A Sweet Update

Following Helen's completion of her quilt, here's an updated mosaic of the Sweet mosaic:

 

And here is an overview of Helen's 2012 Series:

Sweet reveal: Leave my Land Alone

You might recall that I for the special 12/12/12 reveal I managed to produce only an insipid, contrastless, unexciting map.  You can read the sorry tale here . Since than the map - which looked like this

 



has sat unloved on a corner of my work table. every now and agan I'd pick it up and mutter 'Sweet, sweet, sweet. Come on. Think. Sweet.' but no ideas came. I did not know whether to bin this and start again.(But I had no alternative ideas). Or to make this work. (But I didn't know how.) I hated it. I hoped everyone would forget that I never finished it. then I got news that the 20/12 quilts were wanted for exhibition. I had to finish it.

Then one day I was tidying up some boxes of scraps and bits and this sample Maasi warrior fell out onto the top of the sweet map.

 Ta-Dah! Of course.. it needed a man. That much should have been absolutely obvious from the outset. Mostly because the quilt is about the story of how the government are taking the land of the Omo tride in Southern Ethiopia to make sugar plantations. The maps shows their current land and how much will be affected by their forced relocation.(Read more here). For me the stories in my quilts are always about the people and their lives. Not the landscape. So, how I didn't think to add an Omo tribesman with his traditional body paint I will never know.

Especially as the first page in my Studio Filofax, which I open almost every day, is, um, a picture of an Omo tribe family.. (Doh!)

And the great irony is that this most hated and loathed quilt is now my favourite of my 20/12 series!

Time will do great things.

Sweet Mosaic

I'm working on updating the website with the latest challenge works. In the meantime, here's the Sweet mosaic:

Wagashi

Wagashi are Japanese sweets and I just love them. They are sweet, of course, and so beautiful. If you've never seen any, you have to do an image search in google, and you will see how pretty they are, almost too pretty to eat!
Actually "wa" means "Japanese-style" and "kashi" means "confectionery". Together they become "wagashi".
One of the big challenges in learning Japanese is to master the writing system. I now know my hiragana and katakana pretty well. But of course I am only starting to study kanji.
Anyway, for this quilt, I decided to print some fabric with the word wagashi written in hiragana:
わがし
I tried lots of things, made many test prints, and finally settled on using only the hiragana わ (wa). By the way, "wa" means "Japanese-style", but it also means "peace" and "harmony".

The flavours and shapes of wagashi are often inspired by seasons and flowers. This is why I added this sakura on my quilt.

Merci to my sweet Twelve fellows for this fun series of 20x12 quilts!

Sugar Pie

As usual, inspiration lead me a circuitous route to this quilt. For the longest time my plan was to make a fairly literal interpretation of the theme, maybe even something pictorial. Then a week or so ago, as I struggled to find any germ of an idea that would lead me to The Quilt, I had an interesting (probably only to me!!)epiphany about how I design. Often I'm asked to explain how my inspiration evolves and I struggle to put it in words. It always starts with colour and a mood. I feel a certain way, a certain visual atmosphere starts to form. The epiphany part is that this creates a kind of design board/mood board in my head. It has snippets of lines, shapes, but mostly waves and sparkles of colour, and they all merge and float and blend into a feeling. So then I collect together fabrics that match that feeling and think about how I want them to interact. The type of interaction (is it fluid, sharp, linear, etc) informs that technique that will be needed to join them together. The whole design is never made before I start. I just choose a beginning and go for it. The process is then an organic one; things just happen and every decision is made as the need arises. Another epiphany - that's why I have so many failures and why I should probably work in series! Often a mis-step along that way will create another problem that needs correction which causes another problem, etc, etc. (I know lots of you relate to THIS!)It's a haphazard way to work that, for me, results in many more bad quilts than good ones. I usually know immediately if it's been a success or failure. One of the more difficult lessons for some artists/artisans to learn is to cull their own work; to weed out the rubbish and get rid of it. When we began this Twelve by Twelve adventure, I made a commitment to myself that I would try new things, that I would be accepting of whatever I produced and not beat myself up about stuff that sucked. There would be no culling because, for me, this was a learning, fun project. I never imagined a book! or even exhibitions! And now my good quilts and my terrible quilts share a stage with each other and with the magnificent work of my colleagues. Looking over my quilts from the three series, I would still happily burn quite a number of them. But there are also a few that I am quite proud of and they would not have happened had the bad ones not been there to learn from.

