The Festival of Quilts has many competition categories into which any quilter can enter a quilt, and providing it isn't provocative, indecent or dangerous, it will be hung - and judged! The Fine Art Quilt Masters category is also open to all, however where it differs is that it is a juried competition.  There were over one hundred quilts submitted this year from which the panel of 5 judges, leading figures from both the art and textile world, chose just 23 for the 2018 gallery.

The aim of TFAQM gallery is 'to celebrate those quilts that transcend craft and demand equal billing with work shown in an art gallery'  The judges were looking for a  fully-resolved composition and powerful artistic impression.  The design also had to be original, but other than that anything was possible!

​On the Festival of Quilts site you can see images of all the chosen quilts, but I this week I'm sharing with you a little bit about my entry, The space between the moments.
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No one was more surprised than me to receive the email letting me know that my quilt had made it onto the 2018 shortlist.  Sure, I had filled in the entry form and sent it off: but I didn't expect to get in (who does?)  It's a bit like the National Lottery (or whatever it's called now) - winning (or in this case, being shortlisted) is what happens to other people, not to me.  But to be in with a chance you first have to buy a ticket...or in the case of TFAQM, make a quilt and send in the entry form!

​So how did The space between the moments ​come into being?
 
I lived in Finland with my husband and children during the 1990s and fell in love with a country, its people  and its way of life: it felt like home.  I also learned how to cross country ski and would spend hours out alone in the snowy forests.  Skiing was such a joy, and I relished the freedom and peace which came from being absolutely alone in a pure white, crisp landscape; for the last 20 years I have longed to capture that feeling again. 

If you've been following this blog for awhile you'll know that I finally returned to winter Finland this February - all the way north to just below the artic circle.  I'm a lot older, not as flexible (was I ever?) and a tad more risk adverse these days but gradually as the week progressed so did my ski legs.  It was far more challenging than the routes I had been used to in my 'home' town of Hyvinkää, but it wasn't any less exhilarating,

and I even managed to ski out along the Russian border - at minus 22 we didn't stand still for long! 

Everything needed for a day out on skis had to be carried with you, so my bulky Olympus camera stayed in the cabin and I used my Android phone to take photographs (fact: android batteries carry on working in sub-zero temperatures unlike certain other types!).  I love the panorama function on phones as it's so quick and easy to use - a definite plus point in those temperatures. 

After a long day out on skis and on the way back to base camp our guide stopped each of us in turn and asked us to wait until the skier in front was no longer visible.  Only then, when we could no longer see or hear the other skier could we set off.

Finally, after two decades of waiting, I could once again capture the freedom and peace in a pure white, crisp landscape.  The sun was all but gone and the moon and stars were out so on I skied, trusting my instincts and letting the tracks guide my skis. The only sound was the crack of a branch as it finally snapped under the weight of the snow and the rhythmic swish of my skis on the frozen snow. 

By the time I crossed the frozen lake it was too dark to photograph the way I'd come, so the following day I went back just before sunset.  I wasn't disappointed and  I whipped out my phone and snapped a few panoramic shots before the light faded.
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As soon as I saw the image on the phone screen I knew it would become a quilt - it just asked to be made.

So, how did the quilt come into being?

Fortunately I still had some vintage linen fabric, in the right proportions (the finished quilt is 1.98m x 49 cm), left over from making my daughter some curtains (the things we end up doing for those we love!)  This went into a bucket of pale blue dye.  Obviously not pale enough because it came out looking like a Caribbean afternoon.  So I moved on to using screen printing inks.  They are more fluid than regular textile paints and as they are translucent I can build up layers of colour.  Which is just what I did!   The blue colour still looks a bit perky in some of the photographs, but in 'the flesh' it's just about right.  

Once the paint surface was dry and heat set it was time to layer up the quilt and start stitching.  The sky and snow were quilted using my Bernina Q20.  The sky first had relaxed free flowing lines which were then infilled with text.  Annoyingly my hand guided text is very neat and tidy - not at all the look I wanted for this quilt, I was after something much scrappier.  So I had to put in many hours trying out different styles, not sure I quite achieved it, old habits are hard to kick.  I also needed to brush up my angular meandering pattern as it isn't one which comes naturally but it was so right for the snowy section.  

With the machine quilting done it was time to relax and enjoy the hand quilting.  I used to be a dedicated quilting hoop / tiny stitches kind of quilter.  Not anymore.  These days I just tip all the possible threads I may need, never mind about the weight, into a basket, grab a selection of needles and settle comfortably down for some relaxed hand stitching.  I still use a thimble though.  Can't hand stitch without one.

I only used a very relaxed cross stitch for the hand stitching, building up the density in greens to give the impression of the tree line and in white/off white for the snow.

Hardest to represent were my ski tracks.  In the end I smudged some Derwent Inktense pastel over the surface, but that looked like a river.  So as very pale lavender thread was back-stitched in to show the way. Even after the stitching was done I tweaked the paint, a dap of white here, and bit more dark green there.

But there comes a time when you've just got to stop; my time was as I knelt on the floor in tears.  I could do no more.   I was done, exhausted and drained.  No other quilt has required such an emotional commitment.

So I took the required photographs and sent off the form. 

The quilt was rolled up and put it away.  I went out and did some gardening.

​You know the rest.

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

​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