Whispers II - Round 3

We had our Whispers meeting on Thursday and the next round officially began. I will be using Sue Hickman's lovely Venice inspired piece as my inspiration.

Our follow-on pieces are kept secret from the rest of the group so I can't tell you what I plan to do but the good news, from my perspective at least, is that I do have a plan. I'm going to experiment with a new technique and as I don't have to complete the piece until mid January, there should be time for a plan B if required.

Jan Simpson passed me her piece that had been inspired by my FOQ gridy piece. I thought mine would be a very difficult piece to follow as it didn't  have an obvious theme but Jan created a great piece which clearly linked to mine but yet was very different. I look forward to being in a position to show it to you.

Against the odds I completed my piece on time and it pretty much turned out, how I planned it. My piece was based on a photograph and the piece was pretty true to the photograph. I can't help questioning whether this is a good thing or not.  Should I have been more creative and moved it on from the photograph? I had taken a number of photographs until I had the composition I was looking for. Is that enough?

Festival of Quilts

My spare time has been in short supply recently but any time I have had has been taken up with stitching. The reason for the frantic stitching has been the looming deadline for getting my entries into the Festival of Quilts (FOQ), which will be held next month at the NEC, Birmingham. You will see from the close-up that it has involved a lot of stitching.

Here is the finished piece which is 41 by 26 inches. I have entered this in the 'Art Quilt' category.

You may remember that this quilt will also be used as my first Whispers piece. I told the Whispers Group that my piece would have a portrait orientation and this is what the rest of the group have planned around. Which orientation do you prefer?

I have also submitted a piece that I produced during my City & Guilds course but I decided to make a few tweaks, just to keep myself under pressure. This piece was based on my drawing of a local field:

And here is the piece I created from it. I have entered this into the 'Pictoral Quilt' category.

So here they are packed and ready to go.

I must admit I am starting to feel a little apprehensive about my entries, mainly because they are not created in the traditional quilting tradition. Will they be acceptable? I'll be paying more attention to the quilting techniques used this year which is what I should have done last year! Will they get get hung? Only time will tell.

Whispers Round 2

The Whispers Textile Group met again recently. The aim was to show off our first finished piece and confirm our plans for the next round. I'm sorry to say that I was the only one who hadn't finished my piece but the girls were very understanding. Thank you.

As a Project Manager, I don't like to miss a deadline but I did due to 1) life getting in the way and 2) deciding that the piece would benefit from significantly more stitching. The one thing that makes me feel better is that the design is complete and the stitching will (hopefully!) enhance it but not significantly change it. Hopefully you can see from the picture above, what I mean. Nobody should be held up.

So now we are officially into the next round of the 'whisper'. My next piece will be based on Judith's Coxell's lovely Seatle skyline. This is a section of the piece:

The piece is approximately 44 X 16 inches. There are very few requirements for the next piece, it should be inspired by the Judith's piece,be  in sympathetic colours so that the two pieces could hang together in an exhibition and be 11 X 16 inches (about 1/4 of the size of the original piece). 



I do have a couple of ideas but lots of more thinking and designing required. And that's it. That's all I can say and all I will be able to say until all the whispers are complete. We want to work on our pieces without being restricted or influenced by anyone else's work. The suspense will build!

Whispers 2 - Round 1

Those of you have read my previous posts will know that I was part of the Chinese Whispers Group and in February we held an exhibition of our work. We have have now started the second 'round' of Chinese Whispers but in a slightly different format to the first one.

As before we are all creating our first piece of work based on any theme and using any technique, only this time the original pieces will be larger. Another difference is that we are going to show each other our first pieces with only the subsequent pieces being kept secret and in fact we have already shown each other our work-in-progress. Except for Sue who has shown her finished piece!  The other 4 members of the group will create a piece of work inspired by the original larger pieces. These 'inspired-by' pieces will be roughly 1/4 of the size of the original pieces. My first piece (above) is/will be 26X40 inches and so the other members of the group will create a piece which is  40 X 61/2 inches portrait, which I think is a challenging size but  I don't need to worry as I don't need to do this one!

