Twelve by Terry

Terry lives near Portland, Oregon and is celebrating her 800th post on her blog And Sew It Goes. If you're quick, and stop by and leave a comment on her blog, you might be fortunate enough to win an original small textile work by Terry. She also has some other goodies in her ETSY Store. Here are Terry's Twelve by Twelve works:

Twelve by Kirsten

Kirsten lives in Townsville in Far North Queensland and recently opened a craft studio and shop certain to seduce hip crafters everywhere - pompomrouge. Here are Kirsten's Twelve by Twelve works:

You can see more of Kirsten's quilts on her website www.kirstenduncan.com.au and she also puts fun stuff on her blog.

Pretty in pink

There was plenty of pink in my Dad's garden last weekend.

Twelve by Twelve Website Gallery Update

The Twelve by Twelve website has been updated to showcase all 144 art quilts in our first theme series including the latest Twelve works. Terry, who set the theme, once remarked on her blog that her favourite colour is orange-red and many us seem to have channelled an orange-red vibe along with a circle motif:

With the completion of twelve challenges, the individual Artist Gallery pages are now fully populated and it is fascinating to see the body of work created for the project so far. Over the coming days, we'll be sharing a compilation mosaic for each Twelve. Here is my contribution. You can see more of my contemporary quilts on my website www.brendagaelsmith.com. My other website www.serendipitypatchwork.com.au features my patterns, projects and workshop offerings. Both websites link to my blog Serendipity & the Art of the Quilt:

Half way around the world from Australia, is Helen in the United Kingdom. Helen's Twelve by Twelve works are predominantly inspired by stories:

You can see more of Helen's quilts and share in her design resources on Helen's new website www.HelenConwayDesign.com. Helen also keeps an entertaining blog - From Down the Well.

A Colorful New Journey

Having just cycled through twelve wonderful challenges, we're off again on another round! But this time, we're changing things a bit. So here are our parameters:

* Size will be 12x12 inches square again

* The over-arching theme will be COLOR!

* The host of each challenge will determine the parameters of the color challenge, and how that colorway or palette will be described. The challenge host may choose to post a photo as the color inspiration, or set a palette of several colors, or use a descriptive word out of which the artist may "pull" a color palette (ie, "seashore" or "autumn" or "circus," say). Of course, given the extreme creativity of our participants, the host may chose any other way to communicate a color or palette for the challenge. I'm thinking of this round as the Colorplay Challenges.

I'm excited!

And here's our first challenge of Round 2, which will be revealed on (drum roll, please!): December 12! Get it? 12/12! (This was Nikki's brilliant idea, I believe.) I'm a word person, and I'm in a simple and direct mood, so you get one word for this challenge.

PINK.

Yep. Pink. I know it's not the comfort zone for some of you, but I'm thinking that's why I'll really look forward to seeing where this goes! Me, I love pink -- so I'm giving it it's own place oif honor in our Colorplay challenges. (This probably goes without saying, but you can go in what ever direction you want with it, and you are not limited to using only pink. So, off you go!

Start thinking pink!

Twelve by Twelve Art Quilts On Tour!

We Twelves value technology - after all our project could never have happened without the power of the internet and blogging. Nevertheless, we recognise that experiencing textile works "in real life" reveals another whole dimension in colour and texture. Accordingly, we are thrilled to announce that the international tour of the Twelve by Twelve exhibition of 144 art quilts commences in Australia in 2010 as follows:

• 29 April - 2 May 2010: Australasian Quilt Convention
  Royal Exhibition Building, Carlton, Melbourne, Victoria


• 28 May - 23 June 2010: Gosford Regional Art Gallery
  36 Webb St, Gosford East NSW 2250 Tel: (02) 4325 0056


• 25 - 27 June 2010: Textile Art Festival
  Brisbane Exhibition Centre, South Bank, Queensland

We'll be adding new venues as our exhibition program develops so check our Exhibitions listing. Our goal is to exhibit the quilts in the community where each Twelve resides and beyond. We want to share our project with as many people as possible! You are welcome to contact us if you have any suggestions or questions.

Twelve

Thanks to all of you for responding so Spectacularly to the "Twelve" theme! What a privilege it has been to be a part of this group. Now, it's on to the next phase. I can't wait!

Terry

Twelve Women

It's been 2 years since Diane asked me to participate in this online group, and I can't even begin to tell you what a wonderful adventure it has been. I have been pushed to create art I never would have come up with on my own, I have had feedback from people all over the world, and the most important part is that I have eleven new friends. The twelve of us have such diverse personalities and yet we all work together so well. We feed off each other, we give advice, we encourage, we critique, and in my opinion we have become a very unique group.


