We both produce our own unique fabric to use in our quilt making. It’s all about the total ownership and freedom that comes with the creative process; we have a piece of white fabric, dye it, print it, remove some colour and then add even more: we take the cloth and make it our own. No two pieces are the same and often the results aren’t quite how we planned, but that’s okay - over the years we’ve learnt to embrace the serendipity that comes from working with the bucket and bench.

Each summer we move the dyeing process outdoors and into the sunshine - and yes, the sun does always shine on an indigo day! Indigo dyeing - pure alchemy. Back in July I blogged about our latest indigo day (missed it? Take a look here) so this week I thought I’d show you what I’ve been sewing with one of the pieces we created.

See the honey comb piece on the left? That’s a full width half metre piece of shrunk cotton, which we rolled up along a piece of chunky cotton string and pulled up tight until it resembled a hair scrunchy. A couple of dips in the indigo vat and that’s the cloth you get! Super easy, super fast...and super fabric!

So what did I make with it?

Each summer, as we cut, roll and label the fabric for our stand at Festival of Quilts I always say ‘next year I’m going to sew something to wear out of some of our fabric’. If you’ve ever visited us on our stand you’ll know I never had.....until this year! Yes, we have been (worryingly) so organised that everything is cut, folded, bagged and boxed ahead of schedule that I’ve had time to sew a top!

If you follow me on Instagram you’ll have seen that over last year or so I’ve come back to dress making with some summer dresses for me

and last year a couple of fiendishly tricky 1930’s evening dresses for my daughter - definitely a labour of love!

I didn’t attempt anything as complex for the indigo fabric but chose a simple top using a pattern I’d bought when we were at thread last month at Farnham Maltings, from our friend Viv of Purple Stitches.

I thought it was a great pattern to showcase some of our indigo fabrics! Its also got just 3 pattern pieces!

Multi sized with a couple of length options and printed on good quality paper - so much easier and more robust than the flimsy tissue paper the bigger pattern companies use. Cut out in a flash (does help that the InStitches studio has lovely large, height adjustable tables !) and sewn in a couple of hours

I like a lined yoke and if you go onto the pattern website there’s pattern options and videos to show you how. No excuses really!

I’ve made 3 already! So what does the indigo one look like? Take a look...

I’m really please with it. If you want to see how it looks on then do be sure to stop by and say hello, we’re on stand QIA15 next week at the Festival of Quilts - I could just be wearing it! And you never know - Terry might even have her's cut out and sewn up in time...

Hazel & Terry

A couple of years ago I travelled around India and spent some time in Rajasthan. Wherever I travel I take hundreds and hundreds of photographs and very often I come home, unpack, stick the laundry on and then don’t do anything with the images. Until, that is, when the 2018 Contemporary Quilters’ In Print challenge was announced.

The peeling, shabby walls of India tell their own stories and the walls of Pushkar were no exception. Wandering the back streets one afternoon, camera in hand, photographing anything and everything I took a series of images and it was these which were to become the starting point for my quilt.

This part of Pushkar had definitely seen better days - black mould crept across the once white walls, the paint worke was peeling and tatty posters and handbills were stuck everywhere. Graffiti spread like a rash. Much to the amusement of my fellow travellers and accompanying guides I often photograph graffiti. From Cambodia to Vietnam, Myanmar to India I’ve photographed a lot because, I don’t know about you, I think that when it’s in a script I can’t read, a lot of it, far from looking destructive, looks creative! The pattern of these words inprinted on the walls are telling stories often only know to the writer.

If you’ve followed the blog for awhile you’ll know I often photograph doors, walls, windows and now graffiti! So out came the photographs (actually, on went the computer – isn’t that where all photographs are stored nowadays?) and these two images immediately caught my attention. I remember photographing them and being amused – Pink Floyd, playing here, right here in the back streets of Pushkar, really?! Absurd, but it tickled me that’s for sure.

As with all the CQ challenges there is a size restriction and for this challenge it was 100cm x 45cm in either a horizontal or vertical format. I tried both and ended up selecting horizontal which meant I had to modify my original ideas, but it made me focus!

First step was to fuse the two images, nothing technical, I simply printed them off onto normal copy paper, married them up and glue them into place and rephotographed them!

