Trip Around the World Christmas Cards

It's December and it's that time of year when I put a morning aside and make Christmas cards.


These are actually what I made last year but I made them so late that there wasn't much time left to share the idea.

Hope there's time for you to try them this year.

First of all cut lots of 1'' x 1'' squares of Christmas fabrics with your rotary cutter and ruler. Cut as many as you can.

Now start laying them out in rows on your ironing board.

 Make sure you place them right side down.

Make the rows as long as your ironing board.

And then keep adding rows. Make sure there are no gaps between the squares. Spend time trying to get the rows as perfect as you can.

Cut some bondaweb/fusible web the same height as your cards are going to be. Now carefully iron the strips of bondaweb onto the fabric squares, trying very hard not to displace them.

It's very cool when you can lift them all up once they're attached.

Now carefully trim the top and the bottom. 

Once this is done you can cut various widths to fit your cards.

If you look carefully at my selection of cards you can see how I cut differing widths. Sometimes a small, narrow piece is more effective than covering the whole surface.

And you can also make bookmarks.

 

Here I've used Christmas fabrics but you can use any fabrics you like and make any cards you want with whatever patchwork block design you like. Cards for all times of the year and for every occasion.

Happy ironing.

End of the Summer

Well it's Monday, September 16 and here in Andalucía everybody is back to school.

September for me always feels like the beginning of the year so before I embark on more projects for the autumn and winter here's a photo review of the summer.

I actually had two free months this year and having moved down here to the coast there were a lot of new inspirations. July I did loads of work but I think that the heat was getting to me by August and I wasn't half as productive.

Well I'm living by the sea and at the end of the beach there are piles of nets with wonderful lines and a palette of colours which I wanted to use for dyeing. Project for the future?

Later on in the summer I photographed beach towels hanging from a hotel's balconies at the end of a day. This project I did mange to use.

One photo which I didn't get was the lines, and double lines, of colourful parasols all the way along the beach. Next year.

Of course there were new paving tiles

and another antique quilt which sent me off into a whole new series of work.

As I've already written, I spent alot of time dyeing.Here's my 'Dye Studio'.

A few things side tracked me:

Sun dyeing - with procion! Fun but didn't lead anywhere.

Natural dyeing. No idea where this is leading.

I have a saucepan of pomegranates stewing at the moment and mordants coming in the post.

In the grips of the first wave of enthusiasm - I had sewn the first indigo seeds- I found these amazing and HUGE saucepans in the weekly flea market. Of course I had to buy them - they were a bargain!!!!

The end of the summer saw a whole new range of fruit come into the market: figs, dragon fruit, passion fruit and the very first mangoes. I love the way they are arranged in rows on the market stalls. I've got lots of photos and they're ready for a big, winter project.

These two are nothing to do with textiles or needles and thread but they did take over quite a bit of time. Perhaps this is why I got very little done in August? Finally our budgies mange to hatch their eggs, luckily only two of the six hatched. Suddenly one night when the chicks were about three weeeks old their mum decided to pull out their feathers and so suddenly we were hand rearing chicks. It took three of us to do it at the beginning but slowly, us and the chicks, worked out what we were supposed to do. They are now beginning to fly around and almost feeding themselves at last!!!

And finally THE STORM which landed on us one afternoon at the beginning of September.

Dramatic and swift and despite being up on the terraza taking photos of the clouds I forgot to bring in my pots of indigo seedlings. By the time I realised that they were out there I would have had to wade across to rescue them, and there was a lot of lightning and hail stones, well more like small chunks of ice. Needless to say the seedlings didn't do very well. They're still alive, just, but with burnt leaves. One little plant was under the table and is still nice and green and I'm hoping come the spring this will be the one which flowers and gives me seeds for the next attempt.

I'm now looking forward to it all being a bit cooler. One of my other projects was quilting my Pink Trip Around the World, not the best idea sitting underneath a wool filled quilt in the middle of August on the South coast of Spain. Just have to get all the quilting done before next summer!!

Back to Dyeing

Last week I was hand dyeing. I've been dyeing fabric for years and probably all of my quilts have my own fabric in them somewhere. Some of my quilts are all hand dyes.

