Busy Bees Village

As I said before, everything I found in my cupboards is desirable - it's just that I haven't got round to use it!  So I call this my "unused desirables" piece. 

I have been collecting commercial batiks for years.  I find them pretty and at times irresistible - so I buy them occasionally, with the idea that I will one day find a use for them.

I decided to use them to make a map. When I teach classes on map-making, I find my students often bring commercial fabrics to work with.  So I have often thought I should make a map using commercial fabrics myself, as a class sample. This was my opportunity.  (I can always show a photograph, if the quilt is away travelling).

It's an English village among fields, with a river at the bottom.  I added one or two other old fabrics. I used my usual freehand piecing technique for most of the quilt.

It was important to find a contrasting fabric for the roads. The dark fabric I originally planned on did not show up well. So I eventually bought a new, very light, batik fabric, at the Festival of Quilts - it has a much more interesting effect.

I also fused-appliqué a bridge crossing the river. 

The striped fabric comes from a small stash of fabrics I bought in my first trip to the USA in 1993, intending to use them to make doll's clothes (and I did - in the times when I was a toymaker).  I have recently used some of them for my tribute to Yvonne Porcella quilt, and have rediscovered the pleasure of using stripes and checks, and black and white.

However I am not sure I will use the batiks again, certainly not all together - maybe as details, among other fabrics.  I find the result too busy - I am so used to working with hand-dyed, almost solid fabrics.  So I called my map Busy Bees Village.

Size 30" high by 25" wide.

The Unused Desirables

For this challenge, I looked inside my cupboards, and I found lots of things I don’t use regularly.  But I cannot call them undesirables – I loved them when I bought them - they are all desirable, it is just that they have not been used – yet?!

There are some beautiful commercial fabrics, including interesting batiks, and some really old fabrics I bought in the US when I was still making dolls, bits of which I have used for making dolls’s clothes, like 20 years ago.  

There is a shelf full of silk organzas and painted silks, which I have used at some point, a long time ago.  Some of them were used in the couple of bojagis I made.

I have also a collection of fabric paints, and colourful pens such as Sharpies, which I always mean to use, and then I don’t – except occasionally for printing text with Thermofax screens.

I have gorgeous Inktense colour pencils and blocks – which I don’t know how to use, and no idea of what to do with them.  I have Markal sticks, which I do know how to use, but haven’t found a way of employing them in my work.

And other things I haven’t mentioned here….

So plenty to choose from, for this challenge… decisions, decisions…

The Magic of Shakespeare

I am a great fan of Shakespeare. I particularly love some of his more magical plays, such as A Midsummer Night's Dream, which I saw recently again, twice - once at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, and once on the BBC - an extraordinary version dreamed onto the TV screen by the team that made Dr Who - so you can imagine the fabulous effects they used to work magic on the viewers!

This quilt is called "The Play's the Thing" and uses Shakespeare's titles to work a design with text on a dark background.  It is made with a fused appliqué technique, and it is 40" by 33".  Measurements are the wrong way round - but it could be hanged the other way, as the titles are both vertical and horizontal.

Text on Fabric

Letters, words, phrases, paragraphs – in short, text on fabric - are very appealing elements of design. The letters can be clear or garbled; they can be read easily or not at all.  Their meaning can be part of the quilt’s idea, or just a background part of the design.

Reflection 4 by Jette Clover

Letters and words could be applied with many different methods and tools: embroidery, fused appliqué, pens, paint, computer printing, screen-printing, thermofax, ironing paper transfers, and many more.

 Walk in Orville by Susan Shie - detail

I challenge you to incorporate an element of text into your next quilt.  It doesn’t matter what size the text section is, neither it should be necessarily readable - as long as it is sufficiently visible to be understood as a clear component of the design of the work.

Alicia Merrett - Mayfair 1761 - detail

Text printed on other materials - paper or whatever - can also be incorporated, as long as the finished piece has some fabric on it. We will continue with the size of 40” high, and whichever width you prefer - in this case, even long narrow strips will be acceptable!

Fields at Dusk

I found the monochromatic challenge very appealing, so I set out to make a piece almost straight away.  A map seemed to be the obvious choice – a variety of shades of one colour for the fields, black and white for the buildings, grey for the roads and paths.

My first thought was using green – the obvious colour for fields.  However I thought it may be too ‘strong’ without other, warmer colours to counteract it – too stark with just black and white.  So I opted for purple – the colour of dusk.

Purple is a mixture of mainly red and blue, so its shades can veer towards the blue or the red. If a lot of red is added, it becomes too pink.  So I opted to combine both purples - those veering towards red, and some veering towards blue.  I had a variety of hand-dyed fabrics fitting the bill so that wasn’t a problem.

The quilt is improvisationally pieced, freehand, using no rulers. The dusk fields are densely machine quilted, with a range of purple threads, and have added stitched ‘paths’ using a double needle and two different grey threads.  There is some minimal quilting in the white areas, and none in the black areas; and none either on the grey roads.

How does it relate to my Magic and Science theme?  Well – these kinds of views from above weren’t easily available before cameras, aeroplanes, and satellites – so there is the science connection.

