Heading for the finish line!

Always a good feeling to complete a work that has been waiting on the drawing board! Here is my Gang-gang cockatoo wall hanging, which started with an organic cotton tea towel given to me by a friend. It was much too beautiful to be drying dishes on! And both the gift-er (Sheila) and myself love gang-gangs. We had a ball with quite a tame bunch (flock?) that called in for a snack a few years back.

Here is the original tea towel, designed by Tatiana Clauzet used by The Linen Press. She is a Portuguese artist, and I love her designs of our native birds (amongst all her work), which can be seen by doing a Google search.[1]

Very rarely do I work with just blue colour-ways, but wanting to situate these birds high in the branches, I chose the simplest way: stripping 3” widths cut into squares at 90 degrees, and stitched to end up with 2,1/2” squares. To include some green was given consideration – even a blend of only greens as the background. But when I found a blue piece with the imprint of leaves I was satisfied that was enough to provide a hint to the leafy aspect of their mainly aerial habitat.

Having released the gang-gang pair from their tea towel, and backing them with fusible fabric, my attention is drawn to the full orange sun that sits behind them. In my hunt for azure blues, I had happened across a blue and purple ‘moon’, having been cut for use in a previous project, but abandoned for whatever reason. Maybe this is its time to shine! It is ready! So the orange glow gets cut away!

The background needs to be backed and quilted before I can attach the beautiful birds with their backdrop of a ‘blue moon’. This is the next decision to be made, and it is resolved by – you guessed it, another beautiful tea towel, too good to put to use drying dishes. And, to clinch the decision, it is a deep sky blue. At the bottom one word stands out DREAM, followed by: ‘Blue is the colour of peace, calm and spirituality. It helps with tranquillity, rest and freedom.’  So, it appears that’s why I decided to go with a blue background for the gang-gangs, and a blue moon, named as such because it is the thirteenth moon of a twelve monthly year.

I decided to do a ‘back-to-front’ style of joining the three layers together, as initially proposed by Lorraine Scouler, a well-known and respected former Blue Mountains quilter. Following the very bold zig-zag (lozenge) lines in white on the ‘Dream’ tea towel of the back, I realised that the zig-zag would not fit into the parameters formed by each of the smaller 2,1/2” squares, which was my original idea for the quilting lines. But, I argued, why not use the existing lines already there on the backing tea towel, lines that resonate with the soaring movement of bird wings, the more inconsistent drifting clouds on the horizon, the rolling waves of the sea. It has long been a symbol for water, across millennia and across cultures, with many variations in Australian Indigenous culture to represent the changing tides and movements of waters.

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Now I can turn to adding the main characters ‘mis-en-place’, the final step to arriving at the finish of my 'tea towels' wall-hanging.

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[1] https://www.thelinenpress.com.au/product-category/greeting-cards/tatiana-clauzet/

Getting practical!

Life has quite suddenly become more difficult and complicated than most of my generation have had to face in their lifetime. It is a global and whole of nation catastrophe and crisis, affecting our health ad livelihoods. It seems an irony that what I’ve been making during these times of Covid-19, when gatherings of no more than 5 at a time have only recently been allowed, I have been making dinner table mats!

I have an urge to use what is available – since we haven’t been able to indulge our consumerism at ‘non-essential’ businesses. But not just that, I have plenty on hand, and after a good tidy up and chucking out (- in the direction of wonderful people who make cloth sanitary kits for girls in under-developed countries).

These mats are pretty straight forward – or so I thought! Cutting 16x11” rectangles from an ‘overlooked’ piece of cotton with an Indian design, I fused each with some quite stiff vyelene I had in my stash (not sure why). The fabric must have been a cotton sarong of some kind, but contained splotches of bad printing in one area, easy to cut around.

Aiming to avoid hand-sewing of edges, and in order to make the binding stronger for washing I cut the backing 1and1/4” wider all round, in order to turn it to the front and give the idea of a bound edge by machine sewing. That worked well. But when it came to doing a mitred corner – one I prefer over the straight edge finish at each corner, I was stumped. I can do a mitre turn with ease when attaching the border to a quilt…very professionally! These are much less so, and my maths was not up to working it out. Anyway, here they are, looking quite bright and cheery for the table. And now I’ve figured out a way to do my next lot –but I findß it’s all in the doing!

Next project: to be finished is my “Gang gang” wall hanging, which started with the gift of a tea towel.

International Women's Day quilts

This beautiful original batik is my IWD quilt made from an African artwork gifted to me by a friend ten years ago or so. It is the only one piece quilt I have done, and using hand-quilting. For me the image represents that three stages of a woman's life: the virgin, mother and the older wise woman. I added the wide black border pieced from commercial cotton fabric over-dyed. It is available for sale (POA).