The photograph above shows work-in-progress, with pin heads visible if you look closely. Here is a close-up of a section of the piece before very much stitching has been done.

I have used the grid thermofax that I mentioned in my previous post to create my piece. I started with black fabric and used discharge paste to remove the colour to a greater or lesser extent. I over dyed a small strip of fabric with rust orange and created a horizon line and layered the fabric adding wadding and a backing cloth and added additional detail with stitch.

My initial plan was to add the seeding stitches to the biggest black areas but I have now decided that it would be better to have the seeding stitches in all the black areas. Let me just remind you that this piece is 40 X 26 inches....that's a lot of stitching but it has to be done. I know that I won't be happy unless I sew all the black sections. The deadline is the end of the May!  The thought of all the stitching still to do, fills me with dread. Strange really as I enjoy handstitching, so isn't it a good thing that there's lots more to do?  

Tomorrow I am off to see the 62 Group exhibition at  the Gallery of Costume, Platt Hall in Manchester with my good friend Helen. I'm looking forward to a catch-up, the exhibition and looking around the museum which I think will be interesting in it's own right. No prizes for guessing what my next post will be about.

In February, I exhibited at the Courtuard Gallery, Hertford, with 5 other textile artists. Our exhibition was called Chinese Whispers and was based on the children's game of Chinese Whispers. Each artist created a textile 'whisper' passing it on to the next member to use as inspiration for another textile, which was in turn passed to the next person.  There were 6 beginnings and 6 very different endings.  

It was about two years from our first meeting to the opening of our exhibition. Our Private View was held on 7th February in snowy icy weather but we were very pleased that so many people came. Visitors seemed to be interested in the concept of the Chinese whispers and as there was a great variety in the work, there was something for everyone.

Below is the 'whisper' that I started. Following a very enjoyable holiday in Nambia, I was very keen to create a textile based on my experiences but due to the work I needed to do for my CIty & Guilds it had to go on hold. This piece was inspired by the oranges and terracotta of the dunes set against bright blue cloudless skies in the Namib desert.

Jan Simpson created the next piece. In Jan's words: 'Marian’s landscape is of a hot place (given the terracotta earth etc.) so I decided to do something based on the hottest place I have ever been, which is Bryce Canyon, Utah, USA.  It is also the most mesmerising and fascinating place I have ever been to with its Hoo Doo monoliths of terracotta stone carved by millennia of water and ice standing hundreds of feet tall in endless canyons.'

Judith Coxell created the next piece and in Judith's words: 'Jan’s piece reminded me of statues maybe on Easter Island or Mount Rushmore. Thinking of a British equivalent I thought Henry Moore and his sculptures and made this piece. This looked fine but slightly dull so for fun I added sheep as Henry Moore is also famous for his sheep drawings.'

Sue Hickman created the following piece and in Sue's words: 'My first impression of Judith’s piece was of sculptures resting in either a field or a wild garden. I decided to try to keep the background colours similar, but to change the scale of the sculptures.  One of the sculptures looked like a ruined castle and I decided to make this the focal point.  I enlarged the size of half of another sculpture to create the illusion of looking through this to the ruined castle in the distance'

Jenny Alderson created the following piece and in her own words: 'When I first looked at Sue’s piece I immediately saw what represented to me a never ending road so I produced a piece based on the yellow brick road. I have used Kantha work, an Indian method of securing together fragments of various fabrics. The analogy here is that I also see the characters in Dorothy, the tin man, the lion and the scarecrow as fragments of the world they are in at the time and the way they hold together.'

Debbie Brindley Lewis created the final piece in my 'whisper' and in Debbie's words: 'When I saw Jenny’s piece it seemed to sum up the whisper process for me. The end had arrived and happy with friends after various trials and tribulations. I followed the theme of films. The background fabric was made up of various film stars from a similar era. A cine camera was added and a “film strip” border completed the piece.'

So from sand dunes to film stars. Who could have predicted that? Certainly not me. I was very pleased with all the pieces that were in my stream - thank you all!


We also created a book with the pieces in it, so we each have a record of all 36 pieces.