A few days ago I cut a stencil from the several metres 180cm wide piece of neon orange nylon I have, and used white to print on a piece of faded black:

I intend to add ‘something’ and work it up into a 40sq.cm piece, which is a nice size for the smaller works I’m currently interested in making. At the same time, I hand painted some squares of gold paint onto another piece of black – a slightly disappointing outcome, but who knows what might come from it, and painted some gold squares onto some plain light grey:

I am thinking of quilted or mixed media textile works, and possibly one might be useful as a base in the upcoming Stitch Club workshop with Jessica Grady over this week and next. From what I can see of her work, at first glance most of them look like exciting party platters – lots of brightly coloured bits of stuff – but her work is compiled of lots of material embellishments made from various selected and discarded materials, reminding me somewhat of the more formally arranged mandalas of Susan Lenz who both retrieves discarded objects and at times actively breaks down into component parts something complicated like a piano, in which there are so many repeat parts. I haven’t watched Jessica’s tutorial video yet, but I do know we’re going to be making our own embellishments and can already see that has a lot of potential… for now, or sometime.

Before I tackle that workshop, though, I want to finish the 40cm piece I’m currently working on. I fused lemon citrus coloured shapes onto light grey, hand stitched the edges with some of the neon-lemon-green thread (of which I still have about 1400m) layered it, finely hand quilted around each of those shapes with toning grey, and am currently auditioning how I’m going to quilt cross the grey areas:

Another of my quilts is going somewhere I’ve never been, and I’m pleased to announce that “Pandemic Pattern” is one of five works chosen from the Quilt National 21 collection to be displayed at this year’s Modern Quilt Guild show, QuiltCon, at the Phoenix Convention Centre from February 16^th – 20^th (full information https://www.quiltcon.com/about-quiltcon/ )  

The Quilt National booth is #214, so if you’re going to that event, do stop by and hi to the Dairy Barn people there; give “Pandemic Pattern” a smile, and, if you can get away with it, a gentle pat with love from me. 

In October this year, “Pandemic Pattern” will be on exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, October 16, 2022 – January 8, 2023. I’ll mention this again, obviously, closer to that time.

Today, having finished off the piece pictured in the previous post, and not yet settled on my next creation, while I thought about it I decided to rationalise my two bulging scrap bags, of the heavy duty clear plastic kind that new pillows come in. One has a tear and is starting to look as if it will break wide open and suddenly spill a heap of bits out onto the floor some time soon when I move it around. It took me an hour to rationalise one of them – chucking out the rubbishy little bits of fabric I know I really won’t use, and the frayed and tangled threads that build up in those bags as I rummage and stuff goes in and out.

Mind you, I think at night when it’s all dark those scraps breed up a bit too – in all the years I’ve been extensively using scraps of fabric, they’re been gradually increasing in volume. I carefully keep offcuts, knowing that just little bits of a large number of pieces of different fabric in a work adds a richness to the contemporary freehand piecing I do. And I always feel a bit of a wrench when discarding even tiny little bits of fabric when I’m being quite practical and realistic!

So the outcome will be about 2/3 of the huge amount of scraps, maybe a little less, of the volume that were stuffed into those bags. The little amounts I’ll probably fuse onto whatever background I select (which could also be black) really won’t make much of a dent in that volume now in the scrap bags 🙂

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A few months ago, I played with these stencilled gold blobs+gold stitch, and have it in mind that fused fabric blob shapes in blues, greens and yellows with some neon thread stitchery could be interesting and fun to do.

It’s too late to start this today, but tomorrow I’ll get those scraps all sorted before breakfast before I start the new 40cm work, with a new audio book at the same time 🙂