Book Release Celebration! Introducing Chapter 4: Water & Françoise

Hi! This is Françoise here.

Twelve by Twelve Theme series by Françoise Jamart

As you know, we are having a giveaway to celebrate the publication of our book Twelve by Twelve: The International Art Quilt Challenge. Each day, for twelve days, we are asking you a different question. If you would like to have a chance to win a copy of our book, just leave us a comment with your answer to the question. You can play everyday if you wish. At the end of the twelve days, one lucky winner will be randomly selected. (By the way, it is REALLY helpful if your comment is linked to a profile or blog that includes your e-mail address so that we can easily contact you if your comment is selected.) The book drawing is closed.  Stay tuned for the winner details.

I wrote the fourth chapter of our book. The theme, chosen by Karen, is Water. In my chapter, I explain why I chose to work with a picture of dew droplets and I show how my quilt evolved. I also tell you where I usually find my inspiration and what impact being a member of the Twelve by Twelve group has had on me and on my work.

Droplets by Françoise Jamart

Although my hubby made me a nice studio in a spare bedroom about a year ago, I still often have problems finding free time for my art. So here's my question for you today:

"How do you create time and space for your art?"

Biggest Stretch of the Theme

The award goes to... Kristin's water quilt - Sustainer & Destroyer!
Not only did Kristin choose to make a quilt about the destroying power of water, but she actually did use materials that can be destroyed by water. Soluble thread and interfacing, basting glue, watercolours...
And, can you imagine that she's planning to, one day, pour water on her quilt to ruin it? Such a lovely piece of work!
Kristin, if you really do this, I want to be present that day. And I guess all the other twelves will want to be there too... (Hawaii would be the perfect place, after our exhibitions of course.)

Recycled Water

In exploring the water theme, I experimented with shibori dyeing and created several batches of "water" fabrics. Although none of these fabrics were used in Coriolis, I am pleased to report that Tudibaring - Place where the waves pound like a beating heart was selected to be part of the forthcoming My Place exhibition travelling to South Africa, New Zealand, Australia and Europe:

Splash! Water Gallery is now online

I have now loaded the water-themed quilts onto the website Theme Gallery (updating the artist gallery pages could take a little longer):

Once again, I am fascinated at how a cohesive mosaic and palette emerges from twelve individual pieces and how the the group "quilt" is greater than the sum of its parts. Despite your comment on my post Gerrie, your rainbow and faded (diluted?) landscape fits right in.

Music From Across the Water

I so enjoyed making this water piece!

My goal was to convey a sense of water that wasn't blue. I found myself thinking about reflections in water, and the wonderful ripply lines.

And then I found a stunning photograph by Flickr friend Russell Docksteader. You can see Russell's "Water Music" photograph here. (He has a lot of stunning water reflection pictures on his photostream, in case you want to cruise.) With Russell's permission, I translated the image into fabric for my piece.

I did this as a whole cloth piece, painting the colors with Tsukineko inks. Then I machine quilted it. I studied Robin Ferrier's facing/corner triangle method and used that on the back -- it was easy and worked great!

Karen, you picked a great topic. This had a great range of possibilities and I really enjoyed it.

Rainbows and Sun Breaks

Life in Portland, Oregon means that for much of the year, rain is a predominant factor. So, for me, it was an easy jump from the water theme to think about Portland weather.

I once lived in Wilmington, NC and it was interesting to note that the annual rainfall was about the same. However, in Wilmington it pours buckets of rain from huge thunderstorms and occasional hurricanes.

In Portland, we have gentle, misty rain with occasional sun breaks and rainbows. So this became my theme.


Here is a detail:

I found a copyright free rainbow photo and fiddled with it in Photoshop and printed it on cotton. I then printed it on organza, but really faded the photo so that it was barely visible.

I cut the organza in strips and fused them to the background photo. I over lapped the strips and did not line up exactly with the background photo so as to give the impression of looking through misty rain. I left two parts of the background without the organza overlay — these were to be the sun breaks. I quilted rain and sun streaks. I had to add a border and a binding. I didn't want that to be too boring so I added some rainbow fabric to the binding.

