These Days

by Misik Kim

After I finished our work for the special exhibition, many fabrics were left.

While working, I went on a journey into the past.

To my beautiful day….

I used these fabrics for my work of Alicia’s challenge.

There were many kind of letters.

Some of them were not used, some of them were changed too much now.

It is interesting for me

I enjoyed cutting and connecting,

I think that I live in many memories now.

Materials : Digital printed fabrics, commercial cotton.

Size :  40 (H) X 32( W)

Women's Roles in Sapa, Vietnam

Visiting another country on holiday and seeing the many roles of the women of the Sapa region, Vietnam inspired my quilt design. Here the women are multi-skilled in farming, domestic duties and the production of their traditional clothing which their adorn with embroidery, patchwork or indigo batik. The women grow, process and weave hemp into lengths for clothing. They use natural indigo to dye the hemp cloth.

The Museum in Sapa had many story boards of the village production processes. It was fascinating reading.

Old textiles are recycled into bags, wall hangings, jackets etc  sold at the market by the women who often have started their day in the fields before walking long distances to sell items.

These are some of the recycled embroidered pieces made into neck pieces, based on those worn by women of the Black Hmong ethnic groups.

Back baskets carry everything needed for daily life and this was a common morning procession. We spent 9 days in the area and I bought a few small embroidered items, cut from clothing to use in my work so when the challenge was announced I was still in Sapa and thought about my designs for a quilt. I also had a piece of  batik fabric I had made a few years ago. This fabric piece had the family roles of women written on it- wife, mother, sister, aunt, daughter, grandmother and was a perfect inclusion. The women of Sapa work very hard in all their roles.

Women's Roles in Sapa, Vietnam

18"W x 40.5"L [46cm w x 102.5cm]

Women in Sapa, Vietnam work very hard in their family roles and those of farm worker and textile producer and seller. The batik text in the central section lists familial roles while the three short woven hemp, indigo dyed with embroidery strips, showcase their needle skills. I have reversed the strip under the batik to show the hidden side of the piece, just as we don't see all the women do in a day's work. The necklaces are stitched and hand painted over the batik section.

Detail

Materials: cotton, hemp, embroidery thread, wax, dye, paint, batting, thread.

Techniques: batik text hand drawn, hand painted, hand couched, hand woven fabric, machine pieced, machine quilted.



 

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.

Greek Isle: Le Journey

This past several months the news has been full of extraordinary, very disturbing images of failed attempts by masses of individuals and families trying to flee war and poverty, no matter the perils.  The image I can't erase is a beachside on a Greek isle, mounded high with piles of color-filled clothing, sprinkled with life-vests.  Detritus washed ashore from failed attempts to cross out of North Africa to hoped-for security in Europe.

With this imagery in mind I searched my stash of text.  I like text, especially foreign text.  Text that doesn't necessarily mean anything to me, it just looks interesting.  Because of this, I collect text...so far the collection is fairly limited to English, French, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.  It was from this collection that I found a piece...a vintage, rough linen sack with cursive French.

Jumping off the fabric was 'le journey' and I knew where I was going.

Combining African fabrics with this linen, I built an island based on the traditional log cabin quilt block to underscore mankind's most basic and longed for right:  HOME.

detail

Greek Isle: Le Journey 40"x42"

Dream Tree

by Lin Hsin-Chen

Every time I complete an international exhibition project, I create a work to celebrate the time I spend. This is the one that I created for Taiwan International Quilt Exhibition 2016. I would like to thank all my friends for making our dreams come true. The dream now becomes a common recollection. A lifetime memory can be dignified, romantic, resplendent, surprised, unexpected, frustrated and hard-won. We must learn to accept all of them and keep them in mind constantly. It is the start of happiness.

When I was a kid, I used to have a variety of abstract ideas. At that age, I had no idea about taking actions and making dreams come true, and I didn’t know that failures are opportunities for self-learning. Dreams are like flowers. What a beautiful picture it is to hang them on a tree and grow with them. Dreams can be real or surreal. Without great determination, it is never easy to make dreams come true. Flowers bloom, big or small, present or past, and I hope one day there will be a tree full of flowers. And there comes another distant and big dream.

Thinking is the theme I chose for myself at the beginning of the third cycle of Viewpoints 9. The reason is that rather than indulge in fantasy and end up with nothing, I want to take actions and keep records of not only stunning works and exhibitions, but also words. I enjoy combining text and flowers in this challenge, and let them bloom together on the tree. Such a good thing! Thank you, Alicia, for the topic.

Materials: hand-dyed fabrics, commercial cottons, silk, hand-dyed threads

Techniques: hand stitched, hand pieced, hand appliquéd

Size: 100 x 100 (cm)

I would like to show you an unexpected beauty of this work. I was absolutely fascinated by it. It made me postpone batting and quilting process. But I do enjoy such delaying. Hope you will also like it. Here it is! I put it on a window after I completed piecing. The backlit photo gives me lots of ideas of quilting design, which means, I have not quilted the work yet. I look forward to sharing photos once it is quilted.

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Words cannot express...

How do you depict Joy?

I love words: their shape, their meaning, their sound. So much contained in so little, but somehow, never enough. I cannot imagine this generation will not learn the beauty of cursive writing and how creating the flow and shapes of words is artistic and calming.

As a writer, this challenge thrilled me. I often use words in my quilts and I’m continually seeking the best methods and tools to represent them either explicitly or implicitly in my art. My husband would say I’ve wasted lots of money chasing the perfect way, but I’d say I’ve learned a lot!

The words in the background of this quilt were written with white Liquitex paint via a small bottle and 9mm tip. The technique was loosely inspired by an article in Quilting Arts Magazine June/July 2015 issue by Sue Bleiweiss. The actual words tell my story as a high school swimmer and the joy of the water and the discipline of training.