Twelve Women celebrates us, our friendships and our future endeavors. Thank you Diane, for starting this group, and thank you to the rest of you for being the strong, creative women that you (we) are.

This piece was made using my own deconstructed black and white fabric, with a sheer silk overlay. The figures and lettering were painted on using stamps and a thermofax screen. I then added handstitching to the painted areas.

All Hands

I loved that Terry chose the theme "Twelve" -- it was the perfect theme to wrap up our first 12x12 cycle! Isn't it amazing that we've all worked together for 2 years?

I had lots of ideas, and spent a lot of time working on an image of a staircase with a sole glass slipper and a fleeting shadow. Maybe it's the fact that Caroline is just now beyond the dress-up and princess phase of little girl-hood that I loved, but I liked the idea of illustrating the stroke of midnight for the "Twelve" challenge.

And yet... and yet... I kept coming back to wanting to celebrate the twelve of us working together. I have loved getting to know everyone in the group better, and I've learned so much from all of you.

So. I decided to work with 12 hands. Can you tell that's what they are? I cut them out in various colors of silk organza, and fused them down, focused around a circle which is meant to symbolize our common purpose in participating in this project. I do like the transparent effect. The result is a bit jumbly, but that's sort of what I like about it. I've had it up on my wall for a week or so now, and I'm not sure if I love it or it's too chaotic. Or maybe the chaos is what I like about it.

Quilting added another challenge. I quilted a big spiral of concentric circles, but found that washed out the hands a bit more than I liked, so I went back in and quilted those, too. So there's a level of stitchy chaos here, too -- lots of seemingly random crossing of lines -- but there you have it. I figure that there is always a touch of crazy unpredictability in any group!

Here's a detail shot:

The Twelves

Good friends are like shooting stars....You don't always see them, but you know they are always there.

When Terry announced this theme, I just knew that I had to do the twelve of us, a remarkable group of artists from around the world. When Diane asked me to be part of this group, I had no idea that I would garner a close group of virtual friends that I love and admire. After 12 challenges, we know a lot about each other. We collaborate well. We work out our differences in a most civilized manner. What can I say, but, I love you all.

I wanted to do 12 little Picasso style portraits of each of us. Life got in my way. I realized that would never happen, this time around. I started thinking of other ways to put us into my art and came up with the idea of a thermofax screen for each person.

Now, I have to ask your permission to use your photo. As there are 3 attorneys among us, I hope I am not in trouble. Anyway, I found photos of the 11 of you and photoshopped them to create black and white images. I will share on my personal blog the mess I created in doing this.

I screened images on to a rainbow of fabrics and cut each into a block and pieced them together. I decided to do some seed stitching around each image and just took a few stitches to tack the faces in place. Here is a detail:

Working on this made me happy because I love the friendship that I have with each of you.

Midway

My Twelve quilt was one that wasn't born until the Eleventh Hour (so to speak). As the weeks went by, every time I considered the theme and tried to think of directions in which my quilt could go, I hit a wall. I thought about dozens (bakers and dirty), I thought about numerals and base 12 and binary, I thought about disciples and jurors and... nothing enthused me.

Time was running out. Ah yes, time. My Nemesis. Time and I have a turbulent relationship. I never wear a watch. I would prefer that clocks not exist at all. And yet, I dread being late and am always on time for everything (except deadlines - that's another story!). Then again, I can't stand waiting (it feels like such a waste of time)so arriving early is not pleasant either.

I frequently am not sure what day of the week it is and usually have to check a calendar if the date is required. I've even been known to forget what year we are in and often have to calculate how old I am.

As I thought about time, it struck me that Midnight and Noon are the only two times of day that have names. They are also the two times of day that I like the best because they are my two significant markers. Midnight is magic. The witching hour. My favourite time of day, when all things seem possible. I have always been a Moon person rather than a Sun person. And Noon? Well, that's lunchtime! I have what a colleague once told me is a Public Service Stomach - it grumbles at 12:00 exactly.

So my quilt began to show itself to me. Midnight and Noon. Blue and orange fell into my hands and once again (for the THIRD time in this project!) the design is a circle. Of course, there is always a glitch somewhere. This quilt's glitch was that my O stamp is lost, so Noon became Midday. :D Ha ha ha ha ha ha!!
That little tussle that time and I have on a daily basis had to show itself somehow, I guess.

