On May 17th 2006 I blogged about the gift of some frog skins that I have kept, admiring them every now and then and not quite sure what I could do with them; wanting to do something interesting and special, but just waiting for the right inspiration.
Frog skins, ~5-10cm x ~10-12cm
About a month ago I realised pieces of this leather would be lovely to applique by hand, but I couldn’t find them. I knew they were safely together in a protective plastic file or folder, and turned the likely places upside down. It seems, though, that all the time they were in the archeological layers at the end of my cutting table anyway, as this morning I walked around to the other side of it and there was the folder on the floor, in the zone between the huge windows and that back edge of the table where Dulce The Dog stations herself there to oversee activity out on the street below.
This fine leather unfortunately only comes in small pieces! One thing that was slightly bothering me was how to use the frilly bits from the top of the leg where it meets the main part of the body. However now I have tested one of the frills with an iron and found it does smoothe out beautifully, that makes it all potentially useful. I see segments of the leather somehow being appliqued with overstitching, as I’ve been doing lately, perhaps on a black background.
Pins leave little holes in leather so I need to be careful there… perhaps I could punch a few tiny holes… either way, I will need to plan before cutting into this stuff, as I’m not sure I can get more. But my next move will be to contact the person who gave it to me and ask where I can buy some.
I think we’re all interested in our physical surroundings. We understand views of it, and we know it varies from useful and friendly (to Man) to hostile or barren as in deserts or rugged mountains. I studied geography, including geomorphology which fascinated me. As it turned out I married an exploration geologist, so all my adult life have continued to be aware of what we see of the Earth’s surface and how it relates to human activity. Landscape is not static, no matter how unchanging the large elements of it appear to be. We might look out the window at a mountain peak every day of our lives and we will think it has never changed from when we first became aware of it. But even a huge solid mountain does change, constantly, but we don’t register this unless a volcano erupts, or there’s a large landslide, for example. A rough storm over a few days will quickly and dramatically change the shape and profile of a beach. A hill gradually wears down with water, temperature changes or wind action, dislodging rocks and sandy materials that gradually accumulate somewhere else closer to the coastline. Silt deposits on a valley floor, fills in a bay on a coastline or adds to a river delta; and material roaring down a canyon in a flash flood will spread out onto the plains below to form an arroyo as the water sinks into the sandy plain. Take this favourite photo of mine as an example:
It may take you a few minutes, though, to work out that this is actually only a line of tiny sand ‘cliffs’ just a few cms high on a local beach. In the lower part of the pic the lines that clearly have something to do with the water moving down on to the lower level are actually trails left by tiny little bivalves as they retreat closer to the water’s edge with the receding tide.
The main lines could be the plan some freehand patchwork, and with this in mind I did a quick sample for a class in Gramado last year to demonstrate the potential that interesting landscape photos have.
Although I won’t take this particular sample further, a year+ on, it does bear further thinking about.
Perhaps it could work well as a design using oversewn fabric, or even leather patches and strips … neither approach I’d have dreamed of a year ago.
If you’ve been reading my blog for long enough you might remember this Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt top. It’s a very long running work in progress, or WIP, which I think I last wrote of about 4 years ago.
OK- A few will need to be removed and applied somewhere else!
Though I began making it in 1980, strictly speaking it isn’t true that I’ve been working on it for 40 years. It’s languished in storage for two long spells totalling about 12 years, but even so, it has been hanging around a while. In the stressful times of this pandemic, I’ve found hand stitching very rhythmic and calming – so in addition to the online workshops I’ve been taking, and several exhibition entries I’ve produced, I’ve also been covering and adding more cream hexagons to the border of the flower garden. I keep a little stack of cut papers and fabric hexagons, needles, thread and thimble just beside the phone to work on them sometimes while chatting in long phone calls with distant family or friends. Especially in this cream-hexies-border-building phase, it’s been easy to just pick up the top and add a few on to where I think I left off ‘last time’.
A couple of days ago I thought perhaps it was time to lay it out on the floor to see how many more hexagons I still need to cover and add, and where along the edge they’re needed. I really can’t remember making a specific decision to not add a couple more flowers on that chopped off corner, but the reason must have been that I had no more of that acid green. So anyway, that corner needs to be filled out to become square, and the corner diagonally opposite needs some attention too. Is this bothering me? Not at all. Ancient textiles often have some noticeable irregularity, and of course in the Muslim world every artisan craftsman deliberately puts in a few ‘mistakes’ in his finest silk carpet or hand carved furniture – because only Allah can produce a perfect creation.
This morning I noticed on the dashboard that there’s a list of drafts I can bring up, those posts begun but never published, for reasons not always apparent. There, I found a post I began 3 years ago, which started “I saved this pic to three of my Pinterest boards, lines, sheers and presentations – because it wowed me on all fronts.”