This fused image was then uploaded to Adobe Sketch on my iPad. This app allows you to have different layers so I was simply able to trace marks, shapes and text . SSSh! No drawing required...

This whole cloth quilt is a piece of vintage linen. To create the rusty marks for the door I draped the fabric in a large plastic tray, the rusted objects (and we have quite a lot at the studio!) were strategically placed on the door area, as well as littered over the rest of the ‘wall’ surface and then I poured over black tea. It’s the black tea combined with the rust which gives the grey, black and finally rusty marks which I needed for the first layer of colouring. This is definitely a quilt of layers!

Once I’d rinsed and dried the fabric the door area’s rust marks weren’t as distinct as I’d hope for. Balancing nails on their head for the nail marks isn’t an easy task! What is easier is to dip a nail into pva glue, print the required mark and sprinkle with rusting powder before spritzing with a water /vinegar mix. The cup of ground coffee which had gone cold by this time was useful for adding extra colour to the door ‘wood’. Nothing goes to waste when you’re being creative!

Machine stitching came next to give structure to the door with hand stitching to blur the edges. Then it was time for another layer of paint. White opaque fabric paint, mixed with puff paste, was sponged onto the wall area and then heat set to expand – I was after that slightly blown, bubbly texture of old painted wall. The creeping damp was created by sponging over black fabric paint.

I’d already ‘traced’ the text in the Adobe Sketch app so it was a simple step to create cut file and send it to the Cricut for cutting as a stencil. A couple of test runs using copy paper were needed to find the correct size (the separate arrow was tricky!) before I then set it to be cut in freezer paper. The Cricut has been in the studio for quite awhile but it’s a struggle finding time to play with it and put it through its paces. We have it for making repeatable stencils as it’ll cut through a wide variety of materials so I’m sure that once I’ve figured it out it’ll be a brilliant tool to have at our disposal.....

Anyhow, freezer paper stencil ironed into place, it was time to add colour with Markal oil pastels. I over did the black slightly so then I had to used several cotton buds to carefully remove some. Curing takes a couple of days before I could start stitching. For a little quilt there was a lot of hand stitching to create the surface texture, thank goodness for tv box set!

I didn’t want a visible binding so chose to apply a facing to finish the edges. The last step was to apply, using red Markal pastel and a stiff brush, the red graffiti numbers.

I’m pleased to say it was juried into the In Print exhibition and you can see it at a variety of venues around the UK until spring 2019. At the moment it’s at the Forge Mill Needle Museum in Redditch and at the end of August it’ll be at the West Country Quilt and Textile Show, which is where I will catch up and see the whole collection.

Bye for now,
Hazel& Terry

Where do you find your colours ?  Flowers, fruits and natural landscapes are often used as inspiration, but have you ever thought about looking at the hard landscape - the buildings, the roads and man-made structures?

From Wakefield to Bath via the Mekong Delta.

The peeling, the rough and the weathered

or the modern, the reflective and the graffic?

You can see how we've been inspired in our new range of fabrics - Sticks & Stones, which will be available to buy on our stand at this summer's shows.

Until next week it's back to the print bench, there's still plenty to do!

Hazel & Terry

​Following on from Hazel's post last week, here's the story of my quilt, Black across the Sun II, which will also be travelling with SAQA's Wide Horizons VI ​exhibition later this year. One of the things that is good about this exhibition is that the call for entry allows older pieces to be entered - up to three years old in fact. Which meant that this quilt of mine which was originally made for a Grosvenor exhibition of my work in three of their southern quilt shows gets to be seen by a wider audience.

This quilt is an attempt to depict the strange feeling you experience during an eclipse - right at the point of totality, and the route by which I came up with the design is quite convoluted!

To go right back to the beginning, a while ago Contemporary Quilt, one of the specialist groups of the Quilters' Guild, had an exhibition where the theme was Dislocation. They specified dimensions of 50x120cm, but I also wanted to try out a square format. ​Although this is the second quilt in the series, and not the one I made for the CQ exhibition, they have a shared story.

​It took me a long while to think of something to do for this theme. I knew couldn’t involve the obvious interpretations using bones and X-rays or displaced peoples and refugees as I have no experience of these. Having been a nurse in a former life I was thinking about the odd feeling people experience when coming round from an anaesthetic (I have no direct experience of this either!). While I was working I was listening to a prog rock song called Anesthetize by the band Porcupine Tree (don’t ask!). I usually listen to music while I work, but I have to know the lyrics well, otherwise I spend my time trying to work out the words and no work happens! On this day the words crept into my consciousness and I realised they could be describing an eclipse.

