Sharing Quilts -- and Ideas!

Did you know that Kristin recently moved from Hawaii to Virginia? And that's pretty close to where I (Deborah) live?! Kristin and her family came to visit this weekend and we packed three days with all kinds of fun, including sharing our 2012 Series art quilts.

Apparently we were gabbing and gesticulating so much that the camera couldn't even focus on our hands. We also talked a lot about where we are going with our "maverick" quilts. Kristin has a clear idea and plan. I am floundering, but she helped me consider several options that are both practical and inspiring.

There really is no substitute for sitting with another creative person and tossing out ideas, brainstorming, making sketches, thumbing through fabric and considering options. Thanks for your help, Kristin! (Now we'll see if I go the direction we discussed or abandon it entirely for something different.)

Twelve by Twelve Minor Website Metamorphosis

Our first challenges quilts in the 2012 Series can now be viewed on the website on the new Metamorphosis page.You will see that, with the change to the 20x12in format, our mosaics have morphed into a slightly new format too:

Over on the Twelve by Twelve website, there have also been a few changes. Here are some new features that you might enjoy:

• we have added a new About page that covers a few frequently asked questions that often come up;
• there's a new 2012 Series Gallery Page that sets out our timetable for 2012; 
• the main gallery pages for the Theme Series and the Colorplay Series each have an array of 144 clickable thumbnails that take you directly to the page with the artist statement and enlarged image of the relevant quilt;
• the Media page has been expanded to include a listing of podcasts and vidcasts featuring the Twelves and our project;
• the Exhibitions page has been moved to its own tab in the navigation menu so you can easily find out where to see the next exhibition and also see details of other exciting events that the Twelves are involved in; and
• there is a new Artist Gallery for the 2012 Series where you will be able to see all of the 20x12in challenge works completed by each Twelve grouped together. For example, here is Gerrie's 2012 Series Artist Gallery.

The website is now made up of close to 400 separate pages so it's possible that it needs tweaking here and there.  Please let Brenda know if you come across any broken links or other glitches.

Jubilee

Updated: I think this is finished. No doubt I could keep going...and going...and going, but after three full days of embroidery through too, too many layers of fabric and fusible webbing, I am declaring it done. I love it and I am so happy. It even has a name now - Jubilee. I decided that for this year's challenges I would like to make works to hang on our walls at home. I've never hung my quilts up at home and we have very limited wall space now that we live in a townhouse but this 12 x 20 format is perfect. Which reminds me - I LOVE working in this new size!
You can probably see that there is a whole heap more embroidery on this and there are also sequins (only a few show in the photo - they are easier to see in the detail shots on my blog) in the bubbly section. This quilt seems determined to photograph badly; although I am wondering if my camera is entering it's geriatric years. I can't get a crisp image *grumble grumble*



I struggled so much with this theme. Every idea I had was old and sad and done to death (except for the one glimmer of an idea that referenced Kafka's Metamorpohosis Terry!). Then one morning I woke up with a clear(ish) image in my head and I knew that my quilt would be an abstract representation of the process of metamorphosis of any kind.

As you can see, it's undergone it's own metamorphosis and is no longer abstract...



Start at the bottom.

Building blocks,stem cells,foundation,a sound base of ideas, information,potential.
There begins a bubbling, fizzing, effervescence, a stirring,movement.
Reaching out, evolving, aspiring, cell growth, development.
Fruition, birth, display, expression, achievement, celebration.

ps: Brenda mentioned in an earlier post that there was a Twelve about to be tattooed. That metamorphosis has also occurred!

Log Cabin Conversion

             I must admit that I really struggled with this challenge topic!  I started thinking about this from the day that Gerrie announced this theme, but I couldn't settle happily on an idea.  I have pages of sketches, and I spent a lot time just thinking and imagining various directions.  But it took me quite a while to settle on the metamorphosis I wanted to depict, and here it is: the evolution of an art quilter.