Because of my trip during the month of May, I had to select a format that I could easily do with the time I had before the trip and the short time when I returned. You can read more of the saga of creating this quilt on my blog.

On top of the World

After having picked the theme water, I had the hardest ime coming up with an idea. I was distracted by my daughters wedding and a trip to Mendocino. I looked thru my photos from the various travels and settled on this picture I took at Lake Titticaca in Peru/Bolivia (back to the realism). I quilted white silk/cotton fabric, then painted in the features, which is a technique I've only played around with once before. The hand stitching is the reeds that grow up in huge areas of the lake, and which the people that live on the lake make thier floating islands from. I left out the women that use these boats, wearing thier gorgeous colorful clothing, I knew I couldn't pull that image off!

Splish Splash

As I stated earlier in a blog post here, I've always loved images of mermaids and wanted to someday create one. Well you also saw in that post my initial drawings and I must say I really enjoyed creating this quilt and adding the embellishments.

I have been a fan of Nellie from the Nellie's Needles blog for a long time. She creates awesome water (lake series) quilts, and while I don't exactly know how she creates her quilts, I tried mimicking the look to create my water. I dyed white on white fabric for the skin using fabric paints. I drew her facial features on with a marker and then added further color with Tsukineko inks and fabric markers.

I embellished her lower body with sequins and beads and they really look great in the right lighting. I added teardrop-shaped beads to give the look of water spraying from her tail. I had the most trouble with her hair. I, at first, thought I'd create it with just yarns/fibers, but I wasn't happy with the control over the placement of them, so I sketched out some shapes for fabric and then added some fibers to enhance it once the fabric was stitched down.

I have created all of my 12x12 quilts on heavy interfacing, like Timtex, as I like the support it offers on these small quilts. I have also zigzagged around the edges of all my 12x12 quilts and on this particular quilt, I also added a fiber around the edge.

Water: Sustainer and Destroyer

This one is all about the concept. Life cannot exist without water, yet water has the power to destroy as well.



I could have gone for dramatic imagery, but instead, I chose to keep the imagery rather generic but rather to create this quilt (or more properly, assemblage) out of things that are affected by water. Of course, since we are an art quilt group, the things are all related to sewing.



The "top" is appliqued with circles of sheer fabrics, to include a stabilizer painted in a water ring pattern with water soluble paints. It is embellished with pearls glued on with basting glue that releases when wet. I colored the piece with water color pencils and a fabric marker that disappears when wet. The "batting" is water soluble stabilizer.



The quilting is done with water soluble thread on top and a variegated rayon thread in the bobbin.

(Because of the sheer fabrics, I think this looks especially nice backlit.)




The backing fabric is a silk scarf which I marbled -- a process that requires paint to be floated on water.

This is what the piece looks like now, representing the sustaining quality of water. But eventually, I'm pretty sure I'll need to douse it in water and document it's demise to show the destructive power. I'm thinking that I should wait until it has a chance to travel across two oceans and then I'll photograph it at the beach, or perhaps find a waterfall which can be part of the process of destroying the piece. Performance art. Who knew we'd go there.

What would you like to see?

Swimming pool reflections

I cannot guarantee that the inspiration for this quilt is unique but I suspect there are not many art quilts out there that represent a Unisex toilet door! It may also be one of those inspirations that should have inspired but not actually gone in the quilt ... but, too late now!! My previous post mentioned my swimming experience and I decided to go with my impressions of the reflections on the moving surface of the water.As with the other quilts in this challenge I decided to use techniques I had either never done before or only done once and hadn't done to my satisfaction before. So for this one I used stamping with fabric paint using the back of a Sherrill Khan stamp that just happened to be the first thing my hand rested on! It came out much better than the lettering on my Community quilt. That represents the mosaic floor of the pool. Hand seed stitching represents the 'scratchy' marks on the water that came from the bare tree branches outside the window.I painted the wavy reflection of the door of the aforementioned Unisex Pool toilet door, and then tried to disguse my heavy hand with the paint by quilting narrow lines over it with varigated thread. (Following my self imposed rule above I may well have to paint on the next quilt before I can move on from that technique! Brenda - is there any chance your next theme will be Kindergarten art?!) Over the whole lot I machine quilted the grid formed by the tiles of the pool wall and added 'slubs' of close quilting and small beads to show the glittery shimmers on the surface of the water.