This one? This one I love! This is my Sugar Pie. The mood board for this one was sugared almonds, fondant, gelato, Marie Antoinette, frothy, lacy, twinkly. The first background that I planned was very small rectangles, stacked sort of like Chinese Coins. It wasn't gelling in my head and I realise now that that's because it would have been far to staccato. Then I took this photo of some english paper pieced hexagons that I'm making and a friend commented on how much he liked the edges (surround yourselves with artists, people!).

Now I had a background that worked - very narrow strips of highly patterned fabrics. I actually didn't know that it was a background until I had sewn it and it needed something on it! It needed frothy, blendy flowers that melted into it and emerged from it.

And now, after making 7235687265 colonial knots, I have run out of time. It still needs more embroidery and more sequins and some beads. They will have to wait until next year now. It is the sister of my first quilt for this series,Jubilee. And I think they may have more sisters waiting to be born.

One Lump or Two

I haven't always been a coffee drinker, but within the last several years I have become one. I don't, however, take mine black. I like it loaded, so to speak....sweetener and half-n-half for me, please.

I have tried many different types of sweeteners in my coffee, the current one being agave nectar. I admit, though, that good old-fashioned sugar is by far my favorite sweetener in coffee.

My quilt is almost entirely hand stitched.  The only machine stitching is the black outlining around some of the elements.

The background of the quilt is made up mainly of neutral fabric scraps. I've recently been adding lots of hand stitching to a few small works and I'm finding the process very satisfying. Plus it gives me something to do when my husband is watching something on TV that doesn't really intrigue me.

The green leaves near the top left represent sugar cane foliage.

Millefiori

 

There were so many SWEET possibilities!  For a while I tried to stay away from the obvious candy connections, and I spent some time working on a design based on (sweet) memories of my daughter's childhood that was going to involve using pieces of silk from the Chinese dresses she's worn over the years... but when she discovered my plan she forbade me and insisted that she wanted those dresses kept intact!  

I started thinking about my associations with Christmas sweets in particular, which led me to think about these pretty candies which always seemed special to me.

I think of them as "Millefiori Candy" and I found this image by searching that phrase.  But I didn't find many photos and if there are other names for these, I'd love to know them.  I haven't seen or hasd them in years.  Are they just at Christmas-time?  These colors seem springy, actually.  I don't even know.  At any rate, with all those happy colors, how could I resist?  And of course, I knew my background had to be pink. 

So I had a lot of fun doing little abstract millefiori disks.  They're fused and then sewn down.

 

And yes, I'm aware that the colors and style of this are so sweet that it almost makes my teeth hurt looking at it.  But that's just extra sweetness, I figure.

There are no deep messages here, no serious reflection on what a gift the last 5 years of sharing art with the 12x12 members and readers has been to me.  I will save that for another time.  This is just a sweet celebration of simple happiness.

Thanks, Terri, for a "sweet" theme!

All That Jazz

When Terri announced the sweet theme, I was not very excited until I looked up the definition and found:

pleasing to the ear; making a delicate, pleasant, or agreeable sound; musical. 

 I had a secret hope that she would choose music, continuing in our M theme names. So, in a way, she did.

I went for a jazz interpretation. I wanted to continue the use of batiks and found every thing I needed in my stash, although I had several different trumpets before I settled on this one. It was a bit awkward fitting the instrumentas into the size parameters. Adding the musical notes was so much fun.

I found a hand-dyed quilting thread that was the perfect colorway for this, and I did simple straight quilting lines on the diagonal.

It is simple and sweet and fun to make. Here is a detail.

