What a satisfying morning. I’ve started making what will be a small piece, a maquette for another, larger, work in the Pandemic Pattern series. I’ll be using some of that fine leather I recently acquired and posted about.
I’ve selected a red background for danger. How to represent the now classical covid shaped motifs is sorted in principle. We see lots of diagrams and graphics of this now classic molecule in some lovely and often lurid colours, so I googled to try to find the true colour of the virus molecule. It turns out that it’s colourless, if you could see it with the naked eye and so therefore it really doesn’t matter what colour you use to represent it.
So for this first pass at this pattern I’ll use black, but I have some lurid purple and magenta, and heaps of bright orange to consider for the future. For the little spiky bits my preference is the green single thread pictured above, but being polyester it’s a bit springy and could drive me mad unless I can master better control over it. There’s always stranded embroidery thread, and black perle, so I’m still deciding. What I have decided is to not use gold because that somehow bestows positive celebrity on the wretched virus that’s devastating the whole world this year.
Despite what I wrote in a recent post, that idea has been sidelined for the moment. I realised I was trying to put two ideas together that weren’t going well, they were blocking my way forward and I was stuck. I unpicked what I’d done so far, reviewed my thumbnail drawings, cleared away fabrics, got out others, tidied my work table and got ready to make a fresh start again the next morning.
Intending to use lines of arcs as in several previous works, I auditioned some sheer fabrics, stitching them with metallic thread onto the black background. They were hard to photograph:
I selected the right end one, which looks best with the duller gold I stitched it with. I pre-applique with machine basting, and although in this image it was a straight line, now with curvy shapes I’m using the longest stitch set on the widest zig-zag, which is easily pulled out once the edge stitching’s all done. Pulling the top thread from the stitching is a breeze using Gutermann’s Skala – one of those multi filament threads many call bobbin thread. I always use it for machine pieced patchwork and have done for decades. The seam is as strong as anything else, the stitching is so fine the seam lies ultra flat, and as I say, and it’s quick and easy to undo any seam that needs to be redone.
The fabric shape is machine basted with the longest/widest zig-zag into place, that stitching being removed once the applique is complete.
This work will be1.8mw x 0.9mh, so there’s a lot of sewing to be done while I think about how I’ll quilt it, and whether to use batting or just a third layer of fabric between front and back.
Though I’ve become pretty speedy with the hand applique, it occurred to me perhaps this wasn’t the smartest technique to use in a big piece, and yet I felt compelled to. I found myself recalling an exhibition of the layered textile art of Nena Bardaro I visited here in 2017. She’d used fairly sheer fabrics in her quite large appliqued works, and I began wondering if she’d stitched the raw edges down or whether they’d been finely turned under… When I read that post, I felt really silly to have fogotten the most fascinating technical detail of those works – her ‘stitches’ were lots and lots of tiny melt marks made with non-specified heat tool that fused those nylon fabrics together. I feel a bit better – that must have been almost as time consuming, obsessive perhaps, as what I’m doing right now.
A Nena Bardaro work detail – stitch-like melt marks that fused the layers of nylon.
I see the threaded needle as a mark making tool I can use with various materials and media to produce art with unexpected, improvisational effects as opposed to an element of precise technical excellence. We’re all influenced by what we see – and many artists I admire are using hand stitches in their art as mark making in addition to constructional functions.
A year ago I made this small quilt, Regeneration 2, currently on show in the Australia Wide Seven exhibition at Belconnen Arts Centre, Canberra, until December 18th. The 40 selected 40sq. cm quilts in that collection will travel between venues in Australia and New Zealand until the end of 2022.
Regeneration 2 2020, 40cm x 40cm. Raw edge hand applique
Regeneration 2, detail.
If you look at the detail of this small piece, I wouldn’t hold it against you if you commented out loud that it looks rather amateurish. Those raw irregular edges and hanging bits of thread are a world away from finely executed traditional hand applique, which I can do, of course. I’ve done plenty of cross stitch, pulled and drawn thread work, hardanger and other traditional embroideries, all quite exacting, and I love them all. I own and take pleasure in using household linens worked by my grandmothers, and other lovely antique hand stitched linens by unknown stitchers that I’ve collected. I love them all, but I just don’t work that way – which is what I’ve always said about traditional quilts.
I have certainly been influenced by the surge in popularity of hand stitch and the growth of the Slow Stitch movement over the last decade. For the last year my surface design has centred on hand stitch, which is why I’ve enjoyed the TextileArtist.org Stitch Club workshops I’ve been taking over the past few months.
