Auditioning for ‘red’ turned up a piece of red lame, which I’ve never been able to use – someone gave it to me I think – although it frays easily and in the past I’ve found it very hard to handle and avoided it.  With bonding, though, new avenues open, so I bonded some on the straight (upper RH) and some on the cross  (upper LH)  Bonded, this material handled a lot better than I dared hope – no threads seemed to shift at all in either sample while I stitched, so that’s encouraging….. but I couldn’t get a photo where each section of the lame photographed equally well, seemingly because they’re on different angles.

The lower sample is a better shot of the sample in the previous post, and, so back to the cutting table and iron.

I just love a good survey – and I’m always happy to give my opinion on something that interests me.  I suppose you could say that the greatest of all surveys is a national election that either brings a change in government or avoids it.   In just the last couple of weeks,  I responded to interesting surveys in the general area of textile and fibre art education, principally art quilting.  

(1)   Lisa Call  asked around fellow SAQA members to see if any one knew of classes on basic techniques of what you can do with fabric for aspiring art quilters, saying she was looking for “an overview/survey type course for art quilts…. a variety surface design techniques … collage, and a bit of piecing …”  ending with asking for suggestions on how one might learn such things, and clearly favouring online learning.  I felt she was looking not for someone to teach ‘it all’ for I think the field is too vast to wrap one’s mind around.  Her student will need guidance, help in recognizing what technique has been used in a particular work she likes, and then finding a good online location to learn the basics of that technique, after which its all up to her to run with it, or not.

(2) Fellow SAQA member Roxanne Lessa asked us and her blog readers to let her know what they would like to learn from her, citing an extensive list of  things she’s be interested in teaching or tutoring on.   I’m not looking for a course or a mentor just now, so just moved on.  From this list, though, you need to have some idea of what you wanted to learn before you even contacted her, perhaps how she did something in one of her works pictured on her website.

(3)  Teacher and art quilt maker Dena Crain recently surveyed quilt artists seeing their comments on how art quilters rank the value of learning the same course material through  (1) attending workshops/courses taught in real time   (2)  classes taken online  (3)  learning through a lesson in a book or periodical  (4)  ditto via a digital or eBook format.  Of course, the costs of accessing each one could never be exactly equal, but for the survey we were asked to assume they were, and rank our choices with any comments/reasons for them.  She summarized her findings in today’s very interesting blog post The Future of Education for Patchwork Quilters  She is an American living in Kenya – and in her remote location faces varying kinds of location from what US, UK, European, many Australian, New Zealand, Japanese and other Asian quilt makers take for granted – relatively easy access to real time classes, easy access to vendors of supplies or mail order that works beautifully, and so on.  Knowing a lot about Dena and her geographic perspective, and seeing similarities to my own situation, of course I had views on this and did not hesitate to respond !

While I’m certain workshops and classes that you physically attend will always will always rank high for learning because of the huge potential offered by real face time between all students and teacher involved, technology is changing fast to make recorded and live online demonstrations, classes, courses, seminars,  etc.  all feasible and highly worthwhile, with different advantages to suit the individual.  The offerings in fabric and thread alone are massive, and include some extremely good on almost every technique you can think of,  but also plenty of mediocre ones; with costs ranging from free to rather expensive.   How fortunate are today’s craftsmen and artists to be able to choose to learn wherever we look from the comfort of our own homes.  And on that note, even though I don’t plan to leave the house on this rather wet day, it’s time I showered and dressed before spending time in the studio.   I’ve been doing some samples and am keen to start pursuing a couple on a larger scale – but to get started there, “I like to be clean and tasteful” as my fav. Aus satirist comedian Barry Humphries, speaking as Dame Edna Everage,  would say  🙂

The annual Studio Art Quilt Associates’ Benefit Auction for 2013  kicks off in a few hours’ time, at 2-00pm, Eastern USA, currently 12 hours ahead of Australian EST    Over the next three weeks, and at the International Quilt Festival Houston in late October, the 420+  12″/20cm square quilts made and donated by Studio Art Quilt Associates  members from many countries around the world will be auctioned to raise funds to help cover SAQA’s art quilt touring exhibition programme.

