Single Use Plastic

Continuing on from the theme of using teabags as a substrate or art material, this quilt was made from a photo of an old lady who sheltered with me in a tropical downpour in Java. I asked if I could take her photo and she agreed. When she saw her photo she thought she was so ugly. I thought she was just so beautiful with her woven hat and plastic sheet raincoat and so much life and mystery in that face! Not long after this, Mt Merapi erupted and I wondered what happened to my wonderful model and if she managed to escape and continue her life anew.

The images below give a close up of the stitching on the teabags that brought her face to life. Everything used in this art quilt was recycled from the woven hat - remnants of Tamara’s art project, to the background scraps to the old scarf and finally the single use plastic that found a new life

A Gathering of Keruru

Learning to thread paint really changed my focus for quite a while. This quilt was begun in a workshop - the keruru (native wood pigeon) sitting on a wool felt log at the bottom left was made in this workshop. The keruru were made individually and then appliqued on. My quilt took on a life of its own and morphed from the class ‘sample” into this quilt. The flowers on the stylized cabbage tree are strings of pearl beads stitched onto strips of white fabric and applied. I can remember at the time of making this looking out for cabbage trees that were coming into flower to get the form of the flower branches sort of correct. The clematis flowers at the top right are also thread painted with the lianas made from textured yarn.

I remember I learnt a lot of other of textile techniques in this workshop. It was the fisrt time I had used raw edge applique - leaves of the cabbage tree and the process of creating the wool log was interesting. Wool sliver dyed in various colours was laid out on a background fabric and covered with water soluble laundry bags. This was then stitched over both horizontally and virtically. Once the water soluble bags were washed away, I was left with a substrate that was very like moss covered logs. Without the water soluble the wool felt would have caught in the presser foot of the machine and been almost impossible to stitch. It is a technique i will use again when I begin my series on tree bark textures

The quilt is free machine quilted. It marks a move in my journey from this sort of technique and into free style design

McKenna Ryan Wildlife Adventure

This was the second McKenna Ryan quilt I made. The colours in the photo are more muted than the quilt in reality. this one hung in our lounge for a, long time and i loved looking at the colours at night. This journey helped my a lot with colour selection as well as specific techniques, many of which I still use periodically in my quilts today. Quilting the water in random swirls would be an example of this

In My Garden

This is the quilt on my home page. It has a pieced white on white background - a system I also used in the Memories of Kakadu quilt - and machine appliqued flowers. I was drawn to this pattern because of the lovely contrasts and because nearly all the plants are replicated somewhere in my garden. When I was quilting this, their was a fantail that kept coming to the window and catching insects against the glass so I quilted a little fantail into the background of this quilt

Working in a range of green shades meant the cyclamen flowers really pop at the bottom centre.

I would still like to make a quilt on a similar manner on “Visitors to My Garden” celebrating the diverse bird life we experience on an ongoing basis - the joys of having a large garden, close to town but away from the main road. Sometimes , like when the tomatoes are ripening, I think thee are too many birds but at this time of the year we get a different set of visitors - sometimes migrating herons or paradise ducks. There is a mother mallard duck who hatches her brood each year in the pond to the north of us and then takes her babies across our property to Brooke Park each day so they can hide from the hawks. She hardly loses a single duckling and they start with her shepherding them along as fluffy bundles and end with a row of almost adult ducks. Then there is the keruru (wood pigeon) who comes to get water. He sits in the tree, watchful, to make sure the tui are not around to chase him away. Tui are quite aggressive birds. The tui abound in the flowering cherry in the Spring. If we get a dry Summer the pukeko come for water from the bird bath. They are incredibly noisy and keep jumping up onto the carport roof. Fantails are friendly little critters that often accompany me around the garden as I disturb minute insects that they catch on the wing. The little Californian quail are also noisy for their size - they fly straight up like a helicopter, chattering at full speed. Each year we also have a couple of pheasants that nest in the bush area behind the house. The cock pheasant will take off with a great flutter giving me quite a scare. And then there are the more usual visitors - thrush, blackbirds, sparrows finches and white eyes. I might even include some rabbits that sneak in to try and steal my vegetable seedlings. Lass loves to chase them but she isn’t fast enough to catch them.

Don’t you think that would make a delightful quilt. Time is the problem and I must finish my Diploma course before I start anything new.