Knowing this might be our last challenge, I wanted to make something that represented my thoughts on this wonderful group.  When Terri came up with Sweet, I had to think for a long time how to work that out.  Joann http://jsuley.blogspot.com came to the rescue when she mentioned referring to something she likes as "sweet", which is what my kids say too.
I like the symbolism of this piece.  I started with a large painted circle, which I made on three separate pieces of fabric, then pieced them together.  I added the hand stitched circle so it's hard to see the paint underneath.  After that the piece came together really quickly. The yellow strip on the right side was added after I finished and bound the piece and discovered it was 11 x 20.  I tried out the greys, and a dark red, but yellow seemed to work best.  Actually, not cutting it off in the first place would have worked best.
We are twelve women who have been able to join together to create a wonderful group experience yet maintain our individuality.  My art has improved considerably since joining this group. I've pushed myself way outside my original box and for that I'm eternally grateful.

Sweet Memories

For this final Twelve by Twelve quilt I wanted to play homage to the last 5 years and 336 quilts.  "Sweet" was the perfect opportunity to reference the dark brown quilted, painted fabric of Chocolate and the lollipops from my Lollipop Forest quilt.  12 Lollipops are for the "12" theme (and of course the 12 of us) and the colors are from each of the colorplay palettes.  Laying out the quilt, I was a bit worried about how the colors would play together. Now that I'm finished, the quilt is growing on me.   It may not be my favorite artistically, but it warms my heart to think of everything this quilt represents.  This certainly is a bittersweet challenge!

Sugar Maple

After dancing around various "sweet" inspirations, I finally settled on maple syrup. I am intrigued by various bottle shapes and have made a few collage-style art quilts with a bottle as a central shape. Since maple syrup comes in a very recognizable "jug" bottle, I thought it would be fun to start there.

I added a painted silhouette of a sugar maple tree and various fabrics... rust dyed, hand-dyed, commercial and heavy decorator fabric, even some organza.

I love those tiny blue stitches. They are tedious to stitch and only visible upon close viewing... but I still love them.

I wanted an interesting motif to stitch in the upper part of the quilt. After some research, I found a chemical structure for the leaf of the sugar maple. Aha! I simplified it a bit and removed the notations about the elements.

My ubiquitous arch and a bit of fabric printed with leaves. (Originally, that fabric were table napkins that I made years ago for Thanksgiving dinner. I never really liked them as napkins, so they are in my stash for just this occasion.)

This quilt may not scream "sweet" upon first glance, but that is one of the things I have always loved about our 12x12 project. There was never any rule or strict expectation that any of our quilts would be "obvious." In fact, "obvious" is sometimes far too easy and doesn't encourage growth. This project has generated so much growth for me personally, professionally and artistically. It has been the very sweetest of experiences!

Süß (Suess)

As I started this particular challenge, “Bittersweet” came to mind. As usual, I went to my working sketchbook and wrote down things that came to mind when I thought of sweet or bittersweet. This time I also went to one of my heftier sketchbooks and drew/painted studies of bittersweet, since I have been working more and more with drawing and painting as much as possible in order to expand my artistic range. I drew two varieties of the plant, and painted abstractions such as the triangles in the page above, and a stylized berry pattern on another page which also included a drawing of a pile of dark chocolate. I like the concept, and there are some interesting elements going on. But I was quite sure I don’t want to be so literal as to recreate my sketchbook drawing in fabric. Somewhere along the way, keeping up with the doings of our teenage German exchange student, something caught my eye. She had posted a cute picture of herself and her sister on Facebook. A friend responded with “sweet,” but in German, which is “suess.” He used the extended German alphabet, which contracts the double esses to an eszet (ß), which looks to Americans to be a funny B, and changes the ue to a u with an umlaut (ü) — which looked to me like a cute little happy face in the middle of the word! Süß! How sweet is that?! 

You never know where inspiration will come from. 

I tried various typefaces on my computer and printed out a template when I was happy with the results. For some reason, I felt like I needed to use a reverse fused applique instead of placing the elements on top of each other where I could see them, so in the end, my ü is not exactly centered. But, I like that I was able to play with words and typography and still incorporate the color scheme and triangle motif of my original sketches.

