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Moskou, St. Petersburg and Murmansk and many other venues all over Europe. The Freedom quilts were on show at the Festival of Quilts last month in Birmingham too. I just wish I could  have gone in person too! Gudrun also put me in touch with the German magazine Patchwork Professional who consequently published an article about my work, and she suggested it for the calendar too! And now she has honoured me with this interview! Saying THANK YOU seems quite inadequate!

If you want to find out more about how these little Freedom pieces were made you can find that information on an earlier blog post here.

Here comes the sun

And about time too. And of course there was no question of a uninterrupted azure sky but there was a lot more blue on view than we've come to expect this summer. I tried to make the most of it as I need to soak up that warmth and light in order to face the coming winter months.

There was more good news. My little quilts about Freedom have been exhibited in Almaty, Kazakhstan. If you had told me that at the start of my art career, I would never have believed it! This entire exhibition of small (no larger than 20 x 30 cm) art quilts is organized by Gudrun Heinz, who is just the best in keeping us up to date with when and where it travels to. Another piece of mine thus made it into the Murmansk (Russia) paper in the past,  and Freedom has now been to Kazakhstan. Hopefully it and all the other art on the theme of freedom will inspire people there. I don't suppose I'll ever make it there myself but you never know.

You can see a glimpse of one of the pieces I made in the right hand side bar of this blog, as it's also featured in the Bernina calendar. I'll be a calendar girl next month when I will share with you both the pieces again (or if you can't wait, click on the Freedom Textile Exhibition label below) as well as an interview Gudrun will be having with me for that occasion. You can see pictures from the Kazakhstan show here (sorry, the text is in German only).

Masquerade Rose

Bernina Calendar 2012

I knew it was coming but it was still a wonderful surprise to see the Bernina calendar for 2012 where for September the above image has been used. I have Gudrun Heinz to thank for the fact that a detail of my little Journal Quilt Je suis libre 1 has ended up being featured in this prestigious publication as Bernina selected the pictures for this calendar from among the entries for the Freedom Textile Exhibition she organized. It's travelling for the foreseeable future and has just been to Moskau and Saint Petersburg and will be going soon to Murmansk (all in Russia) and after that to Prague, Chech Republic. Just wish I could go to some of these exotic venues myself. You can read all about it and see the other entries on Gudrun's website here. In the calendar details of all the pieces featured are used and you can see my entire piece below. Read about the two pieces I entered in the exhibition on an earlier blogpost here.

The only requirement for being included in the calendar was that you had to use a Bernina to make your piece and I'm the lucky owner of not one but three Berninas and have in fact only sewn on Bernina sewing machines since I started doing my City and Guild Embroidery Course back in the early 90s. And I probably always will. Love them! Bernina themselves (located in Switzerland) made the ultimate choice of which pieces they would like in their calendar.

So hereby a HUGE thank you to Bernina and to Gudrun Heinz whom I also have to thank for being featured in the Patchwork Professional magazine earlier this year.

Freedom Quilts

It seems like it has been quite some time since I blogged about my main occupation, quilt making, and yet, this is how I spend most of my days, even though I enjoy my little forays into mixed media, photography and graveyard visiting and all my other actitiving.

It's just that making quilts is very time consuming so there is little to show you while I'm in the process and on top of that there is the requirement of most shows not to have revealed your work to the world before the exhibition concerned opens. Such was the case for these 2 little (20 x 30cm) quilts, but they faced the public for the first time at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham in August this year, so quite some time ago. I had so far forgotten I hadn't revealed them here.

They were both made for the theme of Freedom and will be travelling all around Europe for the coming few years, including exciting visits to Germany, the Czech Republic and Russia among others. This travellling exhibition is the brain child of a German quilter, Gudrun Heinz. She comes up with the themes (I'm participating for the 3rd time in one of her exhibitions), and organizes the busy schedule of where they will be exhibited. You can read all about coming venues, past exhibitions etc. on her website here. And there is also a CD available for each of these exhibition including the Freedom one.

My inspiration for both pieces came from a page in my Vintage Gluebook that you can see underneath on the left hand side. The vintage image I used on that page seemed to embody the Freedom theme to me. And by great synchronicity the page actually shows a map of a German city as well as gothic German text. How's that for co-incidence! It was simply meant to be turned into pieces for a German exhibition.

All the fabrics I used were hand-dyed and painted and of course they also feature my signature embellishments, seed beads! The figure was printed onto cottom fabric sheets and appliqued down. There are also postage stamps as well as vintage paper text (covered in Glossy Accents) and the title: Je suis libre, which translates as I am free from French. It sounds a lot more exotic in that language!

Quilting to the beat

Hand stitching is what I love best about making quilts but that doesn't mean I don't machine quilt from time to time. Today was such an occasion as contrary to my planning I decided to make another little Journal Quilt for a travelling exhibition on the theme of Freedom, organized by a German quilter. You can read all about it on this website.

I have taken part in 2 previous exhibitions organized by Gudrun Heinz and in fact, one of my piecies (Have I got news for you) is still travelling at the moment. It's been to exotic places like Russia, the Tsech Republic, Switserland and many others.

One Freedom piece was finished this week and on a whim a companion piece took shape in my head and today also entered the real world. The background is free machine quilted using what I call a pebble stitch. A real favourite for me but in order to do it I need music with rhythm and a loud beat. The CDs from the American Anthem album (a birthday gift from John) provided this in spades and pebbles were shaped under my hands by the sewing machine while I loudly sang along (badly!!) with the songs on the CDs! I can't show you the two pieces yet but a small detail can't do any harm!

It all made for a fun day specially as we also walked along the lane with the dogs in the autumn gloom! There too the main colour was orange.