dyeing.quilting.knitting.blogging
I tried a few new things with May's TIF piece: photo transfer paper, oil paint sticks and hand tyeing. The image of a heart was drawn by Jason Reid and used with permission. For more info about the concept read here.
In my last TIF post I mentioned an unbidden image which came up for me when I read Sharon B's April TIF concept. I said I would incorporate that image into my April TIF challenge piece.The image was of myself as a baby in a crib. I've heard some stories over the years from various family members about those early days. Not all of them very happy ones. I have the sense that a lot of us may have been asked to spend quite a bit more time our cribs than was actually necessary. Just a guess. Probably for that reason, I'm not a big fan of cribs. Both my daughters slept with my husband and I for the first few months after which we moved them to a futon on the floor of their own bedroom. It was much easier to change the baby, put her down to sleep and easier to deal with her when she woke up crying in the night; we would just go in and lay down for a while on the bed. It worked for us. I thought about the crib image for a while, not sure how it might inspire a small quilt or piece of textile art. After awhile I came up with the idea of a repeat block based on the bars of a baby crib. Below left is an image cropped from a photograph of a crib. Below right is a quilt block based on the image.
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Related posts: April TIF -Part I, April TIF - Part II
Here are the first six blocks pieced together. What I liked about making them was cutting the fabric free hand with the rotary cutter. The effect is that there's a bit of variety and movement added to the blocks.
This month's Take it Further challenge concept is this question from SharonB:
How do you see change?
I related fairly strongly to something that she said in her post,
"It amuses me when people say we have to learn to live with change as change has always been part of life. As soon as we are born we start to grow in other words we start to change."
The first thing that came to mind when I read this was an image related to the first year of my own life, not that I remember anything from that period, I guess that's the point. But the image was there, nevertheless. So, my challenge piece will somehow relate to that image.
How do I see change? Change may bring new opportunities or great joy, as in the birth of a child. It can also bring loss, regret, sadness or pain, such as in the death of a person we love. And it may bring both. The loss of a job may bring with it the discovery of a previously unimagined and inspiring new career path. In the case of difficult change (the positive sort is easy; you celebrate!) I rather try to approach change in terms of the hidden potential for personal growth, no matter how it may appear at the outset. Work with it, as one would with clay, steadily remolding it into something that will hopefully give rise to a positive transformation.
For me, the inevitability of change is also (obviously) inextricably linked with the passage of time. So for this month's piece I'll begin working with these three ideas; (1) An unbidden image relating to the first twelve months of life (2) The passage of time, and (3) Positive transformation. Sound cryptic? It does to me too.My TIF challenge piece this month uses SharonB's concept and colour scheme (well, OK, I swapped a couple of colours). She writes,
Do you ever notice the little things, the small moments, the details in life? This month's challenge is to do just that, pay attention to the tiny details. Sometimes the small things become emblematic for something larger.In Toronto last week I walked by this window display at the Mokuba ribbon shop at 575 Queen Street West, a bit hard to see in this photo due to the glare on the window, but it gives you an idea.
 First I played around with a couple of strips of paper painted with acrylic, twisting them in different ways to see what kind of patterns I might get.Above is an example of something I liked. |  Then I painted some brown packing paper in several colours, the purple, green and gold are from Sharon's colour scheme, though they darkened up considerably when they dried. |
 Dried and fused the paper and cut it into strips. |  Starting to play... |
 ...going somewhere... |  ...adding the last strips of twisted paper ribbon. |
OK. This piece is finished. I don't have much to say about it. I added a couple of more details. As I'm not a big fan of appliqué I used acrylic paint for this. I got a bit hung up on it because of the fabric colours. Although I had not intended, the thing was already pretty dark, so placing a dark shadow on the front of it wasn't working for me. I wanted the 'shadow' of a child playing hopscotch to stand out on the front of the piece. I chose silver paint for that. Not sure I like it. I got the image that I wanted but it most definitely does not look like a shadow, hmmm. I also placed a fence across the front. I saw a space between two buildings there and I wanted to put a barrier across that space. One often finds fences near playgrounds.
