Dreaming Spirals

While we were at Avon Valley Country Park, I saw this amazing tree trunk:

As you can see, it’s the one the obliging angora goat was hiding in:

Here is a photo of the whole thing:

I wonder if it had been coppiced in the past. What an inspiration!

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A few weeks ago I went with the kids on a church outing to Avon Valley Country Park. They had great fun down these scary slides:

while I sat in the cafe and chatted and drank tea.

There are a lot of animals there, including Jacob and Soay sheep and angora goats. After a hairy boat ride where DS1 and DS2 rowed me around (an adult was required otherwise I would have foregone the pleasure), I went and regained my calm by having a walk around to look at the animals. The kids meanwhile hared off to the go-karts…

Jacob sheep:

Soay sheep (had to crop this photo because they wouldn’t come any closer!):

Angora goats - this little one was very obliging…

There was a tiny little kid there as well:

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I’m afraid blogging is going to be sporadic for the next couple of months… the summer holidays are nearly upon us.  I have been busy going to end of year school concerts and meetings and assemblies… DS3 is going to high school in September so he has all sorts of farewell-to-old and welcome-to-new school events.  DS1 is sunning himself in Sorrento on a geography field trip - Vesuvius, Pompeii, Amalfi… in text messages, ‘awesome’ and ‘wicked’ crop up a lot!  Here in the UK it must be the wettest July for at least a couple of years and I am ready for a bit of sun and relaxation.  Some hope with the kids at home!  Anyway, DS3 went to a party yesterday and DH to an airshow so DS2 and I went to Caerleon for lunch and to visit the annual Sculpture Festival.

Caerleon is a village just outside Newport which used to house a substantial Roman legionary force. 

This is a mural painted in a little arts centre called The Fwrrwm.  There are lots of little arty shops and a nice cafe there where we had lunch.  There are also lots of quirky and diverse sculptures in the grounds.

I love this one carved from a tree trunk:

And there is a gorgeous tree hanging over it all:

The field of the sculpture festival was very muddy - not surprising since it had poured down nonstop the day before…. 

 and they had somehow got a crane in to lift one of the sculptures…

I didn’t note down the names of the sculptors but they were from all over the world - Bulgaria, Turkey, the Czech Republic, the USA - and all the way from England too!

I loved these chairs…

And this strange hand caught my eye…

At the end of the day we got the bus home and reorganised DS2’s bedroom so he could actually get into it!  A day well spent…  and I finished reading The Memory Keeper’s Daughter.

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I decided to paint the rest of the foam core today.  Here it is, sitting drying on a piece of baking parchment.

As you can see from these photos and most of the others in this blog, my main painting surface is the floor of my studio.  There is a perfectly good table for this purpose, but it is usually too full of other stuff like cutting mats, rulers, pens, pins, needles… you get the picture.  So the floor is the next best thing.  And so it will remain, no doubt, until my knees give out altogether.

When I was thinking of painting these this afternoon, I was looking idly at the piece of plastic I had used to protect the carpet while I was painting the foamcore, and realised that it was a pretty good work of art in itself!   Or part of one, at least.

So I decided to use some painted fabric as a dropsheet instead, and have the serendipitous marks of the black paint on that.  I wouldn’t try and control it but just try and forget it was there.  (A bit difficult, actually - I still think the plastic came out better but you can be the judge of that).  When I had finished painting the foamcore I still had a bit of paint left, only a smidgeon, but I decided to do some printing with the printing blocks I made with funfoam a couple of months ago.  Ulp, not a couple of months ago, it was February!! Crumbs… where does the time go?

Here is the ‘dropcloth’ together with some printing on it:

I originally painted this fabric back in 2005 and I have used a lot of it as backgrounds or backing fabric as it is quite stiff - it was painted with acrylics on polycotton fabric.  This was the first time I had printed on top of it.  

I still had a bit of black paint left in the palette so I grabbed some painted lutradur and got stamping away….

I haven’t used lutradur in any finished work yet but I really like the effect of this and the potential for layering because it is semi transparent.

I also grabbed a bit of yellow painted fabric and some pelmet vilene cut into postcard sized rectangles which I first painted during the online Personal Symbols course I did with Susan Sorrell last year - nothing was safe from the black attack!

I really like layering paint and dyes - I think it gives such a feeling of depth and interest.  No doubt these pieces will crop up in my future work  when I decide where they will fit.  But for this afternoon - I had fun!

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I just taught myself how to mount my 2005 journal quilts on to foam core so I thought I’d post a photo tutorial, as it has been a while since I did one.

Here, from the last post, is the photo of the cut, painted boards. I cut them about an inch wider all round than the quilts, with a craft knife. I painted them with a mixture of black acrylic paint and black gesso (I used the latter only because I didn’t have enough black acrylic and wanted to make it go further).

