Yes, it’s that time again, and the annual SAQA Benefit Auction starts this week. All bidding is online, and open to Anyone, Anywhere, members of SAQA and non-members alike. At the SAQA website https://www.saqa.com/auction you’ll find all this year’s 320+ donated 12″ quilts made by myself and fellow SAQA members, and access full information on how to bid for the one or more you’d like to own. There’s full information on how the reverse auction process works, and any questions you have.

My work “Just Go with The Flow” is available at ANY time for $1000, but then will be up for bidding 21st to 29th September

The first day, September 11th, is Diamond Day, on which every quilt may be bought for US$1000. After that, the 320+ donated 12″ works by SAQA members are divided into three groups for the reverse auction process – every week the price of every piece in that group starts at $750 with prices dropping daily until until they’re sold. The second and third groups repeat the process.

Yesterday I went with Mike and our friend Dalehl to see a couple of fibreart exhibitions I’d been wanting to visit for a few weeks. It was cold but sunny, a perfect day to wrap up and get out for a bit of cultural activity.

First stop was the Spanish Cultural Centre in the Old City to visit an exhibition of paper costumes there, that I’d been humming and hahing over a bit, I think because ‘paper’.., so it wowed me more than I’d been expecting. Textile art friend Felipe whose background is in theatrical costume had mentioned it glowingly, so I shouldn’t have been a bit surprised, and Mike, who’s not always especially interested in these sorties but kindly tags along, commented that it was amazing, which is high praise for someone with his genetic background.

The exhibition comprised several very elaborate C17 ladies’ dresses, copied and produced entirely 100% out of cream and white paper, by students in the final year of their course in theatre costume and design. In pairs they produced paper copies of gorgeous dresses in portraits by of that era painted by prominent artists like Van Dyck et al, … and there were videos showing some of the processes they used to achieve what they did. These costumes were all monochromatic so the viewer would focus on what they achieved in making different kinds of paper look like the fabrics and trims they represented, rather than being distracted by colours and prints. With some it was really hard to believe they were paper, and of course we were really tempted to touch, but didn’t of course.

Downstairs in the centre was another interesting exhibition of prints of flowers, trees and birds that had been created using the cyanotype process with fabrics and paper coated with light sensitive solutions made from ingredients found in any home kitchen or garden. All the prints were in shades of brown from dark cream to almost chocolate brown which formed a very striking array around the white room. Interesting, and because I know virtually nothing about cyanotype images, have never been tempted to join what seems to be a current craze, and I’d always presumed it was only possible to get a result in blues…

Then we moved out to the Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales in Parque Rodó, to see an exhibition of both the woven tapestries and some of the 3D fibreart figures by a national fibrearts icon, Cecilia Brugnini. Very early in my time here in Montevideo someone took me to meet her, and a year or two later I took visiting Australian artist friend Wendy Lugg to meet her, but I can’t claim to actually know her. This exhibition is a lovely retrospective survey of her art rather than containing anything new, but it was wonderful to see a whole group of perhaps 20 woven works hung so we could see their backs too, which often carried interesting textures themselves. These works range in size from 1-2m, and the stitcher in me saw some lovely textures on many of them, and I found the rich colour palettes very 70s-80s in style, some of them featuring touches of glitter – and I just love a bitta glitta. There were also perhaps 8 or 9 plinth-mounted 3D soft sculpture figures, in various sizes up to about 1/5th life size.

We saw several other really interesting exhibitions in the MNAV, too, including one in which a number of artists presented their ideas through works based on the concept and importance of play in the exhibition title Somos Jugando (‘We are Playing) There were a couple of videos on kids playing the hopscotch and leapfrog- which we played when we were very young, and there was a collection of some of the board games we played. All kids love to dress up in adult clothes and pretend to be a grown-up, whatever we wanted to be; and an interesting collection of hanging dress-like objects by Olga Bettas showed how we can present another identity by covering ourselves with something different.

After all that, we needed somewhere warm to have a coffee and sandwich. The MNAV’S coffee shop is nice out under the trees in summer, but we decided to head for the fish market in Buceo for fish and chips at the restaurant there. It was a good choice because without waiting we got a good table inside, and everyone’s fish was lovely. I ordered risotto stuffed moron/capsicum with mine, which reminded me of the potential of stuffing those vegetables, which I really like.

In every medium are many artists who select some grid layout for their design. I learned about about traditional geometric patchwork and quilting as a cultural project while temporarily based in the USA 1987-94, and instantly loved how identical elements are repeated in horizontal/vertical grids, or composed diagonally (“on point”) in that traditional textile artform. However, I only ever made one traditional design (Flying Geese) quilt, because my creative embroidery background took over. By 1989 I was adding mixed media to traditional quiltmaking techniques to produce original quilted wall art in the then fairly new art quilt medium, and in the early 90s adopted improvisational construction techniques. While my choices in preferred techniques and materials have changed greatly since then, my love of grids has endured, and most of my art quilt portfolio is still based on some kind of grid layout.