Lilies in Moonlight

This was in the UFO pile for a long time. I purchased a pattern at a craft fair and got as far as piecing the background and then misplaced it. I was loathe to create another substitute background. Some of the lilies are back to front due to placing the pattern piece on the wrong side of the fabric but all in all it has been not too bad a pattern to work on. The lilies and leaves are quilted under net (black for the leaves and white for the lilies) - the first time I had used this technique. The idea I think is to blend the variances of fabric choice in the applique. The leaves and flowers were made independent of the background and applied at the end. Of course my common quilting style of circular figure eights in the background brings the background together and allows the lilies and leaves to stand out more against the background

It has been an interesting choice of subject as these lilies are a bit of a rogue in NZ, populating quite large areas where they have escaped from gardens. I do have a clump in my garden but have to make sure I get rid of any seedlings that come up or they will take over. They can be quite invasive although I appreciate in colder climates they are a favourite.

Machine Applique Baltimore

Look at all those bright colours and pieces but this one was machine appliqued and machine quilted. Again, it was a block of the month that helped to keep my creative juices flowing in my left brain job. It was one of those quilts that when I got to the end I found I had made a major error. The lengthwise sashing on the right, with applique done wasn’t long enough to join on. I needed about another inch or so. I resolved this by adding the additional length, cut on the bias, before adding the sashing. The dense random quilting effect means, unless you know where to look, it is barely discernible in the finished quilt.

The quilting journey is often about learning and fudging errors and this was one of those situations. I obviously hadn’t measured twice and cut one on this occasion.

Row By Row

This was another block per month by Ngaire Brookes. It is part applique and part piecing. Some of the pieced blocks were quite tricky.

When Charlotte was a baby and quite little I used to babysit her while Kate went to work and this was her favourite quilt. We would make up stories about the blocks on the quilt - like where the grasshoppers might be going or why the rabbits had to run run run.

While I don’t make quilts in this manner these days it is a lovely jaunt down memory lane to revisit the ones I made on my journey. It is pictured here hanging on the fence during one of my quilts in the garden charity openings. It must be late spring/early summer as those are dahlias coming up in front of the quilt

A Far From Perfect Quilt

This photo was taken before all the threads had been trimmed from the top. It is an interesting quilt as for me it represents business travel in the very busy years of our life. The blocks are hand appliqued and I would prepare a block before we set off somewhere to stitch on the aircraft or in airports. It was a way of keeping calm. One whole block was stitched waiting in Heathrow because a flight from Paris had been delayed because of fog and we had to wait several hours for a connecting flight to New Zealand. Naive style quilts are not my favourite style but this one was kept with simple shapes because of the manner of its making.

Because the blocks were made piecemeal over several years, when I went to joint them and the borders, I had quite a bot of fudging to do to get them to fit. As a learning curve for quilters, there are often adjustments or alterations that have to be made in the final stages. Hence I call this quilt “The far from Perfect quilt.”

The blocks were machine pieced and the stipple quilting was free machine quilted. The full quilt is a generous Queen size quilt.

The 30 Year Quilt

I call this the Thirty year quilt because, if I can go by the date on the bottom Baltimore Quilt block, it took me 30 years to complete it. As you can see, it is quite a large quilt. It was begun as a block per month, designed by Ngaire Brooks as a NZ Baltimore. The squares are hand appliqued (not very well) as I was still very much a beginner.

I daringly discarded some of Ngaire’s designs and replaced them with my own. This was a major step forward from my thinking that I had to follow the rules. I loved doing the applique birds so I put in the keruru and the kea. I can’t remember what the blocks were that I discarded. I joined the squares together and then it sat in the UFO pile for a very long time - not sure what I would do with it or how I would finish it.

As the years past, I decided to go into first machine quilting and then free machine quilting as per Karen McTavish’s great book. I found drawing out the quilt patterns on fabric to be a tedious process so free machine quilting gave me some immediacy and was better suited to my temperament.

In 2018 I joined the on line Creative Strength Training with Jane Dunnewold. Studying the archetypes that affect all of us and learning about the committee in our heads that tell us our work is not good enough or no one will like our work, I discovered that my Saboteur whispered in my head that if something wasn’t completed, it couldn’t be criticised. I decided it was time to put the Saboteur to rest. I took out my NZ Baltimore centre and decided this would be the year that I completed it. It was a mammoth task. First I added the borders, complete with the applique ivy and berries and then I began the quilting. The trapunto diamonds were the first to go in.

As I began the free machine leaf design from Karen McTavish’s book - I think she calls it a fire design or open Cs but my designs always form a leaf type outline. It has become one of my staple designs). I began to feel the quilting needed a bit more. I introduced the random butterflies and dragonflies into the background. I felt this provided an additional design element. I was really getting into free design by now.

I did not want the borders to detract from the squares so the ivy and berries are just on alternate corners . They are stipple quilted around but the rest of the borders are just straight line quilting.

The hand applique hadn’t improved but it was less a focus now.