I sponged them so that there was a bit of texture and to avoid the smears you tend to get with a brush (apparently you can buy black foam core but I couldn’t find it). I also sponged the foam sides of the boards:

Position the quilt on the foam core. This quilt is the July Journal Quilt which I was mounting. If you click on the link you can read about its evolution.

First of all I made two holes in the foam core at each corner using a large needle (well, I think it was something for making rag rugs actually, but it was the best thing I could find for the job). Try and make the top two pairs of holes level so you can put fishing line or something on them for hanging.

I kept the quilt on the board all the time as a guide. I poked the holes roughly first to get the position right and then lifted it up and poked the needle right through.

This is what it looked like when I had finished making the holes.

I then decided which was going to be the top, and cut a piece of fishing line about one and a half times the length of the top.

I pushed this through the top left pair of holes from back to front and then from front to back through the hole next to it, like a button.

I then tied this at the back several times to stop it coming undone and threaded the other end through the next top pair of holes, knotting it well again. Here is what it looks like from the back (note that I don’t bother painting the back!). This will be used to hang the quilt from a nail in the wall.

I then put the quilt back on the front of the foam core, and threaded a piece of matching thread on to a sewing needle, a long enough piece to go all around the perimetre of the quilt (it is not too vital to match it exactly as it will just catch the corners of the back of the quilt and not go right through to the front). Knot it well (I didn’t do this with the first piece and it pulled right out of one corner!). On my first attempt, I used nylon monofilament thread and regretted this choice pretty quickly! Not an easy thread to use…

Catch a few threads at the back of the quilt at one corner near to the holes you have made, and take a few stitches over and over to secure it. Try not to go through to the front.

Put the needle through the left-hand hole and bring it back to the front through the right-hand hole. Then take another stitch into the back of the quilt.

Then take the thread across (between the back of the quilt and the front of the foam core) to the next corner and repeat. Each time you stitch it, position the quilt centrally again and pull the thread fairly taut. It stays in place fairly well, I find, with a bit of flexibility. Go around each of the corners in this way.

Then take it back to the last corner and stitch over and over to finish it off, then cut the thread.

Here it is, finished!

And hanging on the wall:

I decided to hang some of them on the stairway in our house (next to the photo of DH receiving his Superbrain of the Channel Islands trophy when he was 16):

This took a lot of space to describe on here, but it probably only took me about 5 minutes to attach each quilt. You can also put them into box frames mounted on the foam core if you wish.

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Thank you for all your comments and thoughts about orientation of those two quilts.    I appreciated all your suggestions, and finally went with Gay’s idea about putting two sleeves on for the silk quilt (the top one) and have currently got it with the pink at the top.   I put the green and orange quilt with the green at the top, mostly because I decided to call it ‘Whirlwind’ and I thought it looked unstable that way which reflected the title!  Here it is hanging above the television:

I have now put sleeves on most of my finished quilts.  Here are some more hanging above the mantlepiece in my studio, with a lot of my paintings sitting on the mantlepiece with my antique sewing machine and the box I made for City & Guilds:

Here are the sea and cloud quilts I made in Linda Schmidt’s online Elements in Fabric course last year, together with Tulip, based on a macro photo of a tulip:

I’ve also been experimenting with mounting them on foamboard and gallery wrap - I think this ‘fire’ quilt (again made in Linda Schmidt’s course) looks good against the black, even though it is only sitting on the radiator at the moment!

I am planning on mounting my journal quilts on foamcore and so I have several pieces of cut foamcore which I painted black today.  Here they are, drying:

The other thing I did today was to replace one of the pieces of Tyvek which joins my Dreaming Spirals quilt to the hanging device.  It was obviously not strong enough to hold the quilt once it had been melted.  I melted this one only a little and will monitor how long it lasts this time.  It is nice to have it hanging up again in the corner of my studio as it is so bright and colourful!  Sometime I really must replace that scrappy bit of yarn by which it is hanging on the nail in the wall!

I hope that clearing the pile of finished quilts and moving them to the walls will kickstart my creativity again!  It hasn’t happened yet, but July IS a very busy month - the kids’ social lives overtakes mine by a long stretch… DS1 is on a week’s work experience this week with Stagecoach, the bus company, and he got back today having thoroughly enjoyed himself.  He goes off to Sorrento on a geography field trip at the end of next week and I am very jealous!  Especially since the weather we are having here is rain, rain, more rain …. Pompeii, Vesuvius, Capri and the Amalfi coast are much more appealing.    DS3 is madly practising his violin for a music evening at school tomorrow and the other two have their summer concert next week… 

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