Birds of Paradise, 2005

The Trip Around the World series had lots of rounds of hand dyed squares. The occasional gaps in the colour made me think of them as little bits of sunshine coming through the clouds. They were an intrinsic part in making all of these quilts alive and interesting.

I began dyeing with Procion MX dyes many years ago. I was then living in Ireland and this meant ordering them from the UK. Then Dylon came along with their Pure Colour range. They were a godsend: procion based dyes which I could buy in Cork one jar at a time as they ran out. Perfect until the product was discontinued.

I've kept going since then on my leftovers and everybody else's but finally the fix ran out. So I took a deep breath, didn't look at the total, and ordered a whole new batch of dyes and soda ash from Kemtex.( www.kemtex.co.uk an excellent and really helpful company)

I have hundreds of dyeing notes but it's taken me all week to get back into soda ash and urea solutions. I'm hoping all my colour recipes will be the same, and if they aren't well I'll just have a new range of colours.

I spent the initial years merrily squirting syringes of dye into layers of fabrics in jars but eventually I think you feel the need to be more scientific/professional/organised(?). So now I have colour charts and can reproduce colours or dye exactly the shade or tone which I need. Purples, oranges and browns are my favourites. Blues are still a disaster and that beautiful, clear, bright red remains illusive.

I've learnt to re-dye. Think of painting a wall, the first coat of paint dries a bit wishy-washy but the second one is much deeper. It's the same with dyeing; dye a second time and you'll be thrilled with the results.

Fabrics dyed once, on the right, and fabrics dyed twice, on the left.

Also in the box is a jar of synthetic indigo. Indigo – even the name is evocative. I've been dying to try it for years. I have an idea, possibly irrational, that living in a hot climate should produce better results. I haven't opened the jar yet as I'm a bit afraid of letting the genie out of the bottle, I don't think I'll ever stop once I start, but I have done lots of research on the internet. This all led me to thinking about dyeing with natural indigo. One web page led to another and my first seedlings of Japanese Indigo and Woad have just come up. But that's a subject for another post.

The first tiny seeds.

A Room of one's own

Well, here's the view out of window of my new studio.

Well, it's the view if you stand right next to the window and look out sideways.

This is actually the view when I'm sitting at my work table

and studio is another name for the spare bedroom. But hey, it's a big step up from where I've been working for the last few years.

In May we moved out of Granada and came to live on the coast. Almuñécar, the small town where Laurie Lee ended up when he walked out one Midsummer's morning. We're living in the Barrio San Miguel, a large cluster of old houses on the hill around the castle and overlooking all of the town and the beach. The houses are built like a chinese puzzle. Our house is L-shaped with other houses nestling into us. Once up on the 'terraza' you're in Escher land with multiple levels and geometric shapes in every tone of white.

But back to my workspace. The last few years my large work table took up about  a third of the bedroom. Turn around and there was the bed. To be honest when you're laying out all the blocks for a quilt a double-bed is quite handy and lying in bed is a useful way of assessing the latest design dilemma pinned to the wall - and my best ideas are usually first thing in the morning. But that's probably where the advantages end.

So now I have a whole room to myself. Almost. There's an ugly wardrobe full of chairs, boxes, electric fans and a large roll of wool wadding. The new house somehow doesn't have a lot of empty floor space and so basting a quilt means moving furniture. This is probably why the roll of wadding hasn't been opened. There are also  boxes which still need to be unpacked, somewhere in them is my bead box. All the odds and ends which we don't want in other rooms seem to be defying gravity and moving up to my room.

My Room: at the top of the house, next to the terraza, a little bit hot by the end of the day, with a view of a tiny sliver of the Mediterranean. My Room.

However, I have a sneaking feeling that when I finish the next quilt I might just miss that bed behind me. It's a long way down to the floor.

 

Escher Land

Designing with pavements II

Here's the second part of Designing with Pavements.

The last post had a very beautiful and complicated stars and hexagons pattern but here's something much more simple.

Rows and rows of rectangles.

.