Another quilt I associate with IWD is the Shrines dedicated to the images that thea Gaia had printed of ancient images of women revered in the times before the domination by patriarchal ideas the consequent institutions that evolved here:
http://soulseasonsquilts.blogspot.com/2017/

A 'resurrection'

Not so much de-stashing, as resurrecting a quilt started in 1994!! It’s a ‘round robin’ quilt, created during my very early years after joining a group known as the Blue Mountains Quilters (I think so then). We each started by creating a strip 28 to 30 inches long by between 4 to 6 inches wide using our own choice of block style and colours. I feel very fortunate to have been introduced to this lovely group of women by my quilting friend Sue Wademan - who later took me the next step into creative textile quilting.

The original strip created by each woman was then passed it on to the next woman, who did not know who had made the original as they added another of their own creation to blend with the original strip. And so it grew as the other women added strips, until each person had completed a strip for the others in the group – twelve in all, adding to either end, strip by strip. No one was allowed to see her quilt until each woman had added her strip, which naturally aroused a lot of curiosity and excitement as the time drew near for the revelations. 

This is my finished quilt, backed and bound from the collection of strips, starting with the pale green and pink snail-trail block in the centre. I found it interesting that mine started as a pale strip that concluded with quite dark strips at the bottom - lovely variations of blocks too.

 I added some lavender to the  the side to widen it so it can be used as a throw. Finally it has found its place and usefulness after too many years folded in a box waiting to be resurrected!

 

You can imagine the amazing variety of quilts that were created! Some of them are being shown off on the balcony here, at one of our group weekends spent together in the Southern Highlands.

Here are some details of the finished quilt, including the beautiful way it was packaged up to hand over to me by expert long-arm machine quilter, Kerrin Yelland of Tanglewood Quilting, and some of the blocks used. The overall quilting pattern is of alternating circle within square and square within a circle - creating a wonderful flow-on effect.

The finished items from my de-stashing process

The table runner is definitely finished and hopefully now sitting gracefully down the middle of Leo and Mel’s dining table. It was put together with scraps of the fabrics I’d thought I was going to give to the Op Shop, but I am pleased it has become useful – and maybe even a beautiful collection of ‘saved’ fabrics. When I say saved, they have been in my collection for 25 years!

 

The second item turned out to be more trouble than I thought – and I started to wonder if it was worth it…let somebody else finish it off!!! At least it has now been assembled into one piece, backed and bound. They are the same furnishing fabrics, 9 inch square and half squares on each corner; (there is an equation for that: I think when cutting a square into half diagonally, add 7/8”?).  My de-stash box also had a roll of the most gorgeous heavy weight black ribbon with bight aqua polka dots which I’d bought on special for $2 years ago. I didn’t know how I would use it then, but a week or ago the penny dropped (probably at 3 in the morning)!

Instead of joining these heavy fabrics together with a seam, I decided to use spray-on craft glue to place them onto the bamboo batting. And then the inch-wide ribbon could be used to cover the raw edges. I ended up to feeling the need to run through lines of stitching once I’d found a suitable quirky, retro backing – again from my stash. Nothing new bought for these two quilts. More spray to attach the yellow and grey diamond backing – no pins involved. This is not the easiest process in my experience – though this was my first time to use the spray for a larger piece, I can’t say I approached it in the most rational way!!!

After attaching the squares, the strips of ribbon were attached (glued here too). Then my favourite binding was added, the red and beige tiny squares, which seems to really show off the colours in the big blocks. But, without any ‘internal’ quilting of each block, the finished item does not sit quite as flat as I would like it to. All quilters know that the flatter the better…and that leaves me wondering whether quilting within the squares would help, maybe with a simple machine stitched X across each block. I‘ve even thought about the possibility of doing some hand quilting around some of the shapes in the blocks. Woo, hand quilting… who, me? But, hey, when you set dishes on top of the cloth, it will sit flat, no? So, is this little quilt finished? Might have to wait for it to send out a message about what it thinks!

De-stashing - then finding a use!

In another attempt to de-stash over the past month, I found some wonderful furnishing fabrics, samples I’d obtained very early on in my foray into quilting from a local quilter in Katoomba. I used some of them to make cushion covers that I still love. But as I made the moves to put them into a box to recycle to my favourite Op Shop for Cancer Support, I looked again, and thought again, and they are now in the process of being made into a table-runner and a small tablecloth. Surely this is what patch working is about; using all your old scraps in a creatively useful way. I have always thought that this is what underpins all art – especially indigenous art… but that is another very big question…to pull art back onto the rails of function and use over the market manipulations, choices and demands… can’t go there right now!

The fabrics have an Italianate feel of the Baroque period, cut, mixed and matched with what was left over. Not everyone will like them, but I love the richness and flamboyance, and feel it would be nice to see on a table festooned with delicious food. These are the samples:

Finished articles are on their way very soon!