The pin boards on my own Pinterest site are mostly textile and fibre art related topics. The titles of my pin collections include contemporary hand stitch, textures, grids, sheers, stitch on paint, holes, edge treatments and more you can check here. Sometimes I save an image to more than one board if they overlap, as do the contemporary hand stitch and textures collections, because to a stitcher these are so related. Pinterest is really a vast catalogue, personalised because it knows my particular interests, and while I browse there at least once a week, it’s often without finding anything especially interesting.

But on Pinterest this morning my attention was really taken by this image of the bodice area of a mixed media dress by USA artist Marylin Stevens (who gave permission to use it here)

If you check carefully and look at the full image, it’s only the front part of a dress, not a complete dress that someone could pull over their head to cover their body, but my interest isn’t how she stitched or wove it, because I can think of several different ways I could get something like this texture in a pattern a bit reminiscent of the Greek key or meandering pattern, also used by the Romans. My interest is the textural pattern itself, achieved using whatever process she did… and it will be on my mind for a while!

A few years ago SAQA expanded its mission concept and statement, adding 3D quilted objects to its former focus, the fairly modern artform of wall quilts that descended from historic traditional quilts. Since the late 80s, 3D forms were increasingly appearing in art quilt exhibitions, and SAQA now accomodates popular use of quilting techniques and materials in soft sculptures including the various vessel types of bowl, basket, box and vase that are popular with this group. SAQA started up a 3D Special Interest Group aa few years ago, which I joined, and it focuses on quilted objects that are outside the two dimensional wall quilts that have always been the backbone of the Studio Art Quilt Associates organisation.

I began making art quilts in 1988, but since the late 80’s I’d been paart of the Creative Embroidery movement of that era, during which time I’d made several soft sculptures, among them my all-time triumph, my 1987 soft sculpture of the historic Golden Eagle nugget. (backstory gold nugget soft scuplture)

I made several fabric covered bowls in the late 1990s, and a couple of fabric covered boxes in 1986-7 of which I don’t have pics, but I also experimented in 2021 (pandemic) with box-shapes as a shadow box kind of presentation for some stitchery- and maybe I should revisit that idea.

The other main application of 3D is bas relief 3D elements attached to 2D wall quilts, which is how I’d describe most of my 3D work up until the Growth series of embellished stuffed Suffolk Puffs that I’ve been exploring in the last two years –

Recently on Instragram I visited a textile artist Victoria Gertenbach who does lots of 3D elements and small items like embroidered fabric beads, mats and vessels. In that link are two small vessels she posted last year (2025) showing me enough to work out how she probably makes them. They’re small, and she commented that the left, more yellow one, was still a bit floppy but would stiffen up with more stitching. She doesn’t give dimensions for her works so I’m not sure, but this newer one posted earlier this year could be larger, and I feel she probably added stiffening during that construction. Milliners’ stiffening and lightweight canvas would both work here, and the product called fosshape that SAQA’s in N.America and probably Europe – maybe everywhere except LATAM – all adore working with! But anyway, I have a heap of old Xray photos that will be great. They’re easy to sew through by hand or machine, and for something fairly large I’d machine two of them together to form one (stronger) sheet.

My fans know I regularly visit that site most days of the week, checking recent updates there, and I usually spend perhaps 5-10 minutes, but as we all know, that can so easily lead to an hour or more exploring down some burrow hole before coming up for a breath of air, a cup of tea or a walk outside!

I occasionally write a series on interesting things I’ve saved there, https://www.pinterest.com/alisonschwabe1/ as browsing has led me to artists whose interesting work I maaay not have seen elsewhere, eg https://www.alisonschwabe.com/weblog/?p=3611 and https://www.alisonschwabe.com/weblog/?p=7160

Today I noticed a really interesting image of a tube of sheer fabric showing a bunch of pearl like beads inside it, wrapped around the base of a model’s neck….and in fact there were several similar type constructions that wowed me so much with the potential of this, that I started a new pin board https://www.pinterest.com/alisonschwabe1/tubes/ A bit of googling didn’t bring anything directly like them up, and so far none of them have links to their makers’ or gallery’s websites, so I haven’t been able to ask anyone for permission to use those images, which I saved as the reminder of interesting 3D potential.

The obvious thing of course would be to just copy that idea and make myself some art to wear, as I have plenty of ‘why on earth did I buy those beads?’ in my stash – but that’s not my style. However, other ideas include a change of scale, taking it up to something pretty big in a sculpture intallation; or couching lines of such sheer bead containers onto a 2D piece including it in a fair bit of other texture…. and my recent Out of Order 9: Volcano piece is calling to me for further development – using this idea perhaps?