Sometimes it's more challenging to create using minimum lines and forms.
I started by doing a painting/ collage. I had already decided that I wanted to work in one colour and chose a lemony yellow.

I decided against piecing and chose to create the lines using stitching.

The shading on the hand dyed fabric gave me the idea to actually dye the fabric in squares and then quilt.

This is as far as I got. Again probably due to the fact that my machine quilting skills aren't good enough for what I was trying to achieve.It would be interesting to go back and redo the project using big stitch hand quilting and see what emerges.

Here's another set of pavement tiles where you could use a similar approach.

This design isn't mine at all, but a completely traditional one. Sometime back in the late nineties Quilters' Newsletter Monthly (as it was then called) printed this pattern.

I think it's called Rose Dream. I started hand sewing blocks and I'm still trying to complete them. My aim is 100 blocks, or 50 different fabrics. As it's taking so long to do the fabrics are a veritable history of my patchwork fabric collection.

I'm sure some of you even recognise, and still have, some of the same fabrics.

So, despite working on this as a very longterm project, for a long time I didn't recognise that the tiles in the patio of the house where I'm living in Spain were the same pattern.

Interestingly I started the project by drawing around the templates and sewing along the pencil line and then randomly cutting a seam. A few years later I bought Jinny Beyers hand sewing bible and changed to adding the 1/4 inch seam into the templates and sewing by eye. It's a much better system.

The Jinny Beyers method block is on the top.

And finally, a few weeks ago the bus stopped and out of the window was another traditional design there on the wall in front of me.

Once you start looking there are design possibilities everywhere and honestly I do finish projects, sometimes!

Diary of a Revolution Sampler - The End

Well, it's actually May 12 - a happy coincidence - and the Revolution Sampler is finished.

Really it was finished two weeks ago, and it immediately travelled with me to Ireland, I only got around to posting this today.

It's finished but I'm not sure if it is.

I had no way of assessing the piece except that I knew that as a quilt it was perfectly made. In Ireland a few people were actually brave enough to be honest about the piece and I got some very interesting constructive and positive criticism.

Criticism when it's positive is what allows you to grow. And so now I'm full of the beginnings of ideas for the next piece. I may also take the Revolution Sampler apart and rework part of it, perhaps.

But for now it's complete. It has been a great experience making it. I finally feel I can begin to call myself a textile artist, a term I have been very wary of for a long time. Writing the blog added a whole new dimension to the process. On one hand there was the surreal week when 1,881 people saw something I was working on to the realisation that even my closest friends half the time don't read the blog just look at the pictures!!

Two people were instrumental in this quilt's evolution and I don't think they have any idea about the part they played. Last summer Elena Moral shared a picture of the original graffiti from Germany of Revolution, with Love backwards, and Syk Houdeib helped me to collect a lot of the posters and stickers. Without their input this Revolution Sampler wouldn't have existed. Their interest along the way was an additional bonus, thanks.

So that's it. Not the end at all just the first step.

And for those of you who are actually reading, here are some inspiring words from Howard Zinn which I read whilst sitting in Malaga airport, with the Revolution Sampler next to me swathed in bubble wrap.

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places - and there are so many - where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

Howard Zinn. A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.

Diary of a Revolution Sampler 6

Well last weekend I bought some wadding and set out to finish the Sampler.

First I taped the back to the living room floor. Smoothed the wadding onto it and basted the two together. I'd decided not to baste the top mainly to avoid putting unecessary holes in it and also as it lies flat I didn't see the need.

Next step was to lie the top on top of these two layers and at this point I did tack through the three layers just around the outside. Once this was done I decided to quilt the two outer rows on each side before lifting the whole thing off the floor and removing the tape.

It was a strange feeling as I lifted it up. This is usually the moment when after all the back breaking basting you get the reward of finally seeing and handling a quilt, as opposed to a top on its own. The Sampler is a quilt and it isn't. As I've continued to handle it while stitching  the rows of quilting it has definitely become to feel more like a textile.

Here are the threads I'd put aside, in order as I embroidered the rows, for the rows of quilting stitches.