And it still does. I’ve searched hard, following links to many other people who also saved it, googled the image, too, but all in vain. The maker’s name hasn’t come up. So I’m posting it with admiration today, hoping someone might know who this artist is. Please let me know if you do, because of course I will revise this post with proper accreditation. I wish it was my own work. UPDATE Hooray! one of my readers messaged me within 24 hours of posting this to tell me it is the work of Stephany Latham According to her website, the full lenght of the installation is 10 feet. I’d love t see it all – there is a front on view or part of it.
I presume it’s a natural fibre, probably either cotton or silk organdie or organza, sheers because of being indigo dyed. There’s some kind of fibre filling separated out into linear sections, probably sitched to maintain the lines effect, so it seems to be a quilted textile. I think it was probably constructed as one piece before being chopped into segments now displayed as impaled by large nails, a harsh, brutal presentation method in strong contrast with the delicacy of the textile. Advantage – it would be dead easy to pack up and send off with display instructions for exhibition!
As I’ve been writing about lately, small units need effective presentation in some kind of grouping for them to be seen and appreciated for the elements that bind them together while displaying their individual differences. Think of a family photo in which it is clear parents and offsprings share resemblances, but everyone has their own particular identity, too. In recent posts here I’ve shown some small landscapes from earlier times, mostly as repeat units in art quilts, although the little landscapes mounted on basketry mounts were different. I love making them and am considering how more of them could be displayed together.
A few days ago, American textile artist Kathy Loomis sent me a nice congratulatory note on reading that I’d been selected for QN21. Kathy and I have periodially exchanged letters down the years since we actually met up at QN09, and in 2015 I was honoured when she asked me to review her book “Pattern Free Quilts” (2015) Kathy’s email arrived just as I was thinking of her, anyway. I had been looking at a recent work by Margery Goodall in a Perth, Australia exhibition (which I hope to show in an upcoming post) and Kathy’s email prompted me to take another look at her 2009 award winning quilt, Memorial Day I was reminded how much it also has in common, constructionally, with some of the work of eminent Colombian artist Olga Amaral
If you check the detail pic of Memorial Day you can see that each little rectangle is a tiny postage stamp size quilt, about 1/5″ x 1″ layered and quilted, that by it’s use of colour suggests a US flag. Using several red and white striped fabrics and rectangles of navy blue, Kathy created 4085 tiny ‘flags’ to memorialise each US solder who had lost his life in Iraq up to the tme of her making it. Quilt National always opens on Memorial Day Weekend. For a fascinating account of the making and handling of that textile, go to the 18/10/2020 post of her blog, artwith aneedle.blogspot.com
The US flag, known as The Stars And Stripes, has always featured 7 red and 6 white horizontal stripes signifying the 13 original colonies that declared independence, plus white stars against a navy rectangle in the upper left corner that was originally 13, but has gradually increased since 1776 to the present 50 whenever a new state was brought into the nation.
Mike and I lived with our kids in Denver CO for 6+ years, and our kids are still in the US, and all our grandchildren are young Americans. So we are no stangers to US politics and elections, and this extraordinary year, 2020, we’re taking perhaps closer interest than we normally do. Recently I was really struck by how any arrangement of star+stripe+red+blue+white is a visual shorthand for a statement on that country.
This current affairs program (24/10/2020) is clearly about the USA as British presenter Emily Maitlis, North American BBC Editor John Sopel, and US commentator Anthony Zurcher help Brits and non-Americans like ourselves ‘understand’ the US election.
These are not depictions of the flag itself, but we all recognise ‘patriotic’ US theme designs of star+stripe+red+blue+white . If you’ve been to USA, you know it can be seen, year round, everywhere in the country. If you google ‘stars and stripes’ on Pinterest here you’ll find hundreds of examples under various categories, so I selected ‘July Crafts’ to find a huge page beginning with these decorating ideas for July 4th celebration parties: –
These are not depictions of the flag itself. They are common every-day objects with ‘patriotic’ US theme designs of star+stripe+red+blue+white that abound year round in the USA but are especially common around 4th July, Independence Day.
Every country produces souvenir and decorator items including fabric and clothing, coffee mugs, tea towels, biros, playing cards and clothing patches and more, decorated with our own national flags. And Australia has always been a bit conflicted about our colonial origins so enshrined in our national flag, but here I’ll step around that minefield. Many of our flora and fauna symbolise “Australia” internationally, but if you mix the elements of our flag – The Union Jack, navy blue and The Southern Cross constellation, it can be confusing because the flags of many other coutries contain some or all of these elements, too.
I am certain that no other country on earth can make such a consistent statement, “USA”, while at the same time moving so far from the formal graphic arrangement of it’s star+stripe+red+blue+white national flag. Which brings me to my final point – Kathy’s October 21st blogpost outlines her plan to explore how far she can go in design while still retaining the “USA” message – she has taken 2 steps and estimates there might be a series of 6 quilts coming out of this – it will be interesting to watch!
