Kaleidoscope Kiwi

My interest in collage fabric was peaked when Sophie Standing (then living in Kenya) was scheduled to come to NZ to teach a course. It was horrendously expensive for one day but she is a marvellous tutor and her African animals had always been one of my gotos for inspiration.

The course was a bit different from what I might normally attend as every student was making the same basic format that Sophie had chosen - the kiwi. All the finished projects were quite different with some students adding crotchet and vintage embellishments and some students turning up with printed backgrounds. I had just opted for a colour wash.

The interesting thing was we had to chose one fabric from our stash that we didn’t want to do without and from that we were to chose five fabrics in tones to go with the chosen one. These were then expanded out to 12-20 in gradations to tone in together.

Next came the pattern. We had been asked to bring along a photocopy full size of the kiwi photo provided. This we cut out and then cut into to make sure the eyes on our piece were in the right place. We started with practice eyes because the eyes in any piece are the most important. Once we had our eyes right we used the pattern - cutting further into it as needed to get things in the correct placement. attention was directed to have light colours at the top and darker to the bottom.

Once the collaged pieces were stitched down the fun began with bright coloured machine stitching adding detail and going over the individual pieces to blend as a whole.

This was certainly a departure from my normal comfort zone with the bright colours that I opted to use but I was quite happy with the result

A Beginning to Collage Quilts

I guess with a new technique you have to start somewhere. With fabric collage, I started with an online course with Susan Carlson. it was all about using multiple colours in very different fabrics to achieve this result. It is not one of my best quilts but i did learn a lot and when I look at it now with fresh eyes I find the colourways interesting. The palette of the spiral moves from black to green but there is no blue fabric in the piece - maybe I needed to coil in further to lead the eye from green to blue. A lot of the lighter background fabrics and from my own printing whereas the spiral fabrics are mainly scraps of commercial prints. I do note I used a lot of African and native prints. I collected quite a few of these over the years but haven’t really used them in my work. I love the African Savannahs but am more drawn to take from my New Zealand heritage in most of my work - that and my travel dialogues. Maybe one day I will get to Kenya and see the savannahs for myself.

The koru form is all about growth and unfurling so as a subject for where I was at at this time it was probably appropriate. Susan glue tacks he fabrics initially and I have modified that system to better suit my own needs. Over the next little while i will show some more of my collage quilts and where they lead

Tea or Coffee, Jane

A colleague I worked with was interested in my use of recycled materials. At Christmas she gave me some little stencils with NZ themes. I decided to use these to create a quilt in standard blocks using teabags as the substrate. The used teabags were laminated onto a cotton base and then the stencils were applied using black ink. Each block was free machine quilted with a figure of eight pattern. Some additional stitching was added to enhance the images. For example around the wings of the birds and between the fronds of the foliage. The pieces were squared up.

For the sashing I used the inner foil coffee bags joined in strips with textured yarn and an overlay of black organza. This was also free machine stitched in a figure of eight pattern. The blocks and sashings were joined in the traditional way and the quilt was finished using a facing technique.

Jane had given me the stencils and the quilt included coffee packets and tea bags so i called the quilt “Tea or Coffe Jane”.

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

Through the Lens of Steve McCurry

As my interest in thread painting older faces developed, I found some wonderful portraits photographed by Steve McCurry who was a freelance photographer for National Geographic. I wrote to his studio and was granted permission to use his photographs as a starting point as long as I referenced Steve in my work. At the same time my interest in using teabags as a substrate within my work was developing and it seemed a good match to place the images in a teabag substrate stamped with a camera and having the images surrounding an image of Steve with his camera. All the teabags were salvaged from use dried and attached to a background of cotton with the teabags being attached with gel medium and a layer of gel medium over the top. The background took on an aged leather look. I called this quilt “Through the lens of Steve McCurry. Below is a close up of the individual images including some that were not used in the finished quilt.

Over the years I have learnt a lot from Steve’s photographs both in composition and of creating the ordinary/mundane into photographic work of art.

Shadow

Getting depth in a pet portrait of a cat that is all black was a challenge. I needed to introduce brown and grey in order for this thread painting not to be completely flat.

Shadow was my grandson’s cat and when he had his bad football injury and was laid up while I cared for him and home schooled him, Shadow was never far from his side. he would curl up on the black throw and nearly scare me to death when I went to move the throw, not knowing he was there. He would shoot up in the air and run up the back of the couch. He was a very lovely cat and worthy to be immortalised in this thread painting.

There’s a Storm Coming

This was a small quilt, a mix of thread painting and landscape applique. The sky was achieved by using a navy blue fabric that was bleach treated with a paper towel and then rinsed in sodium chloride to achieve the effect of storm clouds. The waves are also an early attempt at creating white water through thread painting and taking account of the way the waves curl from the bottom to the top of the pieces.

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.

Memories of Kakadu

My youngest daughter Kim spent 8 years in Darwin and when I went to visit we would often take a road trip to Kakadu National Park. It was full of wildlife and this quilt is dedicated to those trips. The images are thread painted and then applied to a pieced background of neutral fabrics. The quilt is edged with a textured yarn and the machine quilting includes images of gum leaves. The text in the middle is from a poem I wrote about another visit to Australia, the William Ricketts Sanctuary near Melbourne

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

Amish Wedding Ring

Being contrary again, I decided to make this quilt in non traditional colours - choosing colours the Amish often use in their quilts. My last year of school was spent as an AFS exchange student in Iowa and sometimes we would drive through the Amish communities and you would see the women/girls sewing in the window either by hand or on an old treadle machine. Their customs forbad the use of electrical machinery. The quilt sheet would then often be quilted in a community quilting bee but I never got to see that in progress. Their clothes were always in dark colours - black, purple, burgundy, blue - so that influenced my choice of colours here. You would also often see them in their horse and carriage coming to get grocery basics. It must have been extremely cold in the winter as the breath of the horses sometimes made ice around their muzzles, Instead of the usual white/cream inners I used a bluish purple creating the pieced circles out of scraps but concentrating so that the small purple circles joined up creating a secondary pattern.

About the time I finished this quilt golden papers came on the market and I was keen to try them out. This was an early machine quilted piece using the golden papers with the rose stencil traced onto them. It seemed such a good idea but removing all the little bits of yellow tissue like paper at the end was not such a fun thing to do. Maybe my choice of stencil was too detailed. I hsven’t used the paper for quilting since but I have occasionally used the left over part of the roll for stitching through to make portraits or similar for embroidery

This quilt is machine pieces and machine quilted.

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.