February's Take it Further challenge concept is this question:
What are old enough to remember?Well, for starters,
Yesterday I bought supplies for one idea, but still don't know if this is one I want to do, after all, those of us of a certain age all remember the first moon landing. It doesn't feel original enough to work on something that is so much a part of all of our psyche.And it struck me that I'd much prefer to focus on one thing, something personal and compelling, rather than try to find a way to encompass a whole slew of things from the pile of memories. Looking over the list I had made, it was the games that we played when I was a kid that strike me as something which belong to bygone era. Low-tech and simple, usually involving a rope, or a ball, or a deck of cards, we played them for hours on end, got up the next day and did it all over again. Hopscotch was one of these, and I thought it would lend itself fairly well to patchwork. I would try to improvise a hopscotch game from patchwork and then superimpose the shadow of a child playing on it. I did a few flickr searches to find some visual inspiration and pulled out these shots. Thank you to the photographers for permission to post them*.
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 Two preliminary sketches |  Fabric picks including colours from February's palette |
 Starting the patchwork... |  |
 Making a girl's shadow... |  ...with the dark brown sheer. I was hoping that the sheer fabric would mimic a shadow by darkening the underlying fabric while still showing what was underneath. |
 'Hopscotch' - 11 x 13" | However, the sheer fabric doesn't work quite the way I want it to. Many of the fabrics underneath are too dark and the image of the girl playing does not come across clearly enough. |
Here is a short update on my January TIF Challenge piece. Since my last challenge post I started working on creating some thorny underbrush with acrylic paint on fusible. I ended up with what looked more like trees in winter, so I went with that. Below is a photo of one of the sets of the trees that I painted. I then ironed the painted fusible onto a piece of sheer fabric which will then be ironed onto the quilt top. I chose not to iron the fusible directly onto the quilt because I knew that I was going to want to layer things onto the quilt top and I figured this would be the easiest way for me to play around with the composition before nailing it all down permanently.
Thank you to everyone who left comments on the 'Take in Forward January 2008-Part I' post I wrote two weeks ago. I really appreciate and enjoy reading your thoughts. There's alot happening among the challenge participants including a good bit of action on the TIF flickr pool as well as links to participating bloggers in the comments here. It's a real pleasure to browse around and see what other people have come up with working from the same starting point. Although, I've probably bitten off a bit more than I can chew in one month, I'm pleased with the way my piece is developing. I'm already getting antsy to do the quilting, a sure sign that I am feeling a strong connection to the work that is unfolding. Below are photos with a brief description of what I've done so far.
I traced silhouettes of flying birds onto freezer paper and ironed these onto the fabric. I mixed up some acrylic paint in a pale turquoise colour which I thought would give the feeling of light reflecting off white birds high in the sky.
 After looking at this for awhile I decided that these birds by themselves were too light so I threw a second darker group of birds into the mix. |
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This is the quilt top so far. I have been thinking of calling it: 'There is something of 'God' in the Ninth of Beethoven: Homage to Etty Hillesum', or maybe just 'Homage to Etty Hillesum'.
Next steps:
1) Create a sense of dense brush in the lower part of the fabric using both layered acrylic silhouettes of dead wood and underbrush, and by quilting large thorny vines into the forefront of the piece.
2) Batt, back and baste.
3) Quilt first around the windows and birds by hand, then add machine quilting to bring out the lines in the brush. Finally quilt two lines of barbed wire across the bottom half of the piece, always leaving the top half open. The last bit of quilting will probably be to free-motion machine stipple any remaining open spaces.
SharonB has posted the key concept for the January 2008 Take if Further Challenge:
"The key concept for January is a feeling we have all had, the feeling of admiration for another. Ask yourself who do you look up to and admire? Why? What is it you admire about them? This is the first Take it Further challenge in 2008. Take the idea, develop it into a resolved design during that month and apply it to fiber or paper."The person I have chosen is not someone I know personally but whose diaries I read shortly after they were published in 1983 in a book entitled An interrupted life : the diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943. There is a short biography about her life here on the Etty Hillesum Research Centre website. What I most admire about the way she lived was her absolutely steadfast determination to embrace life even under the harshest conditions. I'll use the following words she wrote to get me started working on the piece:
Let this be the goal of meditation: to become like a wide-open space, without that sneaky brushwood taking away your vista. That something like 'God' can enter, just like there is something of 'God' in the Ninth of Beethoven. (June 8 1941)
