January 29th, 2007
And finally the incredible vitality of this fearsome female warrior’s stance, if a creature with a fish tail can be said to have a ‘stance’
And finally, after days of fiddling with this new blogger program, it seems the image might be successfully loaded, fingers X
Share this:
January 29th, 2007
And finally the incredible vitality of this fearsome female warrior’s stance, if a creature with a fish tail can be said to have a ‘stance’
And finally, after days of fiddling with this new blogger program, it seems the image might be successfully loaded, fingers X
Share this:
Craftmanship issues
January 27th, 2007
A recent morning on the quiltart list there was discussion of techniques. The previous writer had issues with fusing of uneven cutting and fraying edges, and I posed the question whether readers could conceive a design in which frayed edges and uneven cut lines, with fusing technique, were appropriate.
Well some of the answers were interesting, but I then realised I had done such a design myself, not too long ago, in which the pieces were either fused (the hand dyed squares in this piece) and or frayed – the gold scrim squares are hand sewn onto the top of the larger squares, and despite beng cut on the cross this stuff does fray easily – witness the fraying doubled over edging that surrounds the quilt.
This small quilt uses a traditional pattern of a square within a square to explore particular techniques, but overall the design isn’t too crash hot in terms of vitality and excitement, and this is probably why I haven’t exhibited it anywhere yet. And yet it is one of those pieces that somehow become important on the way towards new developments.
An earlier version of this post had this and a detailed view but the buttons would not open to show the pics, although they had done so when first posted. This is the best I can do for the moment, however, and maybe I will learn something blindingly obvious to everyone but me on this new blogger program, or need to take another path after a while.
Share this:
Auditioning Fabrics !!!
January 26th, 2007
… What a fun job to start the new year – IMHO one of the best, most exciting parts of designing and making a piece.
Late last year I received an inquiry from a prospective buyer, J, interested in a quilt that had already sold. However she is prepared to consider a commission, and following some dicusssions via email, J sent fabric swatches to me just before Christmas. The contents of her package divided into some very bright strong colours and some more rather subdued almost japanese prints and stripes, which IMHO would not go in the same colour scheme. So I have sent her two colour suggestions represented by
these two different collections of fabric.
In the upper photo, upon the right hand top side are several strips of prints containing colours she really likes, as they make her feel happy. Very bright saturated colours, they would look great set into some of the hand dyeds I have here by a couple of dyers, Janet Jo Smith and Dijanne Cevaal. They’d be dramatic set into charcoal grey or black, also lovely set into something pale like cream or pale grey…. I’m thinking irregular horizontal ‘wisps’ in line with our discussions on concepts of landscape as a theme.
In the lower photo, more subdued fabrics from my stash suggested by the colours of the other group of snippets. Bearing in mind the principle there should always be at least a tiny bit of yellow somewhere in a colour scheme, the bold blue/yellow/green segment in the middle of this photo would do that – with our without some support from other values of yellow. But this piece of fabric is also important as being one the client herself hand dyed, and she’d love a small piece included and the rest returned. This would be possible and marvellous in either colour scheme and would make the final design just a bit more special to her.
So the info is on its way to J, and regardless of whether she accepts the commission proposals or not, I have a couple of quilt plans that I will probably make up, anyway, taking into account upcoming exhibition deadlines and the need for some fresh new works to show.
