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

I am a keen reader – and I loved that Facebook poll that asks which books you have read from the 100 listed- I don’t remember the exact tally but it was pretty good, perhaps 70%, over a spread of authors from different nations and eras.   It contained a lot on my ‘I must read, sometime’ list, including classics like ‘War and Peace’ by Tolstoy, but also on that list is to finish the rest of ‘Uttermost Part of the Earth’ by E.Lucas Bridges, and E.L James’ other two volumes following “50 Shades of Grey”.  although everyone’s talking about them, and one of my friends is circulating her copies, I just don’t have time just now for ” 50 Shades Darker” and whatever #3 is, being as I am in the midst of a piecing and quilting storm.

One of my favourite authors is the American, Pat Conroy (“Prince of Tides”,  “South of Broad” “Lords of Discipline” and others including one I must read but haven’t yet read, “The Great Santini”)  A book of his I listened to recently – “My Reading Life” read by himself and so itself a real treat – outlined the incredible depth and breadth of his lifetime of voracious reading which was started on a firm footing principally by the influence of his mother.  Reading aloud, bringing home books from the library, talking about them with her kids….  (I wonder whether I got a pass or fail on that one)  He reads at least 200 pages every day, and before commencing his day’s writing he reads a little poetry, (keeps a volume or two on his desk) – and his library totals many 1000’s books… no doubt he lives in an old large Charleston house to accomodate all of it.  Today’s e-readers, such as my kindle, accomodate several thousand books, so, that’s OK, I can read 200 pages each day if I put my mind to it, without necessarily needing space for shelving massive quantities of books.  The trouble is, I am sucked in so often by (a) the fabric and thread world (b) the digital world.  Does it count to your daily tally if you listen to about 200 pages a day?  which I am doing at the moment, with my iPod touch nestled in a pocket and playing as I sew, sew, sew…    The fascinating book to which I’m currently listening is “Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945” by  Tony Judt.  Being an early Baby Boomer, it’s actually covers my entire lifetime, really, and explains a lot about things in my earlier life, which being a young Australian, was then very, very, Eurocentric compared to the more multidirectional outlook Australians have today.  Although I didn’t then understand why really, being very young, I do remember the  frontpage newspaper pictures,  (b/w of course) harrowing escape stories and divided family accounts following the sudden erection of the Berlin Wall – and now understand more of why my parents seemed so shocked.  And so much more.  I had opted out of history at the earliest chance, because the teacher, our principal, Miss Rooney, was so very boring in her presentation of what should have been such an exciting subject.  I had no idea what I was missing until well into my university degree.  Not saying that I would have wished to study history as a major, but as an adult I’ve become progressively more interested in history.  Reading the occasional history-based, fiction or non fiction, is helping fill some of the yawning gaps in my education and understanding.

On my bedside table at the moment is “Explorers Of The Nile” by Tim Jeal – its going to have to pick up a bit if I’m to finish it by wednesday ‘s book club meeting – I think it is very interesting, but I need to find the Dr. Livingstone- Menry Morton Stanley part of the book, read that and then let the rest go- have to hand the book in that day and someone is waiting for it.  “Call the Midwife” by Jennifer Worth is apparently the first in a series about a London  midwife in the immediate postwar years and ’50’s – I’ll try to get the book club to order the others, it was great – but why oh why are so many authors now putting out series and trilogies  (normally I seem to tune in at #2 or #3)  What’s wrong with a large engrossing single volume story, like Ken Follett’s books, and James Michener’s….. can’t modern authors handle the one large epic story  in one go?  Or is it the point that modern readers can’t handle the large story?  Is it a brilliant thing from  the marketers and actually all about money?

And this just occurred to me –  is this the same phenomenon as people making small  1m x 0.75m quilts and referring to these as ‘large’?