Later today bidding will open on the first group of pages 1a and 1b.  They include several I would love to own, and include something for every taste.  “Sandlines”  below, goes up for sale today and I have my fingers X it might sell in the first part of the week.  On august 5th I wrote a bit about it, and my workroom/studio, in The SAQA-Oceania Bloghop

All pieces on those two pages will be $750 starting today, Monday, Sept. 9th at 2.00 pm Eastern until 1-59 pm Eastern on Tuesday, Sept. 10th, at which time unsold quilts on that page will be re-priced to $550, the price going down each day until the end of the week.    Group b auction begins 2-00pm Eastern next Monday sept.16th.  At http://www.saqa.com/saqa-u.php?ID=2367   you can find more information about how the auction works, the online bidding form (not live until 2-00pm US  Eastern later today), pages with images of all 421 pieces by this year’s contributing artists, and if you click through those images you can access technical details of their work, and click through their names to go to their websites if they have one.

In the past few hours this quilt: “Life’s Rich Tapestry”, 1990, approx.  1.5m  x 1.5m,  went up on Lisa Call ‘s FB page – we were talking about how embellishment was in our distant textile art pasts.  She posted a very red and strong green quilt with lots of bead and glitter embellishment, a piece that seemingly has no connection to the  plain uncluttered textile paintings she now does with austere lines, plain colour combinations and heavy machine quilting.  We had both studied in classes with David Walker – I went to a class he taught at the first Quilt Surface Design Symposium in 1990,  and her experience was a little later.  I will never forget that class – it was on developing your own imagery to use in your art quilt designs.  Because Bernina had made available for our use in the symposium these fabulous new 1230 machines, I decided that while I had it I might as well use it as a test drive, and put it through most of its paces – in large part by machine embroidering using the inbuilt fancy stitches to cover all the seams of this contemporary crazy patchwork background with gold thread – it took miles of thread, but the effect was great, and the embroidery functioned as the quilting.  By the end of that workshop I was absolutely hooked on the machine and bought one on my return to Denver.   Marvellous, and I still have it,  but it languishes for long spells in my workroom in Perth – as up to very recently there’s been no Bernina dealer here.   This one is actually version 2 of that design, and went to Visions early the following year.  You won’t have to look to far around my website to see that it is not published there, and furthermore it is totally different in every way from work I have done before or since.  So, what’s the scoop on this one?

David had us thinking about things in our lives, going through lots of personal exploration; and a saying that Mike my husband has often uttered came to mind: ‘That’s just part of life’s rich tapestry’ .  I have no idea whether the title came first or it developed from the ideas I was exploring, but no matter – the elements of the design relate to the good and bad, darks and lights, positives and negatives, happy and sad, lean and plenty – the ‘things’ in life that constantly shift balance and change from day to day, week to week, year to year.  There’s a bit of management and a bit of  luck in the mix, too.   Fortune/Luck is symbolized by the dice in the design, and the big Rainbow Serpent, an indigenous Australian figure that sees and controls all, weaves through it all – and then one’s personal strategy is represented by the Snakes and Ladders (c)  board game in  the centre.  I’m sorry there isn’t a clear close detail shot, but the 35mm slides for quilts of that era haven’t all been scanned, and that particular one is in Perth, Western Australia.

It is only since I began thinking about this quilt again, thanks to Lisa’s FB post, that only now do I realize it marks the beginning of a recurrent theme in my quiltmaking – that these days comes through in the “Ebb & Flow”  quilts and all the “Tracks” quilts – go to those galleries on this website.  Until now, I would never have said there was any connection.  At that time I was moving along with very basic, 1/2″ strip inserts – see “Ora Banda” in the “Colour Memories” gallery, and just had taken a wonderful positives/negatives class with Nancy Crow, but not yet the early improvisational designing one I did with her in 1993.  When we did meet again in that 1993 class in Denver, she asked me about this quilt, which she obviously felt had no connection with that stuff, and seemed pleased to hear I regarded it as a bit of an aberration – but, in the longer perspective it’s very important indeed, and I am still blinking a bit from this discovery.