             Once I settled on the idea of some traditional pieced quilt blocks morphing into something nontraditional, wonky, and fused, I had fun sketching out ideas.  The log cabin block was a natural choice for the ultimate traditional block -- and of course, from there it seemed fitting to have the logs deconstructing into a wonky cabin with a loose take on the traditional red center square.  I even found in my stash some bits of really traditional fabrics that seemed suitable for the log cabin blocks, and then I pulled more modern hand-dyed and batik fabrics for the abstracted landscape.

            I also had fun starting with straight line, grid based machine quilting  (which I suppose could thematically have been hand quilting) and having it evolve into swirly, irregular quilting.

         I totally loved working with this new 12x20 shape and size!  The long vertical rectangle created so many new compositional possibilities and I really enjoyed shifting away from an even square.  I'm already looking forward to the next challenge! 

Emergence

Okay, time for the big confession -- somehow I had it in my mind the quilt was suppose to be a landscape orientation instead of portrait and just realized this morning that I was wrong.  I'm not sure where I got that idea.  It must have been the fact that I was so busy last November when we were setting this challenge that I didn't read the details carefully.  I have had it wrong in my head for the last three months.  I guess I just couldn't be trusted to switch from a square to rectangle.  So here is my quilt, turned on its side.  This quilt really wanted to be vertical, but I forced it to be horizontal.  So, just imagine the quilt with the color coming from the top downward. 

I struggled a bit with the whole idea of Metamorphosis.  I was trying to capture all of it in my head and I couldn't come up with a concept. I thought about a quilt showing the stages of a frog from tadpole to adult.  I thought about the work of M.C. Escher and perhaps showing one shape changing into another.  I then realized I was trying to show to much.  I didn't need a wide angle, but could focus upon one little detail.  I decided to focus just upon the moment of emergence--the moment the butterfly comes out of the cocoon.

This quilt is the result of a bit of trial and error and I now see there will be least another trial.  I'm sure working in a sketchbook would have been beneficial, but I skipped that step and went straight to fabric.  My first thought was color emerging from darkness in the center.  Instead it just looked like some strange hump projecting from the side of the quilt.  After taking a break from it, I realized it needed to be the cocoon breaking open and the color coming out.  I set the first quilt aside and started on this one.  I quilted the background with gold spirals and painted it with a rainbow of colors.  I then added the black and gray fabric around the edges.  At first I had the color emerging upwards, but it just didn't look right.  I double checked some photos on google and realized that cocoons hang upside down and the butterfly emerges from the bottom.  I simply flipped the quilt around and kept going.  I hand stitched the gray fabric with embroidery floss and wrapped the edges around the back.  Hand sewing through the densely quilted, painted fabric was a bit of a challenge--my fingers still look a little rough from the process.  I added the circle beads and finished the colored edge with seed beads.

I now see this quilt becoming a series as I finish the first I started and remake this quit the way it should have been!

A Soldier Emerges

I'm afraid my ideas on this theme far exceeded my capability to showcase them.

About 16 years ago my husband joined the army. Our relationship had begun about three years prior, so I knew him as a civilian first. As he made the transition into military life, I wasn't always nearby and for the first few years found it very difficult to understand this new society which he had joined. At about the same time, I was reading The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. A lightbulb went off in my head that the process by which one is inducted into the military is just a variation of the myriad other rites of passage such as from boy to man, from outsider to insider, from maiden to mother, from neophyte to master, etc.

And that is what I wanted to express: the metamorphosis from civilian to soldier. I found it a lot easier to say than to do though. After many fits and starts, I finally determined that the essence of the change is the breaking down of the civilian life and the subsequent building up of the military one (with it's requisite mores, rites, hierarchies, and language).



The denim background represents the civilian life, the worn areas are where it's breaking down. On top of that is a soldier created from "building blocks." Those blocks are the fabric of army uniforms spanning the past 16 years. I suspect that without the description it would be hard to divine anything other than a portrait of a soldier though. Although I wish I could have expressed my ideas more directly, I am quite pleased with how well the portrait reads. It was an interesting exercise to try to convey a recognizable type of person with the least amount of squares.

Initiation

You will recall me asking whether it was important that the link between the theme and the resulting piece should be immediately obvious and you will I think see that I decided no it need not!