Finally, I finished it with Terry Grant's method of couching perle thread to the edge of the quilt, except that I had already trimmed it to size before I read her instructions not to do so until after the couching, and except that I didn't have perle thread so I used embroidery thread, so the state of it should not be taken as any reflection ( pun not intended) on the quality of her tutorial.

Overall I am content with this quilt, though, as being a move forward for me from strictly representional to impressionalist/ abstract. The edges remain a little wavy but,if that is not allowed with this quilt, when will it ever be?!

Droplets

This is "Droplets", my 12x12 water quilt. I took a picture of dew droplets some time ago in my garden. I liked it so much that I played a lot with it on the computer. For this quilt, the manipulated image was printed on banana paper. I then bonded the paper on homedyed blue green fabric. The background fabric is also homedyed. I added a few silvery beads, because they made me think of tiny droplets.
Here's a detail of the quilt...
More pictures on my blog very soon...

Down the Plughole

For this challenge, I wanted to do something quite different from the first 12in square water-themed quilt that I made sometime ago and I had plenty of ideas.

I had fun experimenting again with shibori to create various "water" fabrics as shown on my blog. I even started quilting one of the pieces. I quite like it but the overall effect is very subtle and I decided that something stronger was required as part of a group mosaic. (Is anyone else is finding that their design decisions are being influenced by this factor? I don't think it is a bad thing and the mosaics so far have been greater than the sum of their parts.)

Out of deference to my husband (aka the Laundry King), when I am dyeing fabrics in low volumes, I rinse the fabrics by hand rather than in the washing machine. Thus I observed lots of turquoise water disappearing down the plughole. This reinforced my decision to concentrate on this quilt.

Coriolis

This is my tribute to the enduring myth that water goes down the plughole in a different direction depending which hemisphere you are in. (The coriolis force is real but is noticeable only for large-scale motions such as winds.)

I used freehand rotary cutting for the piecing and hand quilted it with a variety of perle threads in different weights and colours. I finished it off with a mitred facing (see the tutorial on my blog).

New World

For two years now I have been taking photos of water and collecting them. I don't know why, other than that I love water and I am constantly surprised by the variation in colour that I see.

As soon as our challenge was revealed to be "Water" I knew that I would use my photos. At first I thought they would just be references and I planned to make a quilt that was just an image of water made up of layers of applique. Then Terry had her article published in Quilting Arts and I bought the magazine and opened it to see... the exact thing I planned to make, already made by someone else! Poo.

The last month has been a very busy and stressful one for me and my husband (we have a new business) and, as the month passed, I found myself delaying work on the quilt and only giving it minutes of thought here and there. But those minutes added up and eventually I had a plan - to make a quilt about water using only photos of real water. I printed seven of my photos on to inkjet printable poplin (because at $8 a sheet that was as much printable fabric as I was prepared to buy!!). It was not easy to choose which of the photos to use and I realised as soon as I saw the first print that the colours were very subdued and I wasn't going to get any intensity. At that point I went all Zen and decided that whatever the printer gave me was what I would use. I didn't have the time or resources to play around!

My favourite of the photos (the brilliant turquoise) was taken on a trip to The Barrier Reef last year when my daughter had her first scuba dive. This quilt would be about that experience. She was so excited that day. I have rarely seen my reserved and cool daughter so openly bubbling and fizzing!


Although I have a passion for saturated and intense colour, the printed fabrics were so quiet that I figured I wouldn't be able to fight that and would have to work with it. So the intention became to have a quiet image of Ali emerging from the blue.

