I have been a bit occupied the past few weeks with an online introductory course to Photoshop Elements 10.  There’s nothing like some course structure with a few deadlines – it helped me to work through the odd bits and pieces I already knew how to do and place them into an organised framework.  The Pixeladies’ course was terrific, and lots of the exercises we did using their little mannequin dolls, clothes and accessories etc.  But for the final exercise assignment I chose to work with several of my own photos – including a couple of the beach offerings my regular readers know are a focus of my attention:

I’m proud of all my efforts of course  🙂  but this next one, where I learned how to paste in into a selection, features one of the dolls with my choice of clothes and hair  and the background lifted from one of my own early mixed media works. The overalls were filled with pattern from Ivan and Tara’s wedding quilt – both of which can be seen in full in galleries elsewhere on this site.

And, obviously, I have learned a little about watermaking images too.

This tiny section of one of my Quilt National’13 entries brings me to a post I’ve been meaning to put up for a while, on how I choose and use fabric.  (But “Thread” elbowed its way in as I wrote, so I  considered and finally allowed it to stay on this page.)

I have to tell you, the minute I saw this gold-dotted black fabric several years ago in a USA quilt store, it demanded to be bought – leapt off the shelf calling out “Pick me! Pick me!”  As I  have an emotional attachment to dots, glitter and black, it was a shoe in.  Whenever I begin a new work, I get potentially relevant fabrics out, spread them on a table and the floor if necessary – and once I’ve selected what to use,  put most of them away again, and then turn to my scrap bag to augment the range.  I and other quilters really do call this process ‘auditioning’.   If I think there still must be something more, something special I’ve overlooked, I dig really, really deep down to the back of my fabric stash, which is how I came across this one I’d forgotten.  I still can’t quite believe it lurked in the background for a couple of years, but it must have.

Quite often people say to me – “Where do you buy your fabrics?” and the short answer is “Anywhere and Everywhere”.   I always try to have a little cash on me or space on a card to be able to buy something I love when I come across it.  I know when I return it will have gone.  I recently posted  2012/13/14 and elsewhere I can’t find right now !!! on surprising fabrics I’ve discovered in Montevideo’s sunday markets.  When down there I always check through the bolts and rolls on any fabric vendor’s tables – I just never know what will be mixed in with the majority of stuff that doesn’t especially interest me.  True love determines whether or not I buy any fabric  and experience has shown that if I love it I will use it – no fabric being too precious to cut into.  But, it’s possible a particular fabric may lurk in my cupboard for several years until just the right moment.

If you have looked at my work  in the Colour Memory and Ebb&Flow galleries, you’ll know my contemporary freehand patchwork art quilts have always been composed of many fabrics in small amounts.  I always save small pieces from previous projects, and often dive into my scrap bags for tiny amounts of many different scraps to use in a quilt.  I happily team unusual fabrics and imho it works because every fabric I use I initially bought for love. Recent works can contain fabrics spanning over 25 years – let the textile historian experts make what they will with that!

Here are my personal  ‘rules’ that determine how I buy new fabric:

• If it appeals, I buy a 1/8 – 1/4  metre/yard
• if I really like it I buy 1/2  m/yd.
• If it’s something special to me I buy 1 – 3 m/yds.
• If I am quite over-the-top delirious at finding it, I’ll probably make an offer for whatever’s left on the bolt!  And the last time I did this, there was 19m @ US$2.50/m, of the other fabric shown above – a shiny black cotton chintz that is marvellous to work with – which is just as well, since there’s about 14m left …..

I love black, ecru/cream and other neutrals especially greys, and I adored a wonderful putty colour I’ve completely used up and have never seen again – yet.  But the wonderful thing about fabric is there’s always more.  So, running out of one is no disaster to me.   In addition to neutral plains, I use some hand dyed fabrics (not done by me) which have slight textures, and some commercial prints I call hand-dye-look-alikes; and I love certain prints particularly dots, spots, stripes, interesting fine textures and tiny geometrics.   Yes, I you could say I have great enthusiasm for fabrics – but this enthusiasm is very selective – they must be ones I love.  I never buy whole collections of new fabric releases, and I will never be one of those, including some great artists in the medium whose work I admire totally, who have hundreds of colours and/or prints at their fingertips.  Geography now plays some part in this but I have always had these buying ‘rules’, even when I lived somewhere I could easiy nip out and search for something particular.  Here in Uruguay there is nothing like a ‘quilt shop’ selling nice good quality cotton fabrics, nor the large fabric stores that many of my peers have direct or easy online-access to.  I think this has forced me to maintain an open mind on the potential of absolutely anything I come across.  And there is no doubt that the whole fabric situation in my textile art life has influenced how I work.

Naturally, all this is echoed in threads I buy and use.  For all piecing I use only Gutermann’s Skala, available in 10,000m cones of black, white,  cream, light grey  and dark grey  (there are other colours I don’t need)   When I need other more traditional sewing machine threads or for hand sewing, my stash is mostly neutrals, black, white and cream.  I sometimes use appropriate black/white/neutrals, however a lot of my quilting is in metallics of which I have a few in reasonably large quantity on hand.   Below is a small piece typical of the way I love to use metallic – to highlight rather than smother –

(SAQA  2008 auction donation quilt, Ebb & Flow 12,  12″ sq.) 

or invisible, below, here using smoky grey Skala –

(detail from Ebb & Flow 16,  about 3″ sq ) 

As the Skala blends over the myriad of colours it is sewn across, produces only surface texture without extra added colour.  Of course if I have the exact matching standard machine thread in background colour, eg black, cream, white –  I would consider that, too, if appropriate.  And, some recent works I have quilted in neon colours –

from a group of miniatures in the New Work gallery on this website.

This is what it looked like a week ago, but of course it has moved on from here

and, clearly, moved on from this stage, too!

Subject to no further interruptions, the quilting will be done in a few hours’ time.  I have another finished, and this morning before sunrise I had yet another idea which I should be able to get together in a flurry before the photography deadline in just over a week from now…..of course, they need sleeves too, I always underestimate the time this takes, and guess I might have to ask Eduardo to move the photo shot back by a day, as usual.  ;-p