The call for entries to the biennial juried art quilt exhibition Art Quilt Australia 23, is now open, and this year, the organisers, Ozquilt Network and the exhibition’s sponsors The National Wool Museum, have made a major change in entry conditions. It’s always been possible to enter two quilts of whatever materials you like, but this year if you want to enter a second one, it must be of wool, with at least 60% of both front and back surfaces being that fibre.

Given the main sponsor of the exhibition, I think it’s a good change, because the exhibition opens every second time at the National Wool Museum in Geelong, Victoria; the winner of the Wool Award award is acquisitive; and the prize money is considerable. Past AQAs I’ve seen in person have included relatively few wool quilts compared to other art quilts in which the most common fibre used is cotton. So I’m sure this move will encourage more of us to make art quilts in wool to enter this year.

Anyway, it worked with me !!

But I had to really think about why I rarely work with wool of any kind. What do/did I have against wool? It’s a wonderful natural fibre, and I was brought up wearing wool for warmth in Tasmania. We valued our woollen garments and blankets, and learned how to care for them properly. I did a lot of dressmaking in my younger days, and know well that wool doesn’t press down as flat as well as cotton, so I think that’s why I’ve never really considered using it for art quilts.

I guess the answer lies in the path I travelled to become a maker of quilted textile art – art quilts. Before living in the USA 1987-94, I had been an embroiderer, and had just been invited to have my first solo exhibition of creative, interpretive embroidery. It was very landscape inspired, mostly combining paint with stitched textures. The long story continued with learning American patchwork, joining a quilters guild, going to some construction classes and joining a quilting bee for the cultural experience, while at the same time actively participating in The Embroiderers Guild of America. One time I spray painted some fabric intending to embroider on it, but the result of the painting was disappointing, and I’d have ditched it if a fellow artist hadn’t suggested I include it in an art quilt. It sounded a good idea, so I made one and called it Ancient Expressions, It was juried into and sold from the first art quilt exhibition I ever entered. With that encouragement plus all I learned about patchwork from my traditional P.W. friends, I’ve continued to make art quilts, favouring cotton as my go-to-fabric for art quilt making. My techniques have changed a lot, though, and with hand stitch and raw edge applique predominant at the moment, I am now interested in making at least one art quilt using wool.

I decided to make this a recycling exercise, which is not an entry requirement. Here in Uruguay people do still wear a lot of wool, and they also pass on clothing they’ve finished using. I felt it wouldn’t take long to come up with some interesting fabric pieces I could save from the landfill, and so put the call out to my friends.

Within 48 hours, Virginia had turned up with two donated wool coats, one black and the other red. I’ve unpicked the black one, washed all the pieces in the machine and dryer to give a wonderful result. I wasn’t sure about the red one, but now that I’ve thought of several possible ways to use it, I will unpick that, too. It’s only 50% wool, though, so I’ll have to augment that with whatever I put on it.

Shortly after that, Maureen arrived with an armful of 100% merino machine knitted wool samples from a garment manufacturer relative. I may not use any of the dark browns** but the several shades of grey and cream will be good, and I’m thinking about how to use them. I could cut them into sections, but I could also unwind them and knit or crochet elements to place on the front. The thicker ones easily separate out into 4×2 ply, easy to use for stitching – so whatever I do will have hand stitch on it! There’s still time for some other wool fabrics to turn up between now and mid-late April, when I’ll probably be ready to start making it.

** What I don’t use of these samples I’ll pass on to a friend who organises knitters to produce 10″ wool squares from leftover and donated wool, and then arranges for them to sewn up to make blankets for needy people. Hundreds if not thousands are produced each year, so the wool won’t go to waste!

This idea comes up from time to time, and I have no idea how frequently it actually happens. I only make half a dozen major works in a good year, often less, and I still have about 1/3 to 1/2 of all the wall quilts I’ve made down the years. Many art quilters and other fibre artists are in the same position, and I’m sure painters, weavers, embroiderers and other creatives also face this question.

Some artists cut up out of date quilted works for bed liners for pet shelters, and others cut out interesting bits, add stitching, painting, embellishing and other alterations, thus repurposing them into smaller mixed media works. A recent mention of this issue somewhere made me look at some of my own works. I did cut one into pieces and send it to the landfill many years ago, a bit naughty of me considering the state of the world’s landfills today; but now I’d make an effort to recycle at least part of something.