This quilt ( and I suspect a lot of future work) was inspired by the photographs of Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher in a book called African Cememonies and its condensed version Passages.  I was reading them when the theme was announced and the concept of an initiation ceremony where one transitions from youth to adulthood by way of sacred rituals seemed to be a version of metomorphosis. Originally I was planning to work more directly with images of body art from the Ghanaian Dipko ceremonies.

However, in the course of screenprinting experiments over the New Year I made this piece of cloth and it just begged me to become a Maasai inspired wholecloth quilt. Their ceremony is called 'eunoto' and is perfeormed roughly every seven years.

You may be aware that I have been working on developing a series based on African women. A while ago I took my simplified African ladies motif, exploded the shape then took part of those shapes and cut small stamps from erasers. This cloth was made by screenprinting random blobs of yellow and orange paint onto white PDF fabric then removing some of the paint to give the texture which you can see in the detail below. I then painted over some parts with a Stuart Gill Byzantia paint.

 I cannot show you the precise photos which imspred me as they are copyright ( although I recommend you get a cheap second hand copy of Passages as I did) but I can tell you that the machine stitched cross hatched patterns in red and blue are inspired by traditional Maasi blankets like these. and the centre piece by traditional Maasai jewellery and draped beaded cords such as these , these and these

 In the past I have been worried about making art based on a culture that is not mine but I think in the process of this piece I have worked through that. I will be doing more work along these lines and I am thinking of them not as being about African but as about how I imagine Africa. Not African images but my images dreamed up as I contemplate Africa.  Maybe there is a series. Maybe it is called Africa Dreamed or African Imagined. We shall see.

In the meantime this quilt is about three layers of metomorphosis. It is about initiation ceremonies. It is about the transformation of a white piece of fabric into art cloth, of representational forms of women into abstract patterning and texture. And it is about the transformation of a dark windowless loft into a wonderful studio in which this quilt was made and its maker felt herself begin to transform from a catterpillar munching on the leaves of other people's instruction and influence into a butterfly artist, taking off for the first time under her own wings.

Hand Series

In my blog on Dec. 17th I mentioned the foolishness of trying to fit our theme Metamorphosis to my own work, mainly body images.  Well, I've managed to do just that, and was so excited about it, I made four more.  As you can see, that was easy to do since I chose images of the hand to work on.  I was able to tie it into metamorphosis by referencing opposable thumbs and evolution, but really I was just looking for an excuse to continue my personal series.

I had access to an MRI of the hand with hundreds of images to choose from, so I isolated five that I wanted to work with.  I started with five pieces of white fabric cut to the size I needed, and put them on my design wall next to each other  so I could work on them all at the same time.  I ended up finishing up the first one while partway through the second, and starting on the third, but couldn't work on all five at once, it was too distracting.  These are all hand stitched, except for a few remnants from other projects that have some machine stitching on them.

The images below are images I worked with for this, reversed from black/white to white/black

Not knowing what the rest of our themes will be, I'm not sure if I can continue to relate them to body images, but I at least hope to continue with series work

Allium Four Ways

In a bit of lovely serendipity, my quilt is about blooming flower bulbs and there are actually bulbs blooming up and down the street in my neighborhood.

I love daffodils and tulips and other flowers that bloom from bulbs, but I think the allium is particularly dramatic. My quilt explores a bit of the allium life cycle. It's titled, Allium Four Ways.

I've included buds just beginning to unfold.

 

 The full bloom in all it's spherical glory!

Tiny drawings of the buds on their tall, straight stems.

And the bulbs just sending up shoots.

The roots on the bulbs are loose strands of embroidery floss.

It was a fun challenge to mix in various other elements, like the sheer blue overlap, the wavy purple hand stitched lines and the block of that beautiful teal large print floral. I really love working in a collage format and finding ways to make unexpected shapes, color and materials work together. Sometimes it takes a long long time and lots of moving elements around before I'm pleased with the results. Metamorphosis takes time.

Architectural Shift

Last spring, my husband and I attended a concert at the Frank Gehry designed Disney Concert Hall. I was very intrigued with the building, both inside and out and took lots of photos.