So far so good. So I removed the tape and lifted the whole thing up. Mmmm.... not so flat as I thought it would be. Even here in the photo you can see how it's moving in waves!

The problem is the T-shirt material which stretches and contracts as it wishes. On purpose I hadn't stretched the back too much when I taped it down. I'm hoping that the added pieces of posters in the rows with the T-shirt will help to keep the back in shape.

At this stage just a bit exhausted from crouching down basting and quilting I reckoned I'd call it a day. 

I lay the quilt on my work table and covered it with my large cutting board and practically every heavy quilt book that I own. Knowing I wouldn't get back to it for at least four or five days I reckoned I'd manage to flatten it.

And so to today.

I removed the books and there it was all lovely and flat. By the end of the morning I'd finished all the quilting rows.There was quite a bit of swearing involved, once again due to the T-shirt material. It was ***** hell to sew through, even the parts not printed on. One needle totally bent and even the next one was in poor shape by the end. I also gave in about putting unecessary holes through the paper and added some pins just to even out the waves as I quilted.

Pins and two needles

By two o'clock the 99 rows were complete and the quilt was only a little bit wavy. So I put it back under all the books for a few hours.

.

And if only that had been the end.

I'm putting a mustard/gold cotton double binding around the quilt. A double binding because it's what I always use and the colour because it frames the quilt but doesn't close it in as a black binding would have done.

I cut the sides and for once I had four perfect 90 degree corners. 

Now to the machine, easier said than done. It's not a normal quilt which folds up and moves through the machine on its own. In the end I needed an assistant and even though it's a small piece by the end we both had aching shoulders.

And here's the quilt with the binding almost all the way around and if you look closely you can see it's not flat.The binding exacerbated the problem. For some reason it went on tighter than the quilt and so is now pulling the quilt tighter, just the opposite of what I wanted.

Aching shoulders and just a bit fed up, there was nothing for it except to take all the binding off. Almost three metres of stitching to take out!

So now it's back under all the books, except that now there's a perforated line around it all from where I've taken the stitching out. I'm going to hand sew the binding on - has to be quicker than what I've just done - I hope that this way the binding will be more relaxed and follow the quilt instead of pulling it tight. I expect using bias binding would help too, but I haven't got enough fabric.

Then all I'll have to do is stitch the binding to the back and embroider my initials and the date. The end is in sight. Think I might have thought this before.

Now where's that bottle of wine.

Diary of a Revolution Sampler 5

Well so much for the Easter deadline!

Thursday I finally manged to catch up and complete my daily deadlines for stitching the rows and by Thursday evening I had actually finished them all. Bang on time.

Friday morning I got up and straight to work.

First I sliced up my T-shirt from the demonstration last May 12.

The T-shirt was shorter than the sampler so I added on pieces of posters backed with muslin.

Originally I had thought of combining my T-shirt with flamenco dress fabric (of which I seem to have bought quite a lot over the last few years and not really used much) but in the end I chose a nice bright communist/revolution red - really what else could it have been.

Strips laid out in sewing order

I was a little bit worried about the stretchiness of the T-shirt fabric and I envisioned a few problems with the tension between the strips. I ripped the red fabric to make sure that they were really running down the grain. When I sewed the strips I sewed them all from the top, lining up the top edges, and I was pleasantly surprised that it all sewed up fine and lies flat - well there's one or two small bumps but only I know where they are.

The back looks a bit like a flag, and though no football fan suspiciously reminds me of the Barcelona colours.

As the top is so flat I decided to baste the wadding only to the back. Also because I don't want to put any uneccesary holes through the top. I then planned to place the top on top and do the rows of quilting stitches from the centre out.

Not even lunchtime and so much done.

Next step search through all the plastic bags in the wardrobe for the wadding. Nice piece of wool but my gut instinct is for a piece of cotton which will hold its shape. 

More bags and more bags (even more flamenco fabric, think I'll have to stop acquiring it) and finally the realisation that I have no wadding. DISASTER

It's Good Friday, everything's closed, and tomorrow I'm off for the day to the coast.

I almost made the deadline. This week I'll buy the wadding and now I'm planning on having it finished in two weeks. That's the plan.