I said a little while back I would like to do something more with sheer fabrics, and here are two samples I have done this week to trap some ideas before they fade from the first flash of inspiration….

The first, top, you can see I am thinking waving edges and wandering lines between solid areas of fabric. I did think of finishing off 12″ square of it for SAQA, but it didn’t develop enough zing for me to be inspired to continue.

The second, below, is all glitter and sheer – handling is not easy even in a little sample size piece like this, and so the BIG ideas I have probably won’t be quilte like this, either.
But – a scattering of things like this onto a black background … or v.v, gold in black sheer onto a cream background which I am about to try – well that could be something.

I brought a big cone of gold thread back from Aus on my last visit last year, so I have plenty to play with, even to also do the 1000 invitations to an exhibition which Petra and I hope will be soon (see the posts for late november, 2007 for one of those invites)

If we are accepted at the fabulous place we saw yesterday and are today submitting for, I will launch into something new and large along these lines, and Petra hopes to launch herself over to Peru to study something she has always wanted to learn more about with goldsmiths there who have mastered ancient Inca techniques.

So back to the drawing board to follow a couple of ideas that have come to mind as I wrote this.

This is another work from way way back, last century in fact. In 1994 about 3,500 artisans and craftsmen around the USA, (we were living there at the time) – were invited to submit an original and totally hand made Christmas tree ornament to go on the trees in the White House to celebrate the year of American Craft which also happened to be the Clintons’ first Christmas in residence.

I have been meaning to put this pic up for some time, as beading is so popular in textile crafts at the moment – several friends of mine are making bead jewellery and doing quite well selling it. Beading is everywhere on all kinds of womens’ clothing; beads and other ’embellishments’ have been appearing on quilts in the past few years, although for perhaps the past 15 years at least several prominent contemporary quilters such as Jane Birch Cochoran and Terri Mangat among others have applied beads as an integral part of their artistic voice in their quilted works.

I guess my invitation to submit an ornament came as having been a Quilt National exhibitor in 1993 and at the time being resident in Denver CO. The specifications were few, as I recall to be no larger than 15″ across and weigh no more than 12oz, any technique or material could be used. Coming as I did from a long embroidery background and adoring sparkle and glitter, I envisaged something that would catch the undoubted downlights and glow and glitter over there in the White House. So, it didn’t take me too long to settle on a silk poinsettia with beaded petals and other flower parts. Those who know me know that I jump in boots and all and then find I really have a challenge on my hands once I get down to basics – so of course, with no pattern around for anything like this I had to work it out for myself. The leaves are double sided, and on the underlayer I sewed in a couple of lines of covered florist wire so that I could shape the leaves once they were sewn. The stamen thingies up the middle were challenging – rolls of green silk with beaded ends turned out reasonably well I thought. Then all the leaves and stamen bits were gathered in a bundle and sewn together by hand and finished off tidily. I don’t recall whether I had not resolved the hanging mode at the time of this pic or whether the photographer and I agreed not to show it – anyway it was a lovely gold cord loop long enough to go over any reasonable size branch. The final dimensions were about 10″ across, and about 4″ depth taking into account the splayed leaves and including approx. 1″ deep bundle of stems unit. When I began the project I thought I’d make one for them and one for us – but by the completion of this one, I can assure you I had decided it was to be unique.

The blurbs that came with the paperwork included the information that after the christmas period the ornaments would go to the Smithsonian . I suppose they did….and wonder if they are still there. A couple of years back I tried to enquire but my phone calls, letters and emails went unanswered. I lost interest. If any reader either saw the christmas decorations in the White House that year or has since heard or knows of their ‘fate’ I’d be interested in hearing from you. I also contributed the Colorado panel to a tree skirt under the tree in the Blue room. That was used, at least once – going by the full colour large photo I and other contributors received. That one tree was positively bristling with ornaments, with barely a spruce needle showing. I did read somewhere of 7,500 odd ornaments turning up !!.. and it was probably almost too much for the 15 large trees traditionally placed in the house. it just occurred to me – I could email Hillary’s campaign to see if they can find me the information ….

Opening the front gate to take the dog for her walk the other morning, I stepped on this piece of cardboard and my and first thought was “the little devil she’s been out and dragged someone’s mat back from …” (we have lost a couple ourselves) But then I realised, this is cardboard, right, and it’s printed with doormat print, foot print and some advertising spiel – for one of those youghurt products that are supposed to put the right bacteria into your alimentary system.

Every front gate we passed on our walk that morning had one neatly placed just inside the gate – someone had been very busy overnight in the neighbourhood.

So is this effective advertising? It is a bit witty, telling us to put our right fooot forward every day with this stuff. But even well before 7am, next door’s dog had already half destroyed theirs … labour costs here permit this kind of ‘leaflet drop’ and advertisers are very keen on personally delivered advertising stuff. Another favourite is handing out leaflets at traffic lights, or little catalogues or passing you specials and discount coupons at the toll plazas on the highways; and you either love or loathe the stickers that are routinely plastered over your car window as it is parked in a carpark somewhere along the resort coast between here and Punta del Este. They don’t always come off easily and some times the whole back window seems almost obscured … but the practice persists. I think it’s more pollution than good advertising, and with that frame of mind, on principle I wouldn’t try this product – and anyway I’m happy with my own preferred brand, regardless of whether I am getting the ‘right bactieria’ into my system, or not.

