I had already printed the background in various shades and values of blue (with two different thermofax screens), overprinted it in orange/gold using soy wax as a resist and then discharged some of it.  I then decided to take a (VERY) rough sketch of the streets around where my Nan grew up in Longton, altering the two main ones to vaguely echo the shape of the old bottle kilns that pervaded the city and gave it its unique character.  I used masking tape as a resist and overprinted the ‘buildings’ using the larger scale thermofax screen in black ink to make it look like the old street maps from the 19th century.

When I looked at it, I then saw that the two main ‘streets’ didn’t look so much like a bottle kiln as a pregnant woman, so I decided to call it ‘Birth of a City’, thinking of the haphhazard, unplanned way the city grew up as hordes of people flocked into it from the countryside to work in the potbanks, leading to overcrowding, poverty and rampant disease.  People lived crammed into houses too small for them; houses sprang up next to factories.

Here is a detail of the hanging:

I wanted to emphasize the rough and ready, homespun nature of the theme, so I decided just to hand quilt it with horizontal running stitches to an old blanket, patched and worn and ragged in places. I left the raw edges of the fabric and just had the original blanket stitches as binding.

Due to the Easter holidays and the fact that my two teenage sons are in the throes of revising for GCSEs and A levels, I am late completing the latest challenge for the International Quilt Challenge, which is Time.   Rather ironic really, due to lack of time…  But I thought I’d put down my thoughts for it so far.

The way I wanted to approach this theme was something around the idea of ‘the past is another country’.  I tried to brainstorm this and wrote down what came into my head….

… time past … we think it will be familiar going back, but actually we have changed and moved on, so what we were, who we were, the old familiar landmarks, look strange to us… strange and foreign…

We have forgotten …

We have a kind of nostalgia but we can never go back, we can only revisit old haunts, some of which will have remained the same, some will have changed forever;

we look at them differently, through different eyes; we are probably taller: things there look smaller, older; strangely familiar yet also foreign to the self that is our present.

And if we could go back to our grandparents’ childhood, into an old photograph, we would experience total culture shock

- the sights

- the sounds

- the smells

- the familiar-yet-unfamiliar ; kin yet unknown people

Anyway, that is as far as I got, and it was taking too long and I got stuck with how to move from there to fabric.  I thought I’d put my thoughts down here in case I use them for another project; but then I got another idea for the theme.

Last night I decided to update my Dreaming Spirals Facebook Page – I had not changed it since the new timeline was adopted and it needed a new photograph as the header.  I decided to make a collage in Picasa of my five Reeds wallhangings.  This is the result:

Today I was thinking about the theme of the challenge again and I decided to change tack completely.  I thought of the various seasons the reeds go through in the course of a year (recorded in this blog in 2010) when I visited them each month for a year to see how they change, and I thought of those timelapse videos where a camera is set to take photos at regular intervals of, say, a plant growing, and then they are put together into a video as if the plant was moving.  All my reeds pieces record a different season of the year so I thought I would try and blend them together using scraps from these pieces as a starting point to show the movement of time.  (If you would like to see the reeds photos again, here is a collage of them that I made at the end of that year).

So that is my plan at the moment!  Watch this space…. Meanwhile, do go and explore my Facebook Page – it looks quite different now.

I’m sorry I’ve been a bit absent recently but I have been doing a lot, honest!   I think that I’m going through a natural, if long, quiet spell where I’m reading a lot and not saying much, but I’m sure that will change eventually!  I’ve been doing a lot of dyeing and printing and have taken a pile of photos today.  Here is one to whet your appetite…

The theme this time was ‘Through the Window’ and as you will see from my blog post, my piece turned out differently from what I was originally planning!

I struggled to find enthusiasm for making it but got into it more and more each day. I definitely need deadlines to get me working!

The first theme was Light and Shade and this is the piece I made for it, which I entitled Murder Mystery. 

If you visit the blog page you can read about how I came to call it that!

The next theme challenge is Through The Window and there have already been several interesting posts about how we are thinking of interpreting it.

I’m hoping I will get back to blogging (and actually creating!|) soon – it’s been a challenging and stressful few months family wise (though I’m not sure this year is going to be any less stressful with one son doing GSCEs and another his A levels!).

We have a headboard for our bed and over time the padding and foam filling had disintegrated so much that it was hanging by a few tatters of cloth.  So I decided to make a quilted cover instead.

A few years ago I made a very simple quilt top from a pack of 4” squares I’d bought at a show somewhere.   They were obviously a sort of rainbow pack!   It was a square, but a couple of rows of unpicking and restitching made them into the perfect shape for my headboard. 

This is the result – definitely bright and cheerful! 

I quilted the top with very free machine spirally sort of shapes and backed it with some ready quilted fabric that I had on my shelves.

Here it is on our bed.  (It wasn’t really night, the sun was shining through the windows so I had to use fill in flash!).

My quilting is definitely a bit rusty but it felt good to be ‘drawing’ spirals with the machine again! 

Meanwhile, we are in the grip of a big freeze.  Not thick snow like the north of the country, but the wisteria has a white covering now:

When I ventured into the garden I took a few photos as well.

Last night it was very foggy and on my walk I took a few experimental photos on my new Blackberry.  The camera on it seems a bit hit and miss but I am pleased with the way this one turned out!

Very similar to September really.  I will do a collage in Picasa at the end of the year to see how they develop through the months.