Many art quilt makers and all traditional quiltmakers find ourselves with scraps and offcuts at the end of every project. I believe these two words are in are interchangeable, although I myself think of offcuts as being ‘larger’ scraps. However, everything is relative, and there is no precision here. I tend to save pieces as small as about 2 square inches, depending on how precious it is to me, but I’ll skip defining ‘precious’ just now.

My regular readers know I’ve been using strips of fabric in my work for decades – I just love segmented strips of colour. I’ve both pieced them into backgrounds –

and since 2020-21 I’ve also been laying them onto the fabric background and overstitching them, a process called ‘couching’ in embroideryspeak.

If I had a dollar for every time someone has commented “You do such intricate patchwork!!” I’d be wealthy !

But my readers know the starting point is to machine sew varying widths of strips, long side to side, and cut across those groups of strips. I use pretty small stitching so that when I cut across these ‘collections’ of fabric bits, to make strips varying from 0.5 to 1.5 cm wide, they hold together well in the handling.

In the past week I’ve been working on two segmented strip projects. In one, I’ve dipped into my large quantity of blue-green scraps to form strips oversewn with neon green stitching. Sized 30cm square or 12″x12″, my 2024 SAQA Auction quilt is well advanced –

And finally, I’m now in the strip assembling stage of desert coloured scraps to use in a much larger work, as you might assume from these ~1m+ strips. The background fabric could be black, cream, or a burnt gold which I might dull down a bit by overdyeing it… or maybe none of those, but there’s plenty of time.

I wish I had about another sets of hands, duplicate equipment and work spaces, so that I could follow several different ideas at a time – but dream on, Alison!

Well, one way to capture those ideas as they pop up in my mind is to make a quick sample, so that the ‘essence’ of that idea is there when I have time to come back to it and explore. I occasionally reach for my set of 100 x 3.5inch technique samples I mounted each day on foam core during the 2021 SAQA Reboot 100 day challenge – and here are some favourites, and a couple of those technical ideas have found their way into things I’ve done since.

One of the enduring inspirational themes in my art is ‘landscape’ in it’s broadest sense. Much of what I do is repeat units of diagrams in fabric and thread of recurring patterns of lines and shapes. In 2022 I acquired some fabric scraps from a fellow art quilter in USA. After adding more of my own, many of them wound up in lines, or strips, of pieced patches of colour –

So yesterday’s sample suddenly offered new potential for crossing over strips of pieced fabric onto a background and achieve a greater sense of depth…

Oh yes, and have I ever said that green is my favourite colour?

On January 4th last, I attended the opening of the Salonlatino Artevidriotextil exhibition, in which twenty five 20x20cm 2D selected works by artists from a number of South American countries, including myself, are showing in one of the galleries in the beautiful Casa de la Cultura in the heart of Maldonado, Uruguay. There’s a really nice online catalogue https://qrco.de/begBj6 which I recommend you take time to look through, with some very interesting works and accompanying artist statements. However, those statements were not displayed in the exhibition itself, only the details of the artist, title of the work, techniques and materials used, and their country of origin.  The catalogue’s in spanish of course, but easily translated using google translate.  

Several pieces referenced weaving and basketry, and others added beading or glass shapes to textile and embroidered areas.  I had the opportunity to read all the statements a day or two before it opened, but inevitably there were one or two surprises, as there always are in a juried show.  

The work of Chilean artist, Carolina Oliva Salas, “Semillas del rey Inti” was my favourite in the whole exhibition. (p10 of the catalogue)  Translated, her statement reads “Seeds of King Inti symbolize the spirit of the Sun for the ancestral Latin American peoples, for whom it has great importance, symbolism and veneration.  Ancient cultures considered the Sun as the “God creator of life”, and they worshipped him with all kinds of rituals.  Most pre-Columbian people worshipped the Sun fundamentally because it provided them with abundant crops and was also a symbol of prestige and power.”   The symbolism of the eggs set in felted eggshells, and the connection of all the parts to the sun and Inca gold was well thought out and presented.

