Diary of a Revolution Sampler 2

Day 2

Well I'm now wondering what on earth I've started. 

The day began really well. The piece is an oversized embroidery sample with 99 vertical rows of embroidery, in lots of colours, representing the slogan 'We are the 99%'. I've not decided yet whether to include the 100th row.

With the help of two books: Magic Crazy Patchwork by J.Marsha Michler (a fantastic book if you want to know everything there is to know to create crazy quilts.) and a very old embroidery book Erica On Embroidery by Erica Wilson which was published in 1975 and belonged to my granny - I managed to find 85 stitches and variations.

So, I now have a plan for the embroidery. Every 10th line there will be a row of quilting stitches - represented by the yellow line on the photo.

The piece measures approximately 1 metre wide which means a line of stitching every 1cm. Now the problems are beginning. This may be too close and the stitching will shred the paper or it may be fine and hold everything together seeing as the bondaweb seems to have come unstuck during the night around all the sides. This could have been due to me moving the piece around a lot last night because I was so thrilled with it!

So this afternoon I started to outline two of the letters which I marked with tacking stitches last night. It takes a lot longer to stitch than fabric because you can't bend it but it can be done. However as I sat there I began to do some maths: 100 rows of stitching even if I manage one a day that's three months. That's when I stopped calculating and began to seriously wonder if I've gone mad. It's not like I have nothing else to do, for starters there's a pile of quilt tops waiting to be quilted and oh yes I have to go to work tomorrow.

Well I'm not giving in yet and the first two letters, split stitch and rather large outline/stem stitch, don't look bad at all.

Diary of a Revolution Sampler

Day 1

A blank canvas , well actually a blank piece of muslin covered with fusible web.

Material I've been collecting for almost a year connected to demonstrations and protests here in Granada and Spain during 2012.

Lettering to be embroidered across the sampler drawn onto opaque paper - actually the paper I pulled off the fusible web.

A quick look at the tangled threads in my embroidery box to see what exactly I have. I was pleasantly surprised!

Fixing the posters and newspaper cuttings to the fusible web was a bit like doing a jigsaw backwards.
First draw a line under the image.

Then cut out the paper from underneath and finally iron with a piece of muslin between the iron and the paper.

Everything stuck down.

Now tack through all the lettering.

And finally, for today, rip off all the paper.

It makes more sense on the back.

To be continued.....

Designing with Pavements I

  This is the first post in a short series 'Designing with Pavements'. In January 2007 we arrived in Granada, Spain to live. One of the first things which caught my eye as a quilter were the pavements.

  Many of Granada's pavements are made of cream and terracotta paving slabs with geometric designs on them. They are often arranged in a checkerboard design. The more basic ones consist of rows of dots or lines forming rectangles but the more complicated form pathways of octagons and stars beneath your feet.

  I'm not sure why the pavements are so decorated. Most of the old streets in the Albayzín, Granada's old quarter, are laid with white and grey pebbles arranged in complex designs with swirls and flowers – another treasure trove of ideas for quilting designs, embroidery and Kantha. Perhaps this heritage has created the paving slabs and no doubt it all goes back to Islamic designs and their creators who lived here for centuries. 

  So I took inspiration from what I was walking on. To date I haven't made a quilt from any of them but the series is planned to show you how I explored the designs and what I came up with. Perhaps they'll inspire you to create something too.

STARS AND OCTAGONS

  As you can see from the photo these blocks make a stunning pavement. (Last week it rained all week, hence the damp look and it was really difficult, nigh impossible, to find a cream tile with no chewing gum stuck to it!) Turning the photograph visually makes it no longer a pavement. This trick is valid for lots of ideas when you start with something real – a building, a tree, a landscape. Turn the image and you forget what it is and begin to see shapes and lines and design possibilities.

  My first block was a straightforward copy of the pavement. Looking at the piece I think I pieced each piece separately though it would be very easy to sew long strips of fabric together and then cut out the wedges to sew onto the stars. Or as many of you will have already realised this is the traditional Spiderweb Block which is very often foundation pieced.

  To make my small sample even sweeter I added tiny silver beads to the centres of the stars. On a less whimisical note I also tried out some fly stitches which I think would be an excellent way of decorating and quilting at the same time.

  Going back and looking at the pavement, what is really striking are the lines defining the forms. In the pieced block these lines have given way to the forms which are now the predominant design feature.
 So, with the second piece I went back to the lines and stitched them onto one single piece of cloth. I stitched from the back and put No.5 perle cotton into the bobbin of my machine. I love this couched effect with the thread. I think this little piece is beautiful in its simplicity. I also changed the octagons into circles.

  But how to make an entire quilt? Again I went back to the pavement and its checkerboard layout. The final piece is a classic four patch – 2 lights and 2 darks. The darks are heavily stitched and one of them is also pieced. I've kept both the octagon and the circle and pieced the circle into one of the white squares. Looking at the back of the pieced block you can see the patterns made by the quilting stitches.

  I was well aware of my limitations as a machine quilter; the only way I could achieve this amount of stitching was on small panels which would then need to be joined to form a quilt. Perhaps this is why I stopped. My sketch book from the time has lots of photocopies of different shadings which I cut up and played around with but there are no notes for my thought processes, or for what I intended to do on the two white squares.

  I know I'm not alone. Every quilter has a box, a cupboard, a drawer, a bag of unfinished blocks and ideas. Some really are unfinished quilts but other pieces of fabric are the beginnings of ideas which were only half explored, or maybe hardly explored at all. Don't forget about them, maybe it's time to bring them out into the light and share them.

  I'm revisiting all my pavement experiments and I can feel the cogs in my brain beginning to turn. Strangely when I went out to find the original paving to photograph for this post I found the same tiles outside the door of where I now work. I don't think I'd noticed it until I looked. So keep your eyes open for what's around you – quilting ideas might be,quite literally, under your feet.