I remembered my experience of the eclipse in the UK in 1999, seen at its full extent only in parts of SW Cornwall and South Devon. In the middle of the day the sun was obscured; there was an eerie quiet darkness, with no birds singing or flying and a strange otherworldly landscape - not quite dark, but definitely not normal. This was a sense of Dislocation that I could relate to. I researched the phenomena which accompany an eclipse and learned a lot in the process, and this enabled me to develop ideas and imagery for the quilts.

Circles and scribbled rings have long been one of my go-to symbols when I'm at a loss for what to draw: they're very versatile and can represent pebbles, shells, fossils, or the cycle of life and many other concepts, so my sketchbook already contained marks and ideas that I could use for this piece.  Luckily in my stash were several black fabrics, mostly hand-dyed in various combinations of black and brown, which were great for printing with discharge paste to remove the colour.

I created the main fabrics for the pieces using monoprinting techniques for the large fractured rings,  freehand drawing with a needle-nosed bottle for the smaller rings and zig-zags and Thermofax screens of some of my sketchbook pages of texture and rings for the positive and negative prints on the supporting fabric. I added in a breakdown printed fabric and a 'plain' dyed blue for a pop of colour in the thin shards which fracture the surface at intervals. ​

​The textured fabric was printed using a Thermofax screen of one of my sketchbook pages containing a text exercise that I love. Start by writing words or a phrase repeatedly to cover the page in one direction (then turn the page through 90 degrees and write it all again; repeat this twice more and the words will no longer be legible, but will read as texture. This is a great way of adding layers of meaning to a piece.
 
I constructed the quilt with simple strip piecing, free-cut so that the strips tapered to nothing. The machine quilting developed from a phenomenon called shadow bands - thin shafts of scattered light from the edge of the eclipse, and I used a variegated black and white thread - normally too high contrast for me, but perfect for this quilt. The centres of the large circles are hand quilted with black crosses or FMQ'd with a spiky vermicelli, and some hand stitched orange circles in the text areas echo the circle on the sketchbook page which remarkably come out on the Thermofax screen (usually only black and white is reproducible).

We’re both members of SAQA and earlier this year we each submitted a quilt into the Europe and the Middle East members’ call for entry for the Wide Horizons VI exhibition . The way this works is each quilter submits two images, a whole quilt image and a close-up image, for consideration by a jury panel. Then you sit, wait and act as if you don't mind one way or another! In our case we’ve both been (and still are!) very busy running the studio, sorting next year’s programme out and getting ready for Thread and Festival of Quilts, so this part at least was quite easy.

It was a delightful surprise therefore, in the midst of a very busy day, to receive an email announcing that my quilt Do you remember the cherries? had been one of the ones selected. And it was a double delight to find that Terry has also received an email saying her quilt Black across the sun had been selected as well. In total over 80 quilts had been submitted with 27 making the final selection. Just 8 quilts come from the UK and two of those are from the InStitches Studio!

The Wide Horizons VI exhibition will be at various quilt shows through out Europe during 2018/19 but at the moment we don't have the UK dates so we thought we’d give you a sneak preview of our entries, first up this week is my quilt Do you remember the cherries?

When I’m sewing my art quilts I’m constantly pinning them up on the design wall to see what they are saying and as you may know, sometimes quilts just demand to be made; this quilt knew it’s own mind and how it was to be. I also had in the back of my mind a postcard, sent to me many years ago from another friend, by the Japanese artist Tomoi Yokoi. I didn’t want to copy her artwork, but using the dark background appealed to me and put me in mind of the Flemish still life artists such as Caravaggio and Bruegel and the female Dutch still life painters, Rachel Ruysch and Clara Peeters. The food is central to the compositions but the accompanying textiles and china all have important roles too. With my bowl (incidentally this one I bought on a trip to Warsaw and it holds many fond memories, not just of cherries) constructed it was time to audition fabrics, I like to use my Ipad for this aspect of the design process: pin, click, view. Easy!