I have been taking an online design class and one of our assignments was to make sketches from favorite photos and then play with the sketches, isolating areas.

I ended up liking this block and then played with colors, values and sizes and ended up with Architectural Shift. It is fused and machine stitched.

Here is a detail:

Red Poppy

Red Poppy

 I love flowers and growing them. One flower in particular that has really captured my attention in the last several years is the poppy. I received a packet of red poppy seeds free with an order I placed. I decided to sprinkle a few in the garden one year.

detail

That year a few poppies grew. I was a little frustrated with them at first as I felt the emerging foliage was somewhat weed-like and ugly. They continued growing and soon there were some long stems shooting upward with a down-turned flower bud that reminded me of a cocoon.

detail of seed packet

Then that down-turned cocoon was suddenly standing upright, proud and tall and soon after a beautiful flower erupted. They look so delicate, yet strong.

detail from angle

As I continued to watch them change and mature, they eventually formed a seed pod that was just as beautiful as the flower. Throughout the whole life of that flowering plant I was amazed at it's transformation, from ugly to beautiful.

detail

Of course, they reseed like crazy and the next year I had poppies growing everywhere. But the funny thing about them is you cannot transplant them. I have tried like mad to move a young plant as carefully as possible and no matter how careful I am, they will not survive it. Maybe there's a trick that I don't know about.

I made my quilt with many layers of fabrics, starting with a base layer of collaged cottons that were either leftovers from other projects or small pieces that had some printing/stenciling/paints on them. On top of the cotton fabrics I started layering different sheers, like tulle, chiffon, netting, lace. This was a very fun process for me and one that I am going to pursue some more. I like this new size we are working in.

Metamorphosis in my studio

"One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug."

 When I read that our first challenge theme for our new series was "Metamorphosis" my first thought was the book by Franz Kafka—required reading in a literature class in college. It opens with the sentence above. Though I loved the book, I wanted to think further about the theme. It struck me that what we do with fabric and a few simple tools is also a metamorphosis. Fabric scraps become something else—art. And just as Kafka's Gregor could morph into a monstrous bug, so could my fabric.

Hasu

Hasu means lotus in Japanese.
As I said in an earlier post on my blog, this project underwent many transformations but the lotus remained a constant focus all the way through. When Gerrie gave us this theme of "Metamorphosis", I first thought of Kafka and Ovid, for obvious reasons, and also of Buddhism because impermanence is one of the main features of life in Buddhist thinking.
Lotus being a very important symbol in Buddhism, I quickly found myself going through my photo folders looking for images of lotus. I chose a few pictures taken in Kyoto and Arashiyama during my last trip to Japan.
With this quilt, I wanted to show the beauty of the lotus plant with its roots in the mud and its ephemeral flowers almost open and rising towards the sunlight.
Here are two details...
More on my blog, here.

Sturt's Spurt: After the Big Wet

Early on in this challenge I decided I would like to focus on the transformative power of water on the Australian outback. In 2010 and 2011, Lake Eyre was in flood bringing with it invigorated bird, fish and plant life. From this starting point, it was not a huge jump to bring this piece into my wildflower series.

Sturt's Desert Pea, the floral emblem of South Australia,is notoriously difficult to cultivate outside its natural desert environment. The plant flowers from spring to summer, particularly after heavy rain. The Heyne's Garden Centre fact sheet notes:

The Sturt's Desert Pea generally grows in the hot, arid, sandy areas of Australia. Because of the unpredictability of water, this eye-catching annual takes advantage of rains by germinating, growing and seeding quickly. In its natural habitat it then dies, leaving behind hard-coated seeds which are slowly worn down and cracked by high temperatures or worn with sand abrasion in readiness for germination with the next rains.

This is a photo that I took in Kings Park in Perth but an online image search shows the brilliance of  Sturt's Desert Pea en masse with distinctive silver green tendrils.