I loved Mexican artist Olimpia de la Corona’s piece, “Mexican Flower” (p 23), featuring a plant native to southern Mexico, “Flor de Nochebuena” or Poinsettia. Sometimes writing a blog post is a learning exercise – today I learned that the Aztecs used the plants to provide dyes for fabric and cosmetics. and much more about their history. Elsewhere I read that from the early 1700s the Francisan monks began to decorate nativity and religious displays at Christmas with the red-petalled flowers. The central section of this work is a hand stitched panel in the characteristic style of the state of Hidalgo, (I own, and use, several pieces of embroidery from there myself) in which the stitching is worked so that most of the thread appears on the front of the work – and in the catalogue you’ll find a pic of the reverse side of this work illustrating that. This embroidery is surrounded by a lovely border of finely worked glass in the style of other Mexican textiles, and the antique-finished frame sets it off beautifully.

Argentine artist Patricia Veronica Saporiti’s work “Boston” (p 24) comprised 4 x 10cm panels with appliqued coloured glass pieces connected by chain stitched lines, and it was so much more beautiful on the wall than in the catalogue: 

My own work used fibreglass fabric backed by a layer of nylon organza for stability, to which I added some trapunto areas, hand embroidery and beading, all of which was in effect quilting, so by SAQA’s definition it is ‘a quilt’, although I never use that term for anything so small.

It’s an interesting idea to ask artists to combine two unlikely materials, and this call to present a work combining textile and glass materials and techniques is possibly an international first. I’m hoping the organisers will make it a biennial or triennial, because I’m already thinking about another one … 

Winding down to the New Year, we’re in what many call the silly season. There are lots of TV and newspaper reviews of everything we’ve been following or missed this year – local, national and world events of note, including natural and man-made disasters and inspiring rescues, best book and movie lists, prizes won by various national and international celebrities, sporting highlights, trends in absolutely everything from fashion, travel and more, too many wars, notable obituaries… and there are still 3 more days of it to endure while we wait for New Year to break out all around the world…

Montevideo is really quiet at this time of year, and activities Mike and I do together if we’re home, include having a BBQ lunch and reading out on the patio. We give ourselves a nightly episode of some series on Netflix, and last night finished the final episode of the final series of The Crown, so we’ll be auditioning a couple of new ones tonight. I’m also about to look at what’s on in the movie theatres. This time of year, I’m sure that whatever time we go, there’ll be about 6 people in the theatre. And while my mahjong and book club are suspended for the next few weeks, I have more time to turn attention to a few ideas in sample making in my sewing room or ‘studio’, which I always think is too fancy a word for my workspace, but whatever.

Today I photographed this 30cm square work, tidied up the required maximumum 50 word statement, and well ahead of the closing date, actually submitted it to an online exhibition call that I’ve been planning to enter for several months. It’s been kicking around ‘almost finished’ for several weeks, and although to you it might not look finished, it actually is. The off-kilter fused fabric squares form a wonky grid that gradually gets more out of line, and this seemed to need unfinished edges. If I exhibit it in person I’ll attach it to a plain coloured canvas stretcher, or recommend framing so that none of the raw edges are hidden. In a previous post I referred to ‘rules based disorder‘ which I sort of forgot about when I named it Dancing Squares, but perhaps that’s better as a big concept title for a much larger work….

Some of the fibreartists I most admire work in the 2-3m range, and I’d love to as well, but the size and shape of my workroom make it harder for me to manage in terms of working space, and although my table area does allow domestic machine quilting, I’m avoiding it as my arthritic neck, back arm joints do better with hand stitching. A couple of painters I most admire work around 50cm – so I’m starting to think smaller, and hope I’ll eventually settle on a uniform small size.

Still on The List –

• Continue this series of squares in grids
• a few of which will be around 95 – 100cm plus range –
• but others will definitely be under 40cm
• a 30cm work for the annual SAQA benefit auction later in the year
• ditto but smaller for the Spotlight Auction at the annual conference