The size is 40” high by 22” wide.  I am very happy with it.

Alchemy

How does alchemy relates to natural dyeing?  Well, I don’t know for sure, but it somehow seems to do. Using natural products and mixing them, boiling them, distilling them, searching for some wonderful result….  Anyway, Alchemy seemed a good theme for my quilt, fitting well with my ‘Magic and Science” theme.

Now I had to find the fabrics.  As I didn’t want to dye them myself, I investigated whether I could buy them – but I found no sellers in the UK.  A few friends do 'eco' dyeing, but their fabrics are all in the ‘beige’ range – totally not appealing to me.

Then I remembered The African Fabric Shop, run by quilter Magie Relph - http://www.africanfabric.co.uk.  I explored the online shop, and talked to Magie. She couldn’t guarantee that all the fabrics were dyed with natural dyes, except for the ones done with Kola nuts. But she thought the indigo was mostly dyed naturally too.  The website describes the complex processes the dyers carry out to obtain the different effects on the fabrics.- colours, shapes, etc - fascinating to read.

So I chose the Kola nut and indigo mix fabric – almost black - for the background.  I then looked at other Kola nut-dyed fabrics, which are beautiful to look at, but still, Kola nuts give mostly a beige tone – not for me.

My eye was caught by another set of fabrics in the website, called Langa Lapu Sun Prints, made in South Africa:

“The name Langa Lapu comes from the Xhosa for 'sun cloth'. And that's just how these wonderful hand-dyed fabrics are created. Leaves, ferns and seed pods from plants indigenous to South Africa combine with the natural elements and eco-friendly dyes to produce these unique sun prints. Langa Lapu uses non-toxic dyes, composts old leaves and recycles when ever possible. For example, vegetation used in the dyeing process is sourced form garden centres and not cut fresh from the bush”.

They come in really strong colours, and the foliage shapes on them are beautiful. So I chose to use Langa Lapu fabrics to make the letters and the flasks, tubes, beakers shapes which I then fused to the background. I enjoyed playing with the colours, and the marks left by the leaves give a great  texture to the fabrics. And I think it is important to support the hard-working South African dyers in their small businesses.

The quilt is 40” high by 31” wide. The indigo fabric leaves a slight stain on my fingers when I handle it, and it has a faint smell – but not unpleasant. In the first of the detail shots you can see (faintly) the straight line quilting I did on the background. I also quilted all around each letter and shape, but that is very close to the edges, so it's not visible in the photographs.

The Natural Conundrum

This challenge presents me with a conundrum.  I don’t dye fabric.  I don’t like messing about with wet processes – yuk! - I haven’t got the facilities, or made the space, to do any dyeing.

However I investigated.  I bought books, read them (!), considered the processes, researched how I could get strong colour with natural dyes.  I discovered mordants and fixatives can be more toxic than procyon dyes. I found that if one wants to get really strong colour, the number of stages mounts up, without guarantee of final success (at least for beginners…)  The book cover below is rather misleading!

I am quite keen on improving our environment, but going around collecting the plants etc that are needed for natural dyeing doesn’t really appeal.  The most ‘natural’ dyeing I have done in the past is to submerge white fabric in strong tea to make it ‘skin tone’, when I used to make dolls.

Rust is a process that I find rather overdone already, and the colour does not appeal to me. I am not a 'beige' person – and most ‘easy’ natural dyes – such as tea, coffee, onion skins – only produce shades of beige and brown. And I need strong colour! Wild colour! I wouldn't know what to do with beige tones...

So eventually I pursued other lines of enquiry and found a solution.

You’ll have to wait till the 27^th to find out what it is!

From Galileo to Interstellar

To follow my theme of Magic and Science, I decided to use equations, although I know little about maths.  But they looked attractive to me as a design element. I searched for those equations with a particular meaning for my purpose, which was to chart the important landmarks that have eventually led to the exploration of space - although we haven’t yet progressed as far as Interstellar.

The equations are, starting from bottom up:

Galileo’s equation of motion

Kepler’s law of interplanetary motion

Newton’s law of gravity

Einstein’s curved space-time

The equations were machine stitched with white thread on black fabric, to look a bit like chalk on a blackboard. These ‘blackboards’ are only about ¼” thick, but they do stick out, therefore fulfilling the 3-D brief.

The background is a piece of  fabric hand-dyed in multicolour style by Heide Stoll-Weber, which I quilted with circles inside circles, to give the feel of outer space and of interplanetary travel. It also includes the names of the scientists who wrote the equations. The ‘blackboards’ were then hand-appliquéed with hidden stitches, which kept the edges in relief.  It's 40" high by 27" wide.

Previously I had played with the idea of attaching my witch doll to the background - whom I found in the attic - but decided against it. Although it stuck out just the 4” maximum allowed, it proved incredibly difficult to attach, and likely to present great complications to travel.  But you may enjoy seeing my experiments – she is precariously held by pins to the wall behind the quilt.

 

 

This quilt is also a celebration of British astronaut’s Tim Peake’s flight to, and time at, the International Space Station, which has been front page news in the UK for the last month or so.