The sugar bowl

 
Oh, that sugar bowl! Is there anyone who, as a child, did not lick their finger and, when no one was looking, stick it into the sugar bowl? Oh dear, maybe I was the only one. Sugar has always been my weakness. Sigh. It just isn't good for you, but it it calls to me. Still.

I carried home my grandmother's silver sugar bowl and creamer after she died, and I get them out so seldom I can't actually remember the last time. But when I do I am still tempted to stick my finger in for a quick rush of pure sugar.

I have been overdying shirting fabrics and some of the greys reminded me of the color of sterling silver, with a slightly purple tint to it and I wondered if I could actually make those plaids and stripes represent the reflective surface of the two pieces. The lemon is there for compositional purposes and because sweet and tart together is even better than just sweet. Here is a closeup:

This is very much the same technique I used for my portrait of the original Maverick. Like Mr. Maverick, this piece works better when viewed from across the room!

I'm not really satisfied with this piece. I had hoped to end this phase of our challenges with something really great and I feel like it is just OK. But, "sweet!" is how I feel about this whole Twelve by Twelve experience. Everything about it from the first challenge, to writing the book, to meeting other "twelves" (I still have three more to meet!), to seeing our work exhibited to the world and right up to today, it has been a truly sweet experience. One I would not trade for anything!

Normal service will be resumed in the New Year

There have been many things about being a Twelve which have been 'sweet'. The friendships, the personal challenge and development, the publication of our book and, oh yes, the fun of signing autographs in restaurants whilst at Festival of Quilts with the quilts. Life is such that good times like that are usually balanced with bad days but I can honestly say that looking back there have been none for me.

That is because they are not in the past. They happened this week. I am living the horror right now. I knew from the start what I was going to do for this theme. The story was about how the Ethiopian Government is forcing traditional pastoralists off their land in the Lower Omo valley to make way for sugar plantations. Human Rights organisations are concered about land rights, the loss of traditional ways of living and military quelling of dissent. Eco groups are concered about the effect of the associated hydro electric dam on the valley ( which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site) and further afield on Lake Turkana. I confess I was feeling a little proud of that interpretation of the theme.

Yeah. Pride. Fall. You know how that goes.

I have made an abysmal excuse for a piece of art and there is no way, reveal or no reveal, it is standing as my last 20/12 piece. I had the feeling early on that it was not working but I thought if I added the hand stitching it would come right. It didn't. So I got pen and paints out and made it far worse. Now, this happened to Diane too so I should not be suprised it happened to me as we are so alike. But it happened to her when she had time to make another one and I - wail! - simply do not. Nor will I until the holiday rush is over.

But seeing as you are all nice readers I will humilate myself and show the Dog for your amusement. It has no contrast. It is too literal an interpretation of a map of the UNESCO site with the sugar plantations superimposed and the rivers as my series-required thin blue lines. It is visually overcomplicated and distracting. You can't even see most of the writing and handstitching that I wasted hours on. And the paint dobs look like, well, to be honest, I am not sure what they look like but I am sure they do not reference the Omo tribe's body paint in the way intended. It does not even deserve the time for a decent photo so here it is trapped in my microwave door on its way to the kitchen bin.

 

There comes a time when one needs to walk away from the quilt and this is it.

I am sorry.

 

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Sweet Serendipity & Sweet Dreams

Sweet may have lots of meanings but, once I had dismissed doing a sugar cane piece as part of my Grass series, there was only one meaning I could pursue:  Sweets = Lollies [candy].  Simple and sweet.

I have often remarked how threads, fabric swatches and paint chips remind me of boiled lollies. So these were my inspiration:

I pulled out one of my rainbow sets that I dyed as guest artist this year and made a start in my Dreamlines mode:

I was searching for some lighter value pinks when I made a serendipitous discovery - some pink lozenge units culled from a previous project.

