A Workshop With Gloria Loughman

I had long been a fan of Gloria Loughman and when she came to teach in my local town I was up for the challenge. Unfortunately the venue had extremely poor lighting which affected me quite badly and i ended up with what I could only think of as a type of migraine headache. But I did get to create this little masterpiece. We started off dying the fabric and then cut it into strips and realigned it. The outline of the scene was drawn on a backing fabric and the pieces applied in a flip and stitch manner.

This little piece is a landscape from the estuary at Whangamata with the big pohutukawa tree on the walk to the open beach. I wanted to have an open texture to the tree so it was created on water soluble and applied afterwards. The background hills on the other side of the estuary are just commercial cottons and the while thing is free machine stitched.

This is a very simple composition but the idea of deconstruction and then reconstruction was one I would revisit in later quilts

Playing with Values

Values described by half square triangles

The colours in this quilt always make me feel better. Perhaps it is the sunny yellow - a colour I don’t work with very often - or just the haphazard way the triangles create their magic. It was made during a very difficult period in my life and was just a pattern taken from a quilting book. I liked the idea of playing with scraps of different values to create the blocks and then joining them in a manner that created alternate shapes. Concentrating on the joining of the shapes took me out of my mind set and calmed my spirit - something that so often happens when I start creating and there is too much other stuff going on in life.

My scrap fabrics were sorted into lights and darks and then the half square triangles were joined one light to one dark in a fairly random manner.. I did concentrate on having the yellow triangles pieced so they would meet in the centre of the square blocks. I like those pops of colour in contrast to the subdued tones in the octogen centres.

Someone said to me, when I had my quilts displayed in the garden for a garden ramble, that I didn’t really have any style. Maybe I still don’t, but I was concentrating on refining skills in all of these quilts so that my repertoire and understanding of shape, colour and pattern was growing. Basically I was just making quilts that appealed to me and learning basics of design at the same time.