Water is my theme for this cycle and I had this picture of a dear friend’s daughter from a Christmas card years ago. I was captivated by the total joy in her daughter’s face and asked if I could represent it in a quilt one day. Alicia’s challenge was the perfect opportunity to combine the inspiration of words with the raw emotion of this beautiful child. 

“Joy” measures 29” W X 40” H. It is whole cloth painted using Liquitex soft body acrylic paints and Derwent Inktense pencils. It is quilted with cotton and polyester threads. 

Original Photo

Back

Writing Detail

Sketchbook

For the Text Challenge, my goal was to create a composition that resembles a page torn out of my sketchbook.  Normally I do most of my pre-quilt "sketching" on paper, in my head and on the computer. 

But this time, a piece of white fabric was my paper and I used it to plan my next quilt. Whatever I would have done on paper or in my head, I worked it out on this fabric.

Using a ruler I first mapped out a rectangle in Fibonacci's golden ratio, then added a spiral with red marker.  

From there I sketched out my design (in this case a Monarch caterpillar in the beginning stages of forming a cocoon) first in pencil then later with sharpie marker. I mapped out the color schemes and labelled it here as I would do on a paper pattern. Then I went about choosing the fabrics.

All the while, I made notes to myself about what this image means to me personally - how the caterpillar in a cocoon reminds me of the creative "hibernation" I've been in lately. Maybe the state of being dormant can be used as an opportunity to transition into something fresh and new.

So this piece is really a  physical object representing my thought process.

This isn't technically a quilt by standard definition. Although I may add stabilizer to the back, I didn't want to quilt it with 3 layers. To me, finishing it as a quilt would make it too precious, too substantial and planned out. I really wanted to keep it looking like a thin sheet of paper; something I can add notes to anytime, or rest my coffee mug on, or cross things out and add new ideas etc.  Like the caterpillar, it's not a beautiful thing yet. But it has all the potential.

technical details:

Finished size 35"W x 42"H

materials used: graphite and colored pencils, sharpie marker, hand dyed and commercial cotton fabric

Sketchbook

For the Text Challenge, my goal was to create a composition that resembles a page torn out of my sketchbook.  Normally I do most of my pre-quilt "sketching" on paper, in my head and on the computer. 

But this time, a piece of white fabric was my paper and I used it to plan my next quilt. Whatever I would have done on paper or in my head, I worked it out on this fabric.

Using a ruler I first mapped out a rectangle in Fibonacci's golden ratio, then added a spiral with red marker.  

From there I sketched out my design (in this case a Monarch caterpillar in the beginning stages of forming a cocoon) first in pencil then later with sharpie marker. I mapped out the color schemes and labelled it here as I would do on a paper pattern. Then I went about choosing the fabrics.

All the while, I made notes to myself about what this image means to me personally - how the caterpillar in a cocoon reminds me of the creative "hibernation" I've been in lately. Maybe the state of being dormant can be used as an opportunity to transition into something fresh and new.

So this piece is really a  physical object representing my thought process.

This isn't technically a quilt by standard definition. Although I may add stabilizer to the back, I didn't want to quilt it with 3 layers. To me, finishing it as a quilt would make it too precious, too substantial and planned out. I really wanted to keep it looking like a thin sheet of paper; something I can add notes to anytime, or rest my coffee mug on, or cross things out and add new ideas etc.  Like the caterpillar, it's not a beautiful thing yet. But it has all the potential.

technical details:

Finished size 35"W x 42"H

materials used: graphite and colored pencils, sharpie marker, hand dyed and commercial cotton fabric

Pulse

Pulse ©2016, 26" x 40"

A month ago today, at 2:06 am, Eddie Justice texted his mother from a bathroom inside Pulse, an Orlando, FL nightclub. "Mommy I love you" he started. Back and forth, they shared the terror of the event as it unfolded.  "I'm going to die". By the end of the night, he and 48 other members of the LGBTQ community and their allies had been killed. Among them, young men, young women, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters.

A year ago at this time, I was sewing hearts for the victims of the Charleston, SC shooting.

I'm sick of making hearts...not that I don't want to comfort the hurt and hurting. Not that the act of sewing is not a soothing catharsis for me. But this cycle of violence must end. In the month that has passed since the horrific Pulse shooting, hundreds of innocent lives have been taken from Baghdad to  Baton Rouge. Many more have been shattered and changed forever. My heart breaks. I don't have answers, but I am looking.

Quilt details: Machine pieced, machine quilted commercial cotton prints.

Pulse, detail

Friendship

I was not enamored of the challenge to use text in my work, I particularly dislike spelling out the meaning too specifically, preferring to let viewers draw their own inferences.
However, I changed my mind during our recent trip to Taiwan- the warmth and hospitality shown to Martha and I by Hsin-Chen, her staff and family and our talented, appreciative and fun students made memories to treasure forever.

The beauty and incredible variety of the Chinese writing we saw everywhere was inspiring too, do I resolved to use it in a way to honor our host country and its people.

We spent a good deal of time on foot exploring-
the lush vegetation made the environment very different from my home in the desert.   I spent a fun day alone, making rubbings of the exotic leaves I found in my wanderings.

Then I asked Miss Lee, our translator, to write out "friendship through art" for me in Chinese.

I digitally extracted the text, and combined it on top of a photo of a wall of the old building above-

the text is repeated a dozen times, in varying sizes to become a graffiti like background element.

After the fabric came back from the printer, I spread out the colorful leaf rubbings from Tainan. and began to cut out additional branches for them...

you can see parts of the text peeping through the vibrant, healing leaves growing over the crumbling wall.  

Friendship, 40x33"dedicated to all the wonderful people who made TAQS '16 happen!