I made a line drawing of Ali and then used fusible web to make the image from my printed fabrics. I only used these fabrics (although I was very tempted to use others!) There is a small amount of stitching on the raw-edge applique to enhance some of the shapes, but mostly it is not stitched. The quilt is quilted in horizontal wavy lines using threads in soft blues, aquas and green. I also added some coloured pencil to adjust the colour of her face -it was too green- and shade her eyes a little. It's very hard for me to stop once I start drawing on things, so it took a lot of self-control not to completely rework the image.

I am probably the least satisfied with this quilt of any that I've made for 12x12 so far. I like the idea and the sewing went well. I am bothered by the darkest of the fabrics and wish I'd used something else. With such a limited choice of fabrics and no chance of making more (self-imposed) I guess I was up against it. Interestingly, this quilt looks best up close and really looks awful at a distance - most of mine are the other way around!!

I still like the idea of a water quilt made with water photos, but I think I could have done much better. I decided at the start of this group that I wouldn't beat myself up about these quilts; that I would use the format to experiment and have fun. It's working. I am!

There are a couple more detail shots on my blog.

I'm Back...

but then you all knew that. However, I am still in a jet-lagged haze. It is a good thing that I got my water piece well under way before I left. I hope to finish it this week. Here is some gorgeous water for you to ponder - the incredible Dead Sea. It is very turquoise and lovely. Those are the mountains of Jordan in the distance.

Back from Researching

I've spent the last week researching water in Monterey, CA. I'm now ready to capture the beauty of an oceanfront vacation!

Water-full

I have spent a lovely day working on my water piece. No, I didn't use this photo, although I was tempted to use it as the inspiration for a piece. And I'm done except for finishing the edge. Yay!

After the heat wave we've had over the last several days, today was sunny and warm and just perfect. I worked in my office with the window wide open, curtains blowing gently in the breeze. I listened to back podcasts of "This American Life," which always makes me happy. And I sewed and smiled and had a lovely Sunday.

And then we went out for Mexican food for dinner.

Quite the perfect day.

I hope you're all having fun with your water pieces...as the date approaches I am looking forward to seeing what everyone is doing!

Droplets II

I'm done!
Finally, I didn't quilt the first top I had made. Was not too excited about it... Maybe later.
But I'm finished with this one. There are a few other pictures of it on my blog.

Feeling Thirsty

Hi, all --

I have no pictures to share, as I have nothing to photograph yet. Like some of you, I've brainstormed water ideas, and came up with a few I thought about working on --

-- the blue of Lake Tahoe in the summertime, with the bright colors of floaty toys against it

-- a wonderful memory of one early, early morning in Maine when Roger and I went canoing and some loons followed us

-- the elegance of a droplet of water on a flower petal or blade of grass

-- the lack of water (a cactus, desert, etc -- following on the empty chocolate wrapper theme)

-- the different blues and greens of water

But I have ended up rejecting all of these, in favor of something else. I've been in such a fabric slump lately, but settling on an idea and starting to work on it has me excited. That's a good feeling!

And look -- WEEKS to go.

Rest and Relaxation

I've brainstormed many times about "Water." I keep coming back to an image of vacation, relaxing on the water or gazing out at the great ocean. I grew up on an island in the Puget Sound, surrounded by water. My grandparents lived on the beach and we would always play at the edge of the waves. Summers were spent floating along the Columbia River visiting friends' vacation property along the river. My husband and I lived on a sailboat the first six months we were married. Each of these things has their problems and pains -- taking a ferry boat to get to the city, the water was much to cold to swim in, a lot of people crammed into a very small mobile, icicles on the inside of the windows. I tend to forget all those inconveniences and remember only the romantic, calming images of living around water. My soul longs for peace of walking along the beach, knowing that my life and struggles are so small compared to the vast beauty of the ocean. Now to capture that in a quilt!

Water Found?

There are more pictures (and a tutorial of sorts) on my blog.