  I played around with some designs in Electric Quilt but favoured the more abstract composition sitting on my design wall:

And so, today at 12:12am on 12/12/12 California time (7.12pm Copacabana time), I present you Sweet Dreams:

Sweet Dreams by Brenda Gael Smith

In making this piece, I had in mind raspberry drop boiled lollies but this is the closest lolly image I could find online.  Then, after I wrote my Sweet Memories post, I found this photo of Pink Pez by Purr_fer_Meow:

 Raspberry Drops or Pink Pez - take your pick!  I look forward to seeing the other sweet creations when I wake up tomorrow morning. Sweet dreams!

Sweet Memories

This challenge has prompted a small trip down memory lane.  First up, I re-read The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles, a whimsical tale to an imaginary land reigned over by an extraordinary creature with a love of "wodge".

He held out a large box of candy..."Aren't they good?"  The Whangdoodle munched one happily.  "This is my favourite kind.  I have a very sweet tooth you know.  Would you like to see it?..."It's this one here", he said, indicating it with his tongue.  "See the little daisy on it?"

Apparently, there's a movie of the book but I have never sought it out, preferring the fantastical images I have in my mind.  However, I can just imagine Terri illustrating the Whangdoodles sweet tooth! 

I received The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles as a gift for my 9th birthday from family friends who had immigrated to New Zealand from America.  I vividly recall when their grandmother came to visit bearing gifts including American candy - cinnamon flavoured chewing gum; bright pink Hubba Bubba and cute Pez dispensers and lozenges seemed very exotic to a young child in small town New Zealand.

Growing up, sweets (or "lollies" in kiwispeak) were special treats.  These are same random memories:

• sucking on homemade hard toffee watching fireworks on Guy Fawkes nights;
• making home made honeycomb when I was babysitting - watching the golden syrup foam up when you add the baking soda;
• going to the movies with 10 cents in my beaded purse - enough for a packet of slightly effervescent Fruit Tingles and a popsicle.  I like Fruit Tingles better than Sparkles boiled lollies;
• chocolate fish, musk sticks and big bags of pink smokers;
• trying to avoid getting any Harrogate flavoured Mackintosh toffees in Christmas lolly scrambles;
• going to Jesus Christ Superstar as a ten year old at Her Majesty's Theatre on Queen St in Auckland and sharing an enormous bag of chewy Milkshakes  (Her Majesty's was a Victorian-era venue demolished when I was at university);
• working as an usherette (my parents ran the local cinema) and intervening in Jaffa and Snifter fights; and
• reading American books and not being completely sure what M&Ms and Mars bars are.

Today American candy is widely available and apparently Sparkles, Snifters and Tangy Fruits have been discontinued.  My last encounter with a Mintie (an idle impulse at a quilting retreat) resulted in a dislodged filling and weeks of dental issues.  I don't plan on eating lollies again (chocolates are much safer!) but I have enjoyed these sweet memories.

What sweets do you recall from your childhood?

Sweet in progress

I am on the last minute with my Sweet quilt despite knowing for a long time what I was to do. By the usual warped workings of my Google- assisted mind, I managed to almost instantly connect 'sweet' with the Omo tribe in Ethiopia, which gives me an excuse to revisit the gorgeously inspring photos of Hans Sylvester.

Sadly my quilt will bear very little resemblance to the beauty of the tribal costumes but there is a little homage to the body painting in there....

 

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Bittersweet Study

This will be my last Twelve by Twelve challenge. Sweet is thus bittersweet for me. So, I'm currently exploring ways to express the word or feeling. I thought it almost wonderfully symmetrical that something like bittersweet chocolate could be my last challenge piece when Chocolate was one of our first. It was second though, so it's not quite as elegant as I would hope. Anyway, I was also unaware that there is a climbing vine called Bittersweet. There are actually several varieties, first being Bittersweet Nightshade from Europe with it's lovely ovoid red berries and purple flowers, and the second being American Bittersweet named for it's resemblance to the former, but having a wonderful trefoil orange husk. In addition to my usual word association scribbles in my working sketchbook, I've decided to draw some of the more literal bittersweets. This drawing/painting is totally overworked and tortured, but the point of making it was to explore the plant, it's colors, and shapes. I may harvest elements for my Twelve by Twelve piece, I may not. Nine more days to pull something together.