{"id":2355,"date":"2013-09-06T14:34:24","date_gmt":"2013-09-06T19:34:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/?p=2355"},"modified":"2013-09-06T14:59:57","modified_gmt":"2013-09-06T19:59:57","slug":"lifes-rich-tapestry-emergence-of-a-core-theme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/?p=2355","title":{"rendered":"Life’s Rich Tapestry – Emergence Of A Core Theme"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Life's<\/a><\/p>\n

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In the past few hours this quilt: “Life’s Rich Tapestry”, 1990, approx.\u00a0 1.5m\u00a0 x 1.5m,\u00a0 <\/em>went up on Lisa Call<\/a> ‘s FB page – we were talking about how embellishment was in our distant textile art pasts.\u00a0 She posted a very red and strong green quilt with lots of bead and glitter embellishment, a piece that seemingly has no connection to the\u00a0 plain uncluttered textile paintings she now does with austere lines, plain colour combinations and heavy machine quilting.\u00a0 We had both studied in classes\u00a0with David Walker<\/a>\u00a0– I went to a class he taught at the first Quilt Surface Design Symposium in 1990,\u00a0 and\u00a0her experience was a little later.\u00a0\u00a0I will never forget that class – it was on developing your own imagery to use in your art quilt designs<\/span><\/em>.\u00a0 Because Bernina had made available for our use in the symposium these fabulous new 1230 machines, I decided that while I had it I might as well use it as a test drive, and put it through most of its paces – in large part by machine embroidering using the inbuilt fancy stitches to cover all the seams of this contemporary crazy patchwork background with gold thread – it took\u00a0miles of\u00a0thread, but the effect was great, and the embroidery functioned as the quilting.\u00a0 By the end of that workshop I was absolutely hooked on the machine and bought one on my return to Denver.\u00a0\u00a0 Marvellous, and\u00a0I still have it, \u00a0but it languishes for long spells in my workroom in Perth – as up to very recently there’s been no Bernina dealer here.\u00a0\u00a0 This one is actually version\u00a02 of that design, and went to Visions early the following year.\u00a0 You won’t have to look to far around my website to see that it is not published there, and furthermore it is totally different in every way from work I have done before or since.\u00a0 So, what’s the scoop on this one?<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

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David had us thinking about things in our lives, going through\u00a0lots of\u00a0personal exploration; and a saying that Mike my husband has often uttered came to mind: ‘That’s just part of life’s rich tapestry’\u00a0.\u00a0 I have no idea whether the title came first or it developed from the ideas I was exploring, but no matter – the elements of the design relate to the good and bad, darks and lights, positives and negatives, happy and sad, lean and plenty – the ‘things’ in life that constantly shift balance and change from day to day, week to week, year to year.\u00a0 There’s a bit of management and a bit of \u00a0luck in the mix, too.\u00a0\u00a0 Fortune\/Luck is\u00a0symbolized by the dice in the design, and the big Rainbow Serpent, an indigenous Australian figure that sees and controls all, weaves through it all – and then one’s personal strategy is represented by the Snakes and Ladders (c) \u00a0board game in\u00a0 the centre.\u00a0 I’m sorry there isn’t a clear close detail shot, but the 35mm slides for quilts of that era haven’t all been scanned, and that particular one is in Perth, Western Australia.<\/p>\n

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It is only since I began thinking about this quilt again, thanks to Lisa’s FB post, that only now do I\u00a0realize it marks the beginning of a recurrent theme in my quiltmaking – that these days comes through in the “Ebb & Flow”\u00a0 quilts and all the “Tracks” quilts – go to those galleries on this website.<\/em><\/span>\u00a0 Until now, I would never have said there was any connection.\u00a0 At that time I was moving along with very basic, 1\/2″\u00a0strip inserts – see “Ora Banda” in the “Colour Memories” gallery, and just had taken a wonderful positives\/negatives class with Nancy Crow, but not yet the early improvisational designing one I did with her in 1993.\u00a0 When we did meet again in that 1993 class in Denver, she asked me about this quilt, which she obviously felt had no connection with that stuff, and seemed pleased to hear I regarded it as a bit of an aberration – but, in the longer perspective\u00a0it’s very important indeed, and\u00a0I am still blinking a bit from this discovery.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  In the past few hours this quilt: “Life’s Rich Tapestry”, 1990, approx.\u00a0 1.5m\u00a0 x 1.5m,\u00a0 went up on Lisa Call ‘s FB page – we were talking about how embellishment was in our distant textile art pasts.\u00a0 She posted a very red and strong green quilt with lots of bead and glitter embellishment, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6uxpF-BZ","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2355"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2355\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2359,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2355\/revisions\/2359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}