Lines, dots, circles – the fabric and leather samples to the left are some of the various ways I have used them or plan to use them. Why I use them and how they symbolise what I want to say in my art are partially covered in the following sentences:
Holes and ragged edges symbolise denudation, wearing down, decay, age, falling apart, a sense of the passage of time. As time passes marks are left showing traces of what was there before. These ideas apply as much to a landscape as to a human life, a body, a mind, a relationship, any living thing, indeed anything that exists, from universe down to atomic particle level. Is lace, or cheese for that matter, a series of holes connected by medium, or is it the other way round? Leather is symbollic to me. On a very simple level I will just say that as a material I can work with it embodies many personal aspects of being an expatriate Australian living temporarily in another country.

A hot topic of discussion on one of the lists I belong to has raised the issue, again, of cultural misappropriation of specific imagery by artists who have no known connection with that culture. Of course, the viewer has no way of knowing these days who is connected with what, and how, and assumptions can be totally wrong. A list member (an Aussie) commented on what appeared to be an Australian Aboriginal design in publicity for an exhibition by a north American artist. If I’d seen it before she raised the question, I too probably would have assumed the artist to be indigienous Australian or someone using Australian Aboriginal imagery, which to us Aussies is a no-no, see the next paragraph. But in the wider context of this particular artist’s work and reputation, I feel quite sure it is just an arrangement of dots lines and circles in a personal statement that just happens to look Aboriginal to anyone familiar with Australian Aboriginal art. In different colours I doubt any connection would have crossed any viewer’s mind at all. Symbol plus colour is a powerful combination, but every viewer brings all his own background with him, and therein lies ground that can cause difficulty.


There is now a strong legal framework around the use Aboriginal imagery in all art and design, with a recent history of successful legal action against people using such imagery inappropriately or without right to it. There is a similar sensitivity in New Zealand to Maori symbols, and probably this is so in many other countries now. It has long been the case in the US that only Native Americans may label their work as being Indian made or designed, although I think these days people there tend to use their tribal name more than the term ‘ Indian’ which besides being inaccurate is so open to abuse by anyone to claim it for commercial advantage. Who is and who is not indigenous, is contentious everywhere in this context.

In my inexperienced and ignorant youth, some of my first quilts did indeed use images gathered from the petroglyphs in the US Southwest. ( to see some examples, go to gallery pages on https://www.alisonschwabe.com/ and click on the early series of Ancient Expressions series of quilts some of which are shown there) Many of the symbols in that rock art appear on cave and canyon walls, ceramic, painted, carved and other similar surfaces all around the world. Dots, lines, circles, squares, triangles, crosses, arcs and concentric versions of them, spirals, wiggly lines and so on – these are all universal symbols, primal is the word I use – they are etched in the human brain wherever it is. So too are human figures – we all recognise them – except that representing these and various animals, weapons and the local environment (eg weather elements) inevitably gives rise to distinct regional styles. I now feel strongly that an artist wanting to use such elements needs to think carefully about his use of them, and the appropriateness to what he wants to say.

Decades ago at university I majored in ancient civilisations and geography. The marks left by Man’s activity in and on the earth’s surface have fascinated me, and influenced more than one series of textile pieces.

A major and early series of art quilts considering these concepts was my “Ancient Expressions” series, numbering I – XIV, but still ‘open’ I feel. Maybe there won’t be more – those ideas are taking me down other paths – and time is passing by. At the time I made those works, 1988-93, I was living in Denver and I felt that since I had been to some of those sites, and had actually seen them, therefore it would be OK to use them. I also knew that some of the people who made them originally have disappeared and it is said by experts that some of the meanings in those petroglyphs are not fully known to people living in that area today.

Actually, on looking over the series, the only specific image I think I could be accused of as misappropriating from that region in particular is a stencilled human figure with very wide shoulders, and if I were adding to that series, any human figure would appear much more generic, less southwestern. The rest are the primal symbols I referred to, and mostly used in quilting patterns I devised. The use of universal symbols was really a seminal concept behind the whole series.

Continuing in a series of this name, this little 12″ piece, ironically enough “Ebb & Flow 12”, made one day last week, is for the SAQA fundraiser later this year. Pretty well a potholder size, I consider it really more of a sample. There seems to be a trend to smaller works that are more easily travelled as a collection, and more affordable. I am in two minds about the development. Recently a gallery here sold two small pieces of my work, so it is time I produced a few more and thought seriously about their presentation; there’s been a lot of discussion on the SAQA list recently about possibilities, and I have been mulling them over. The two sold were mounted on what looked like sand blasted glass – actually finely hand sanded perspex – fairly labour intesnsive to get looking good, but I will also do some mounted on canvas stretcher frames for comparison.

The quilting in this little work is machined metallic pewter along the edge where print meets plain – and by doing that I learned something I won’t do in the next one I make, #13, which will be larger. The surface will look very much the same but the metallic embroidery will be done before the final piecing, and I am not sure yet about the quilting, – it may be the subject of another 12″ square yet.

It has been almost 2 years since I have done some of this work, and I now have some things I hadn’t thought of before. This coming sunday I will be teaching a workshop for a few quilters who will be here from Buenos Aires for the weekend for a Rio Plate quilters meeting – no, I am not getting caught up in meetings retreats and projects with a group that is strongly focused on traditional north american styles of quiltmaking. I have talked with the Uruguayan quilters hoping to set them considering something that is more strongly related to their home country of Uruguay; but I don’t think the seeds have taken root yet, it will be a while, if ever they do. The Argentines want to know how to do the freehand rotary cutting and piecing aka improvisational piecing. Preparing some samples for that has me thinking about this stuff again. Among other things, its very relaxing and therapeutic if nothing else …..