Once I’d selected my fabric drape - a piece of wax resist hand dyed cotton sateen, I pinned and tucked it into place before removing it and snipping (very carefully) the excess bulk away. I wanted to incorporate text into the pale areas so I used a piece of removable paper stabiliser behind the fabric as I free motion embroidered the words. It was then machine appliquéd into place before the bowl was finally positioned and stitched down.

The final step for my still life collages is to add extra dimensional detail using Derwent Inktense pastels and in this case, a quick touch of gilding paste for that just picked look!

Artist’s Statement:

Alison had bought them on her way home from work: you didn’t have much appetite by then
and she thought cherries would tempt you.
Our clever girl, she knew you so well, after all she has your sweet tooth.

Plump, sweet and ripe, the juice ran down your chin
And as we carefully wiped it away we saw the delight and happiness in your eyes.

Two summers after you went away I planted a cherry tree for you
And last summer I was able to fill a huge bowl full.

Plump and juicy, each one I ate reminded me of you.




Until next week, when Terry will tell you all about her quilt, Black across the sun, enjoy the weekend,

Hazel & Terry

Hazel takes every opportunity to visit the Yorkshire Sculpture Park because its such an inspiring place , but last bank holiday, when spring and summer finally arrived all at once, I went to explore a different sculpture park. Set on the northwest corner of Portland in Dorset, Tout Quarry sculpture park is a fascinating place with views over Chesil beach and Weymouth to die for.

Tout Quarry is one of only two remaining quarries where Portland Stone was extracted using the old methods. The last stone was taken from there in 1983 for the sea defences at West Bay (30000 tons of it) and since then the landscape has been left to nature. The Portland Sculpture and Quarry Trust Project protects the site, and artists have created over 60 hidden sculptures from the stones left behind by the quarrymen. It’s a great place to explore and gives a sense of the geology and ecology of the area, as well as the history and of course the art.

Works are carved into rock faces, extracted boulders or built from shale, and there is something to see around every corner of this magical landscape. Some are inspired by animals, with detailed carvings or simple line drawings. . .

.. . .others by the human form: the work on the left & middle below, entitled Still Falling, is by Anthony Gormley, and is carved into a massive rock face of unquarried stone in the centre of the area.

One recent sculptor took inspiration from the grizzly local folk tale of the Roy Dog, which hunted smugglers and ate them, weaving their eyes into its fur so they can still see. Look closely at the picture on the right and you’ll see the eyes!

All around are remnants of quarrymen’s work - tramways, bridges, caves and the places where the spoil was tipped over the cliff.

As you wander around the park you will discover a wealth of marks and lines to record and inspire you. (The ones bottom centre are known as Portland screws - fossilised shells in the rock - often seen when Portland Stone is used in building.) Nature has been left to reclaim the area and it is managed as a nature reserve.

We had only intended to stay for an hour but ended up staying all day, walking to the local town centre (Easton) and buying a picnic from White Stones Cafe and Gallery, which is a gem with an artist’s garden and well worth a visit.

We’ll definitely be back to discover more in this fascinating corner of Dorset. Put it on your list if you’re ever in the area - you won’t be disappointed.

Until next week

Terry & Hazel

Last week’s blog was about how we take inspiration from nature for our InStitches’ dyed fabrics and threads, so I was particularly intrigued to visit the exhibition, Fashioned from Nature, which opened recently at the V&A, London. The exhibition aims to explore the relationship between fashion and nature from 1600 up to the present time. Not only does it show how fashion has been inspired by nature but it also highlights the effects on the natural environment of the fashion industry. I didn’t have a enough time to view the whole of the exhibition in one go so in this visit I focused on the more direct and troubling interaction with nature, which is featured on the ground floor.


Here are just a few of the exhibits which caught my attention.

Thank goodness for female emancipation, it has spare generations of women from many things, not least the constraints of a whale bone corset

and the dresses which required huge hooped underskirts. I just can’t begin to imagine how restricted and constrained life would have been wearing such garments.

The clothes we wore reflected our social status so having such a tiny waist (just look at the female jacket modelled above!) was a way of showing the society that you were wealthy enough to employ the servants to do the work you obviously couldn’t given the clothing you wore!

The production of the raw materials and the subsequent processing had huge social and environmental effects - think of the cotton plantations, polluted rivers and working conditions in the huge northern cotton and woollen mills.