I include this story because there are many who have UFOs hidden away and maybe this story will encourage them to take out their work and revisit it. I was pleased with the end result and most people who see the quilt are more interested in the overall design and effect than the less than perfect applique.

In the gallery below you can see the individual blocks and quilting a bit better.

McKenna Ryan Country

A McKenna Ryan Block of the month

For quite a while I was enamoured of McKenna Ryan’s quilts. They were quite a challenge as each block was like a mini quilt in itself. And then they had to be joined. From memory there was a bit of fudging that went on to get each block to align properly. This was the frst one I did as it harked back to our farming heritage even though some of the images are quite American inspired. I have always thought it would be fun to do a quilt with the round haybales that are now such a common sight in the rural community. I love the tree in the block at the top of this quilt. I had grown away from the country themed quilts like the one I did early on in my quilting journey but this was a return to base almost. Of course batiks work beautifully in quilts like this because they give such depth with their marbled patterning.

Entering the World of Applique

My First Applique Quilt

This Rose of Sharon quilt was the first applique quilt I made. The central flowers are machine stitched with rayon thread. This began a long time love affair with the effect the shiny rayon could introduce into quilts and was an early design decision away from doing what was expected. The green of the leaves has faded quite a bit over the years but I do not mind the colour shift. Originally the leaves were a very dark green.

It continues the traditional idea of working in a block/grid format which would predominate in my journey for quite some time.

Although the flowers are stylised, it also reinforces my preference for representational imagery. This is something that I periodically try to move away from but always seem to come back to. I do find abstraction difficult without an anchor of a form of representation. I can admire the bold lineal shapes of the true abstractionist and follow compositional rules to create pieces that are lineal based. Somehow I come back to representation as a preference.

This quilt is hand quilted. Somewhere on the border the grid is fudged to get it to meet. This was another “learning curve”. I don’t think I have ever made a perfect quilt. I am not like the Amish who purposefully put some error in their work. They believe only God can make something perfect. My errors happen and then I have to work toward “fixing” them. During covid lockdown, I joined the inaugural group of Textile.org Stitch club (UK) and was introduced, in one of their workshops, to Gregory T Williams. Perhaps the biggest takeaway from that course was to “Embrace your whoopsies”. Maybe i was already subconsciously doing that but, since then, mistakes are incorporated into the overall whole of my creations by finding a way to incorporate them into the work. I was reminded of Julia Cameron’s words in “The Artist’s way”: don’t fear imperfection. The perfectionist will redraw an image until the paper tears. Perfectionism can also be a means of stifling creativity. Often you are the only person that knows where that imperfection is.

Oriental 3 D Baltimore

The idea of 3 D applique is continued in the quilt which has another block of the month with an Asian theme. There were lots of new techniques to be learnt in creating the blocks. I chose a black background to set off the brilliant colours in the blocks and then white sashings as a foil to each square. The quilting is machine done but the blocks are all hand appliqued using the various methods that came with the pattern.

The Country Bride Quilt

This was one on the first quilts I machine quilted. The first applique block was begun in a workshop. The applique is machine done using rayon threads which I loved because of their shiny and fine finish. Everyone else in the class was using very traditional pale pinks or pale blues for their applique blocks but I just loved the more vibrant colours I chose.

At this stage in my life, my husband would go to the club on a Friday night and, as the children had already left home, I would use this time to quilt. Then go and collect him from the club so he wasn’t driving home having had a few drinks. It was a special time for me, a space in the week that was dedicated to what I wanted to do without interruptions.

Each block, including the quilted blocks, was made separately and then I joined them in a quilt as you go fashion. The top seam is sewn right sides together but the back seam is folded over and hand stitched down.

The quilt patterns were all pre-marked on the quilt top before stitching. I think form the photo I must have used a different weight batting in the border because is stands out more readily than the internal blocks.

Hand Applique Rose Quilt

This was a block of the month that I signed up for and when the first block arrived the colours were not what I was expecting - they were very modern and I was wanting to create a traditional looking quilt - so I withdrew from the contract for the rest of the blocks and substituted my own colours and fabric. I probably wasn’t very popular with the online supplier but the colours in the first block were nothing like what had been advertised in the pink version. It was an indication that I was becoming braver in my journey and more particular in what I was going to spend my time working on.

You can see I am still working very traditionally when this quilt was made with traditional blocks and sashings. I remember those saw tooths being a real challenge and having to fudge to get them to meet at the join. but that was all part of my quilting journey. I Was still making bed sized quilts at this stage. Quilts that had something practical as an outcome. Very traditional and quite controlled. But then that is part of the journey that has continued into the more free form quilts I create today.

This quilt is hand appliqued, machine pieces and machine quilted. It easily fits a Queen sized bed.