This example came to mind. If I were to rework this quilt as Hazel Bruce sometimes does, I think I’d pull out the current quilting along the strips and their extensions, and stitch/quilt using something like – straight stitch, cretan stitch, or fly stitch over those areas defined by the seams. I might even do some of the wonderful blocks of machined zig-zag stitching filling she’s fond of – which could be great in shiny neon florescent threads or metallics.

And, I’d probably also reduce the length. It’s currently 71cm x 175cm, or 28in x 69in. That’s a slightly odd size, but I counted, and according to this photo, it’s 7 x 16 four inch squares.

Right now I’m just a bit busy on two projects for entries into the ArtQuiltAustralia 23, closing date June 2nd, but perhaps after those are squared away I can see what’s to be done to give this one a new life.

A few days ago I made and published this audition sample with a view to a new work featuring strips of stripes made up of the thousand or so small scraps and snippets from several projects in the blue-green colour range, including last year’s SAQA Benefit Auction quilt.

Working this very improvisational way, it’s not logistically possible to cut each snippet individually – it’s like prepping veggies – you do a whole lot at once and then get to work using them. Late last year I scored a heap of luscious hand dyed offcuts from fellow art quilter, Lorraine, so there were many blue-green bits to put together here. Once I’d posted it, I noticed how the short row, of darker fabrics oversewn in black and grey, really receded towards the back, compared with the strips of lighter brighter colours that appeared to be closer. Well, of course I knew this bit of theory, but seeing it reminded me that this is something I can exploit in my next composition.

Lots of machine stitching later, I have a collection of groups of strips of the green-blue and green-yellow groupings, ranging in depth, but length of about 5″, that I’ll cut into wavy lines and stitch down with black thread into a grid outlined on black fabric:

I just finished the work I’ve been writing about, and for the moment, at least, calling it “Odds and Ends”. I commenced it at the start of the current SAQA 100 Days challenge in progress, now just over half way through. I haven’t been posting every day, as I felt there was no point in posting essentially repetitive images every single day! For me, that was a bit different from the previous 100 day one, about 18months ago, in which I did a small sample every day

There’s enough of the binding showing in the above pic to see that the border is segmented, several strips at a time joined into the dark grey-brown background fabric. I machine sewed the binding strip to the back, then folded it over to the front, hand hand stitching it down in the same way as I covered all the other edges in the quilt.

My regular readers know that even before a work is finished I am already thinking ahead a bit about the next – and this following sample completed today is part of that process:

Here, I’ve auditioned 4 fabrics from cream/unbleached calico, through light grey (with a touch of mauve) the dark grey/brown I used in Odds and Ends, and black. I cut wavy strips from the same sets of scraps in predominantly greens+blues, and auditioned silver, neon green, neon yellow, black and grey threads. I thought I’d prefer the sliver which isn’t exciting enough (I don’t think I’ll use gold in this case) but I really like the black (polyester sewing machine thread) against the black fabric, and grey thread against the grey. Another multi-audition coming soon.

In the last few years we’ve seen an incredible expansion of interest in hand stitch, especially with the Slow Stitch movement with attendant features of mindfulness, torn fabrics applied using running stitch, straight stitch or pattern darning, the embrace of meditation, and so on. As a hand stitcher, aka embroiderer, from the 70s, this is a development I’ve welcomed. I’ve never ‘abandoned’ hand stitch and hand quilting, but in the past 5-6 years hand stitch has become a much more significant feature of my own surface designs. The Glorious Straight Stitch, as I term it, has always been a favourite, and during the pandemic, having all the time in the world at home, I found myself truly calmed by simple hand stitching, listening as I always have done when making, to recorded books and more recently, podcasts.

One of the questions in my previous post, was about the kind of edging I needed for this work. I didn’t think either of my favourites, fine binding or facing, were just right. I felt they were just too neat for this raw edged hand stitched style, which continues the line of several raw edge applique works I’ve made and shown in the last few years. It was the border treatment I worked on this next work, Caribbean Crush, that gave me the solution:

I needed to construct a segmented binding, which was easy enough given that I had various groups of pieced strips partly used. I added bits of them into a long strip of the background fabric, avoiding joins at the corners; sewed this to the back of the quilt, folded it forward and hand stitched the raw edge down onto the front of the work, in the manner of all the other applique on this quilt.

I love improvised, machine pieced patchwork, but without any planning for this to happen, raw edge applique has taken a major position in my recent body of work, and I haven’t planned anything pieced for ages! Below are some examples: clockwise from upper left – Pandemic Pattern, 2020, detail; “Make Do And Mend” banner 18″ x 24″ for Lift The Sky project ww.liftthesky.com ; Regeneration 2, 40cm x 40cm, 2019.