Many animals and birds were slaughtered, some to the point of extinction, in the pursuit of fashion. Most of this part of the exhibition was both sobering and fascinating in equal measure.

Fans of Alice in Wonderland will recall the mad hatter. Mercuric nitrate was used in the felting process from the early 1700s and mercury poisoning was a common occupational hazard for hatters. To this day the V&A still keeps its many felt hats in sealed bags!

There are so many interesting and thought provoking exhibits that I think I’m going to have to visit several times to really get the most out of this exhibition. Fortunately it runs until the end of January 2019!


Until next week, enjoy the (finger’s crossed) warm weather forecast for this bank holiday weekend,


Hazel & Terry

and thread we need to print and dye!

We don't just dye pot-luck but have several different themes, so when you visit our stand you can buy a range of fabrics and threads which complement each other beautifully. So where do we find our inspiration for colour? A lot of our colour inspiration comes from the world around us; nature provides us with the most amazing colour palettes so I thought this week I would share a few of the flowers and plants which have been inspiring us recently.

If you follow us on Instagram  or Facebook you’ll have seen our recent posts of the beautiful display of bluebells which greets us as we come up the drive.

On my allotment the vegetable beds aren’t looking their best just yet, but there was a magnificent display of daffodils earlier this spring. Just wait until the sweet peas, rainbow chard and globe artichokes get going - it will be a veritable feast for the eyes never mind the stomach!

And in my garden the tulips have finally burst into all their glory. When I set out my garden a couple of years ago I deliberately painted my garden shed a very dark inky blue to act as a foil to the ever changing pots of colour. I think it works very well, don't you?

It’s a very busy time of the year for us as we get ready for the show but I always try to make time to enjoy going out and working in my garden or on my allotment. Not only do the flowers and plants provide plenty of inspiration for my textile work but being outside tidying the borders, weeding the vegetable rows and harvest the crops as they ripen helps calm and soothe. These days I can even find joy in mowing the lawn !

So if you come to visit our stand at the various shows over the summer take a look at the fabric and threads and see if you can guess which plants and flowers have inspired us!

Hazel & Terry

When we were in Helsinki we visited the Kamppi Chapel - a beautiful organic wooden building which could have been inspired by an egg. Inside there were some felt floor cushions inspired by pebbles.

I’m one of those people who always has pebbles and pieces of beach glass in my pocket, who walks along a beach, head down, looking for stones with interesting marks and shapes. I love their tactility and the comforting feeling of a smooth, warm stone in my hand.

The beaches of the south coast of England are my usual hunting ground, from the golden sand and rugged cliffs of Cornwall, to the pebbles of Sussex via Lyme’s fossil beaches. I’ve got piles of pebbles, shells, glass and small fossils on most surfaces at home (none of them from Chesil Beach I hasten to add) and they often inspire drawings and stitched work.

I suspect felt maker Sarah Waters is also one of those people, only her stones are not going to fit in anyone’s pockets. Her solo exhibition at The Knitting and Stitching Show at Alexandra Palace last year entitled Stone was an in-depth study, in felted wool, of the textures, marks, mythology and superstitions of standing stones and hagstones. And the pieces were huge.

In her blog she says she had a vision of using British wool to make large scale wallhangings that looked and felt like stone. Her aim was for the textures of all the different fibres to be felt, and she positively encouraged people to touch the exhibits. There are more photos of her inspirational work on her website.

So you can imagine that we are excited to be able to welcome Sarah to the studio in May to teach us how to make nuno felt in the form of beautiful  gossamer scarves.

They'll be a bit of a contrast with her exhibited work but still wonderfully tactile. So whether you have never felted before or if you wish to extend your skills further this would be a great workshop to explore the touchy-feely world of felt.

I just can't help myself - I need to touch things!  Looking is all very well but I find that I also have to touch and feel the texture of the surface.  As  quilt makers creating texture, both visual and implied, is an important part of our work.  In a recent piece I wanted to create a section of an wall I had photographed in Pushkar, India.

I used different paints - acrylic, Xpanda and screen printing inks, rusting using tea, Markal oil pastels and stitch to try and recreate the  distressed surfaces of the wall and door.

 On our recent trip to Finland we were busy collecting inspiration for texture.

But you don't have to travel so far to find inspiration for texture!   Rummage around in the kitchen cupboards and photograph what you find...

Until next time,

Hazel & Terry