Still not convinced about Big Stitch Quilting?

Well my very first blog post was about big stitch hand quilting and I still have a feeling that not many of you are convinced.

Since that first post, 22 months, ago I've big stitched lots of my quilts. Most of the Trip Around The World series has been finished, just one left. This fact on its own shows how good this method of quilting is - my UFOs are almost non existant. I've even finished big bed quilts, the ones you procrastinate over for the longest or send them out to a long arm quilter!

If you look carefully you can see the Big Stitching on all of these quilts.

I am completely convinced that this is the way to get your quilts finished.

I love stitching.

Here's some recent stitching on indigo dyeing

The first quilts were sparsely stitched and I used the seams as my guidelines, usually staying just a little beyond the underturned seam allowance - less fabric to sew through. The Trip Around The World quilts lend themselves to lovely long diagonals or chevrons. The quilt backs are beautiful wholecloths.

This is the centre of this quilt where the chevron design from both sides meets.

But now I've begun to stray off the path and do freehand lines. It's a bit daunting and when not all of the stitches are perfect it really shows.

The trick is to keep your needle lined up with the stitches as you make them. Not all of my stitches are the same, but most of them are. In fact someone - a non quilter - just presumed the stitching had been done on a machine!! Also if I am quilting across the whole width of the quilt I will cut the thread the length to go from one side to the other. Then I pull it through the centre of the quilt line and leave half of it dangling and quilt from the centre to the edge and then go back to the centre and out to the other edge. This way the beginning and end of the threads are in the outside edge of the wadding.

I use my own hand dyed threads which match the quilts. I love the way this creates an extra element of surprise; a little pop of white thread from where I'd tied a knot when dyeing, a stretch of yellow running over brown fabrics, a sudden green thread where the dyes mixed.

Choosing beautiful thread will enhance your quilt. Having different colours, or shades of the same one, allows the thread to appear and disappear against certain prints or solids. It creates small details and interesting elements which you will notice much later when you're using the quilt and sitting under it, and studying the geometric shapes and the fabrics and the quilting.

So take one of your UFOs and try big stitch quilting on it. Take the plunge into the unknown, you don't know what might be out there.....

Dyeing with Woad.

Today for the first time ever I got blue dye from a plant. I'm thrilled.

I live on what's called the Tropical Coast, the local commercial crops are mangos, avocados and custard apples. I sowed the seed last August and in January we planted the plants out on a terrace of mango trees.

This week we reckoned there were enough leaves big enough to try - even though normally woad is harvested in Northern Europe during the summer.

So first thing this morning off I went to pick the leaves.

The plants under a (small) mango tree.

I used leaves mainly from the plant on the left.

I have never done any dyeing with indigo, despite having synthetic indigo and all the additional chemicals sitting in a box since last summer.

I followed Jenny Dean's recipe for fresh woad leaves from her book Wild Colour. I substituted soda ash for washing crystals.First I steeped the leaves in boiling water for an hour. I had to keep the liquid warm for an hour but by putting the pan into another filled with boiling water and out in the sun the water remained very hot for the whole time.

I hadn't been able to find a thermometer but she tells you that 50 degrees is as hot as your hand can tolerate. I strained off the leaves. So now in went the soda ash, again a bit of guess work. I used 250g of leaves and 1.5 litres of water and put in about 3/4 of a teaspoon of soda ash. The pH changed to about 9.
Now I had to whisk to get a blue froth. We whisked and whisked and I was told not to put in more soda ash by the chemistry student in the family!

This isn't blue! By now I was wondering if I'd picked the leaves too soon but we continued. 

I added 3 teaspoons of sodium hydrosulphite and waited.

Now it was time to put in the wetted fibres. We still had no idea if there was any blue present.And then we noticed a blue tinge to the film on top of the water and suddenly it all looked like it might work.

And it did!!!It was so exciting and just like magic. You take out the fibre and it just turns blue in front of your eyes - MAGIC.

The thin cotton muslin dyed beautifully as did the wool. I also put in some other cotton, which as usual with natural dyes was really disappointing - though I'm wondering if there was soda ash left in it from scouring which could have affected the result as the muslin was just washed.

Here is the magic on video - it only takes 38 seconds!

So now I'm just incredibly excited, and full of questions. We're sowing the rest of our woad seeds tomorrow. I'm wondering if with the climate here we can get colour all year round. I'm hoping when it gets a bit warmer to experiment by using different alkalis and reducing agents which are not chemicals out of a bottle.

But for now I'm just basking in a blue glow.

Making Felt

Last weekend I spent making felt.

It's been in preparation since the Autumn. I've been experimenting with natural dyes - pomegranates, fig leaves, onion skins, cochineal - all ingredients which I can find locally.

Experiments on cotton were very disappointing so I switched to wool.

In November, whilst in Ireland, I picked up two fleeces; one from Evelyn Shannon and a beautiful Jacob's fleece from her neighbour in County Wicklow.

Here's the wool. It's quite dirty and just working out how to wash it took a lot of experiments. The trick is to take out enough of the grease and dirt so that it'll dye well, but not too much otherwise it feels like a pan scourer!

So having done lots of experiments , including little bits of felt, I decided to really try and ''produce'' some.

It took three days.

Friday evening I made the sandwiches - layers of wool running in different directions. I put four layers and as my wool isn't carded I teased it out bit by bit. Even though it was washed  a fair bit of dirt still fell out. But it was worth it as the finished results were scrumptious.

 Two pieces had Jacob's wool, white and dark on the top and the other has wool in various shades of pink, all from cochineal.

Saturday I started felting. Copious amounts of hot water with soap in. Possibly using too much water? Out on the terraza. It's really hard work not helped by a rabbit running around my feet and making me worry that he'd end up with soapy water in his eyes. I eventually shut him in his cage.

Most of the layers began to felt together so after a lot of rubbing I put them out and had a break.

In the end I didn't get back to them until Sunday. They now needed serious beating to finish the process. I rolled them up with bamboo mats and bubble wrap and rolled, and rolled, and rolled. Poured boiling water all over them and rolled, and rolled, and rolled. The bamboo mats fell apart so I started just using bubble wrap and suddenly everything began to felt together and shrink.

I was considering making felt cushions to sell but have decided that they would cost a small fortune because of the time and sheer hard work making felt entails.

I'm going to keep experimenting with the natural dyes and the wool but just for me.

Finished pieces out drying.

This weekend it's poured with rain and I've ended up back with the textiles I love -my own hand-dyed fabrics. I'm making a range of bags to sell - but that's the next blog.

And I now, finally, have loads of rainwater collected to use with my cochineal.

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