As I wrote on my blog, in creating this quilt, I was hamstrung by a shortage of the brown background fabric.  I cut carefully and scrimped on seams and, after piecing and quilting, it threatened to be undersize.  I resolved this by adding a binding rather than facing the edges.  A serendipitous development as the binding complements the work.  I've really enjoyed working with these 20x12in dimensions and look forward to what Deborah sets for our next challenge.

Ponga Pounamu

I only started my metamorphosis piece this week. It took me two goes. This is my first attempt. It depicts the changing form of the New Zealand silver fern (ponga)from tightly wound spiral koru to gently draping elongated fronds, all rendered in green hand-dyed fabrics - the colours of pounamu (greenstone jade) a metamorphic rock that is used in beautiful jewellery.

More on my blog. I'm looking forward to our first 2012 reveal!

Inspiration Everywhere

I've finished my metamorphosis quilt, but the theme is still stirring about in my mind. In fact, at the library earlier this week, I checked out this children's picture book by Aracelis Girmay. At the time, I wasn't even thinking about our 2012 Series, but of course... it all fits together.

I love picture books with collage illustrations -- a true metamorphosis to turn various papers and images into new images. My favorite book of collage illustration is A River of Words.

This book is about a boy and girl embodying the world around them.

Honestly, the book and illustrations left me a little bit wanting... but the author's afterword was quite moving. She opened with this quote from Ovid's Metamorphoses.

As we move toward the reveal day, I've also been seeking inspiration for the next theme, which I will be choosing. These words did spark some possibilities.

Sneak Peek

Wow, I haven't posted on our blog in soooo long. I am really excited to see what the other Twelves come up with next week when we have the reveal of my choice of theme — metamorphosis. I went through several ideas.

A major happening for me last fall was cataract surgery which was a metamorphosis of how I see color again with more youthful vision. I was going to go with that as a theme. Then, I took an online class with Elizabeth Barton at Quilt University called Inspired to Design, and I came up with another idea.

You can see a sneak peek up there with one of my go to color palettes red, lime green and yellow set off by black. I have not done the quilting yet as I need to finesse the layout just a bit. I can't sew anyway because my artist daughter, Lisa, is visiting and she is using my sewing machine chair. She has some major illustration deadlines to finish this week-end. She leaves tomorrow so then I can get my chair back!! Then I have the conundrum of how to quilt this!

The Butterfly Effect

Now that I have dispatched my completed works to Manly Art Gallery & Museum for the forthcoming Regeneration: Contemporary Quilt Textiles 2012 exhibition (27 April - 4 June 2012), I am ready to focus on my Metamorphosis piece.  Tons of time, right?!

I've been contemplating the so-called butterfly effect.  First, there is the notion of a delicate flap of butterfly wings reverberating around the world in a hurricane crescendo.  How a short e-mail from Diane in September 2007 turned into this project, a blog, a website, a BOOK, and an international exhibition tour that has inspired  so many Friends & Followers.  Incredible!

According to Wikipedia, the butterfly effect is also "a metaphor for sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory".  In other words, the " phenomenon whereby a minor change in circumstances can cause a large change in outcome".  What if Helen had never alerted me to the presence of Diane's e-mail, which had been diverted to a spam filter account, and I have never replied yes, I want to play?!  How different my creative endeavours might have been over the past few years.

Then there's another case of synchronicity that has me wondering whether, in a Sliding Doors-esque moment,  I had left my sketches on the train in San Francisco and Kathleen Probst had found them as I slipped into an alternate universe.  Here's my sketch from late November and here's her mid-December blog post, spooky huh?!  Needless to say, I LOVE Kathleen's quilt (you can see the completed version on her website home page).

Since then, I have come up with some design ideas that have nothing to do with butterflies but I don't have anything to show you yet.  In the meantime, enjoy another Agaristidae Agricola Donovan dayflying moth that I managed to snap as it fluttered by.

Series

I am finished with my 2012 piece, and, in fact, since I decided to work in a series I have finished five of them. I found myself wanting to continue on after starting the first one, and for reasons that will become apparent with the reveal, five was a good number.  I'm not sharing what I did with the theme yet, but I will share some close up pictures.

I wonder if any of the other Twelves are working in a series?