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

The Ox Team

Texture has always been a feature in my art work and this one is no exception. The trees and bush surrounding the image are made from wool needle felt and textured yarn

This was a family piece that was a bit scary to contemplate. My great grandfather and his three sons farmed in the Oparau area and had to clear some land that was covered in trees to get timber for building on the farm - we are talking around the 1930s here. They worked with old fashioned axes and used a bullock team to drag the trees out of the bush to where they could be milled for building. As long as I can remember a photo of the four of them with the bullock team has hung somewhere in the house. With the magic of digital reproduction I now have my own copy of the original photo which hangs in the dining room. It is a bit of a daunting operation to replicate that photo but it was a heritage task.

The men are predominantly thread sketched, the bullocks have more detail added with thread paint. This is a very early thread paint and is quite painterly in its effect. The background is machine quilted

What Does a Textile Artist Do With a Printing Plate

For two years I travelled to Hamilton once a week with a wonderful group of local ladies to the Waikato Arts Society printmaking group. This was a social outing for me as well as an educational one. The main focus was on intaglio printing though we did look at some relief printing and collagraph. The experience helped shaped my art going forward and propel me toward more becoming a mixed media artist.

The plate used in this creation was an early one using a picture of a fish on a calendar as inspiration. I learnt from the group that you could carve into cheap plastic cutting boards or even cereal containers (rather than the more expensive aluminium plates) and that you could use a pasta maker or a die cut machine to print small pieces. I could not justify the cost of a big printing machine at home which was part of the drawcard for the group travelling to Hamilton. I also learnt things like using the paper damp so it didn’t tear which stood me in good stead when it cam to eco printing in a heat press.

Back to this little quilt. Of course my focus was still on textiles rather than paper prints, although you can see the original paper print below. I decided to print my fish (or try to) on fabric. Three runs through the cuttlebug and the prints above appeared. So now I needed to create a waterscape for them to live in.

The ladies I went to class with were dedicated primarily to their printing and created wonderful prints but as always I was impatient to get the next process.

Cleaning the inked plate with mull and wiping areas like the mouth and eye (see below) completely clear of ink was not my favourite part of the operation.

Currently I am working on advanced techniques using a gel plate and some of those images are on the Printing without a press blog.

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.

Lest We Forget - 100 year Anniversary of Anzac

2015 was the centenary of the Anzacs and Gallipoli. This quilt was made as a commemoration. the Flanders poppies are synonymous with Anzac day here in NZ and creating the 3 D poppies was lots of fun. The inserts are less than perfect but they have the images of my Dad and Robin’s Dad in them - two young men who went off to the Second World war. This was the first time I had attempted to insert photos in a porthole system.

I chose the dark grey marbled background fabric as a foil for the red and also because it reminded me of explosions shells going off. The quilt is machine quilted in a leaf pattern (or as Karen McTavish calls it,Open Cs.

The words machine embroidered are the words of the Anzac prayer: At the going down of the sun and in the morning, We will remember them.

Geisha - An Impulse Buy

I am not really an impulse buyer. In fact I sometimes feel so overwhelmed when I go to a fabric store that I end up not buying anything at all. This is another reasons block of the month quilts suited me so well. And today most of the material I use is either from my stash, recycled of printed/dyed myself.

This geisha panel quilt is an exception. Of course it was an easy quilt to piece together the quilting was machine done. On the blue I have traced a pattern onto the fabric and on the geishas and patterned fabric the quilting follows the lines of the patterns. It is a refreshingly simple 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.

My Stars

When photo image transfers (now called heat transfer) first became available, I was keen to try them out and the idea of this quilt was born. The quilt is completely self designed and begins with a black and white photo of my husband and I on our wedding day at the centre. a starting point. This is surrounded by a very busy patched inner section representing the business of our lives that were chaotic and yet had some order within the chaos. It is held in place by the thin red border. The white corner quilting gives the eye a resting place from the busyness in the centre (and provided me a place for more machine quilting practice). Each side shows photographs of my children growing up: my eldest daughter on the left, my son at the top and my youngest daughter on the right. The bottom has my Mum, my husband and the three children together. The white square represents our son who was still born and who we never had the opportunity to see. My garden surrounds them all

From Darwin with Love - A Colour Palette Challenge

This quilt also owes its inception to Kim’s years in Darwin - “The Top End”. One Christmas a package of fabrics arrived in the colours of the Top End: Ochre, bright yellow and intense blue. I will always associated these colours with the Northern Territory. These were colours I didn’t usually work with and the palette was a challenging one - Kim was probably aware of that. I used lots of cream to tone down the complimentaries and this is the result. I was quite pleased with the result and the fact that I had lots of space to practise using machine quilting. A good example of how pushing past our comfort zone can push us into new creative practice.

The quilting patterns were traced onto the quilt and then off I went. There are back to back hearts in the squares between the large pieced blocks. This was the first time I had used a mixture of curved quilting patterns and straight echo stitching