I’m interested in exploring unusual materials in my textile art, and recently mentioned frog leather, six ‘hides’ of which a Uruguayan quilting friend gave me quite a few years ago. I didn’t know what to do with it, and heck, until then I didn’t even know you could tan frog skins. But clearly Graciela felt I would find it interesting to work with, and I’ve hung onto them for years waiting for inspiration to strike.
Frog ‘hides’ shown with a 15.25cm / 6″ rule – they’re not large!
Recently I was rummaging in the box that holds various bits of leather and found the frog skins in their ziploc bag, plus a lovely soft small hide with a gold-dusted finish I’d totally forgotten and now I am thinking of how I’ll use it in a pandemic pattern. I thought if I could get more frog skins I could now consider something major with them, too, and I emailed Graciela to ask if she could put me in touch with the maker. Sadly, the maker has stopped producing it and that business has gone.
Before her own retirment, Graciela’s business included repairing and making leather goods, and she mentioned she had many scraps of very, very fine leathers and suedes left by someone who used to custom make garments for her clients. The photo she sent of her bin of scraps spoke of volume and colour, so of course I went around for a visit at the earliest opportunity and came home with a large shopping bag of various blacks and greys, reds, oranges, magenta, and some lovely earth tones.
We hadn’t met face to face since late last year, months before the pandemic hit, so had a good catch up while we picked out the colours I was especially interested in, both laughing when I commented “It feels just like skin!” Sifting through those bits was very sensual.
Reds, magenta and orange against dark greyish greeny brown fabric
Frog leathers above left, alongside some of the suedes and leathers in earth tones. Though not quite as thin as the frog leather, these latest pieces are still very thin
I made Pandemic Pattern by hand appliquing small strips of raw edged fabric, in a mosaic pattern inspired by the horrible sights we’ve all seen of rows of freshly dug graves. It’s since occurred to me the next one(s) in the series could be other pandemic-related shapes plus hand stitch. Being non-fraying, leather will be easier to work with, and I’ve worked out an efficient easy and fairly fast method of machining them into place. Once the hand stitch has gone into those holes in the leather, that stitching is pulled out – a total breeze using Gutermann Skala top and bottom. I have more than enough material to set out the pandemic patterns I’m thinking about for the series I have in mind.
If you sew or make quilts or other textile art, I’m sure within easy reach of your sewing machine you have an odds and ends tray, box or perhaps even a side drawer, where you keep a group of essentials including a small pack of kleenex tissues, a backup pair of old glasses in their protective case, a couple of thimbles, pencil sharprener and eraser, assorted scissors and some used but still ‘useful’ blades (if only I could find that blade sharpening tool … )
In my odds and ends tray the other day, I found a strip of clear vinyl about 10cm x 3cm labelled Katie Lane Quilts Thread Wrap, and it was a timely find, because I could immediately smoothe it around a small reel of metallic thread I’d finished using. Metallic threads so easily fall off their reels becoming ‘untidy’ very quickly, and untangling it invariably wastes more thread than you’d like to. Wrapping that strip around that reel reminded me that I used to have a bunch of those thread wrap strips somewhere, and I hadn’t seen any of them in ages.
This morning for some reason I picked up a neat little tin storage box my daughter gave me several years ago:
It’s been sitting on the shelf beneath my cutting table on the window side in the direct morning sunlight for ages, for most of the time I’ve had it, and as I looked ruefully at the faded colour, I realised it had some stuff in it, so opening it was like unwrapping a birthday present, and equally exciting!
L – 45mm rotary cutter blade sharpening tool C– thread wraps, showing how they’re used R – buttons – what can I say?
There were things that I must have ‘tidied away’ sometime… and right on the top were the couple of packs of those thread wrap strips I’d been wondering about only the other day. They’re clear vinyl, printed with the logo Katie Lane Quilts, and being about 10cm x 3cm, I realised I could also cut them in half, and for larger reels or cones could partially wrap and then place another wrap over the gap with the same effect – these things are so much more brilliant than I realised when I was dazzled enough to impulse buy them, years ago, on a trip up to the USA. I now have some fine clear vinyl sheeting in my studio, and on checking this morning, I can tell you that works just fine, too. I googled all around the brand and the thread wrap thing, and could find no mention of them, so I must have just been lucky finding it in a trial marketing thing or something. Brilliant idea though, works well, and a bit surprising they’re not a (quilter’s) household name.
Moving on through this archeaological find, there were quite a few buttons, individual and in sets, but I also found that rotary blade sharpening tool I just knew I had. In addition, I found 2 complete packs plus a few 45mm rotary cutter blades (at least 30) and with them retailing at about US$5/blade, I seem to have a serious investment in spare, new blades. This is very reassuring, as the pandemic could go on for a long while yet.
