Dreaming Spirals

No posts for almost a week and then like buses, two come along at once…

I have moved all my bookmarks to del.icio.us, which is a sort of communal bookmarking site and am busy sorting them all out, and clicking on all the links to test which are still live and which have perished in cyberspace. If you haven’t come across del.icio.us it is a way of sharing bookmarks - you sign up and can install buttons on your browser so that when you click on them you can add a link to your bookmarks and tell it which category to put it into. Then you can make them public if you want to… I am in the process of doing this and you can find them here. I will add a link to my sidebar in due course.

Anyway, to the purpose of this blog post! While I was sifting through my bookmarks, I found this useful article again: 9 reasons why every artist should have their own art blog.

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I meant to post this yesterday but I spilt tea on my laptop keyboard so it had to languish overnight to dry, with all detachable parts duly detached.  Luckily it doesn’t seem to have done any damage, or nothing which has shown itself yet.

While I was at FOQ, I met several people in the flesh whom I had ‘met’ several years ago through emails.

Here I am with Carol of Textile Tales in the SAQA Reverberations Exhibit.

Carol was with her friend Jenny of Felted Fibers.

On Friday I had lunch with Frances of Island Threads but we forgot to take any photos.  And I saw Myfanwy from Winifred Cottage several times as I couldn’t seem to keep away from her stall! 

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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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I’ve been busy trying to clear the pile of quilts which are sitting in my studio waiting for sleeves and labels and finishing off in general.  I finally got started yesterday and finishing one seemed to be the stimulus I needed and now there are four hanging on the walls…

There’s a small problem with the next couple of quilts - I can’t decide which way up they should be!!  What do you think?

or this?

This one is habutai silk hand dyed and machine quilted quite improvisationally.  I added the scrim and appliqued the flower petals as I went along because they felt right.  The whole thing is very textural.  I started off meaning it to be the top orientation but in lots of ways I quite like the bottom one now.  Maybe I should put two sleeves on!!!

The next quilt is one I made with the kids - we glued on lots of small scraps of fabrics and I stitched them down and then quilted it, again quite spontaneously.  Again, I started off thinking it would be the top orientation but now am not sure…

or this?

Any thoughts gratefully received!

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The house smells of onions at the moment because I’m busy boiling onion skins so I can overdye one of the skeins I did last time.  Meanwhile, I have been busy knitting my bag!  So far I have done the base and about 10 rows of the main bit - about 50 more rows to go!  But it knits up very quickly as I’m doing it on 10mm needles.  I am going to felt it in the washing machine afterwards - just hope I can get that bit right because the instructions say a top loading machine which you can keep stopping and checking.   My machine is a front loader which you have to programme and it throws a wobbly if you try and stop it in the middle.  So next week if I’m mopping up water and complaining about broken washing machines, you’ll know this is the culprit!

No photos of the half completed bag yet, but here, as promised are some of my fabric stash sorted by value (my photography seems to lag behind my blog posts at the moment…. 

The darkest two:

The medium two (actually looking at that photo I must move a few more around!:

And the lightest two:

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is how I think of this quilt-in-the-making. 

You may remember I pieced the strips and put it together in a different format.  When I got my design board I played around with it a bit more and put it like this and decided that I liked it better this way so I sewed the strips together.  Taking the photo has made me realise that the bottom row colours are quite different from the rest, although it is not so obvious in reality.  I obviously need to do something to tie them in a bit more.  Some stamping on the green strips perhaps.

I also made a larger version of the landscape postcards.

This is about 12 inches by 10 inches or thereabouts.  That light green bit on the third row from the top is green handmade paper.  I think I need to do something with that large dark row in the middle.  I’m also going to do some stitching on it: trees and suchlike.   This postcard was the smaller version of it.  It’s funny how it is difficult to scale something up without making adjustments.

I spent a large part of the afternoon printing trees out on to Lasertran and that t-shirt transfer paper.  And on to brown lokta paper which I bought from Fibrecrafts.  It is A4 size and meant to go through printers.  I’m going to have a play with them.  I feel like making a journal or something about trees.  I’ve been looking at Lynne Perrella’s book, Artists’ Journals and Sketchbooks for inspiration.  I think I’ve been going through a fallow period the last few months and haven’t really felt like quilting so I’m going to try and get my enthusiasm back by ‘playing’ in different ways.

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Here is my design board standing up on its wheels before I put the flannel on:

And here it is after I had covered it with white flannel, which I bought from Cotton Patch.   I pinned it with copious drawing pins into the wooden frame on the reverse.  I stuck a piece of fabric on it to test its stickability!  It is some which I painted in 2005 when I was working my way through The Artist’s Way.    I must do something with it sometime - the story of my life!  I seem to paint and dye much more fabric than I ever have time to stitch…..

Talking of fabric, here are some of the results of my printing with the blocks I made in the last post:

This was the block with the string wrapped round it.

For this one, I used the large rectangular print block and painted it with three colours.  The gold is metallic powder mixed with Ormoline fabric medium and the other two colours are Jacquard Pearlex powders. 

I did this by rolling a brayer in the paint (when I say paint, I mean the powders mixed with Ormoline) and then rolling the brayer over the print block so that it picked up the image, and then I rolled it on the fabric.

I did this one just by rolling the brayer in the paint and then rolling it on to the fabric - the paint formed the organic, swirly shapes.

I will probably overprint these with something else later to add more depth.

It was St David’s Day on Thursday so I bought these daffodils to brighten up the kitchen table:

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