So, the message is that between Midnight and Midday and Midnight and Midday and Midnight is a whole bunch of numbers that, quite frankly, don't mean very much to me!

Twelve by Twelve - The Board Game

After discarding my first two ideas I had for this theme, I landed on the vision of a clock face. A clock has a “twelve” on it, so that’s where my sketches started. I drew a round shape for the clock and added the numbers around the outside. I somehow wanted to associate each number with each theme throughout the past two years (has it been two years already?).

I divided the circle into twelve sections. In each section I embroidered the corresponding name and theme. At this point I was still envisioning a clock so my first sketch included the clock hands and they pointed to the twelve.

At some point the two clock hands became one hand, a single pointer. At first I was thinking I would somehow add this pointer with color, either thread or paint. As I was working on the embroidered names, I came upon the idea that it should be a real clock hand and I’d worry about how to attach it later. Then my thoughts moved onto a game spinner. The more I worked on my quilt, the more it resembled a piece from a board game. But I didn’t know what to use for the spinner and how it could be attached so it would spin.

Well my thoughts then turned into a discussion with my husband. After some brainstorming and searching for something to use as a spinner, we landed upon the almost 15-year-old thermometer that was attached to our garden shed. The plastic face of the thermometer had yellowed and aged so much over time that it was hard to even read it anymore. So off the shed it came and was dismantled. Perfect spinner!

My husband helped me install the spinner so that it would work. Doesn’t this look like a fun game?

Seven Houses Five Trees

After considering several things that actually come in "twelves," I decided to create a quilt using elements of 12 in my design. I enjoy creating graphic landscapes and hadn't really explored that in any of my other 12x12 pieces. (My identity and math quilts are technically landscapes, but they are missing the usual elements from my quilted landscapes.)

I also haven't really created any quilts in strong, straightforward colors. Red is especially lacking. My chair quilt is colorful, but in a different way.

So I started off with the very general idea of creating a landscape including some red. I also wanted to work more loosely. I was inspired by paintings I found in Nino Art Studio on Etsy. Eventually, I created this wacky little world.

The black tree and house elements make up the first 12. There are two sets of 12 green brush strokes on the right. There are also 12 red dots in the sky. And Roman numeral 12s stitched across the hillside.

I loved doing all the hand stitching. It's a lot of stitching and it takes a lot of time, but as I'm stitching I never wish I were doing it any differently. (As long as I've allowed enough time before the deadline.)

I think the binding is especially effective. I fused a simple blue binding and covered it with long stitches all the way around to match the color of the main part of the quilt.
I love the way the blue binding still peeks through.

This was a quilt that kept wanting more. More paint, more layers, more stitching. I may have stopped too soon. And I really didn't loosen up as much as I would like to. But, I'm pleased and I'd like to go knock on the doors of those seven houses!

The Kissing Number

12, it's a number. What can I say, I headed to Mathematics and then threw in some Passion for spice. (Hum, and I did find illumination while sitting in a chair and looking out the window. Hehe.) It turns out that 12 is the "kissing number" in the third dimension. What? The kissing number is the number of spheres of the same diameter that can touch or "kiss" a center sphere at the same time. Basically, if you have 1 ball, twelve other balls of the same size can touch it at the same time without crowding anyone out. A rather interesting concept when compared with all the other "12's" in history, religion and society we've uncovered throughout the last two months.

I took the geometric approach to depicting the "kissing number" and used 12 colored circles surrounding a single white circle. I used fabric paper, created with muslin, scrapbook paper, tissue and paint, for the colored circles and wool felt for the white. The three back circles can be hard to find peaking out from the others, but trust me -- my sewing machine could feel all those layers. I then added the XO with embroidery floss -- 12 sets of 12 in 12 different colors. I wasn't sure which actually stands for the kiss, X or O, and doubted a single X or O would come across as a kiss, so I decided to use the recognizable set.

Once again, I didn't budget my time well with the hand stitching. I finished all the XOs with time to spare. I then thought I would add the backing and do a little hand quilting to tie it all together. Well a little hand quilting quickly turned into a lot of little stitches. Add to that, the fact that I used a heavily painted fabric for the backing and I now have very sore fingers. Thankfully, they can now take a little break to recover before they get to work on the next 12 quilts.

12N 12W

Entering 12 Degrees North and 12 Degrees West into Google Earth will take you to a dense area of foliage in the hinterlands of Guinea in West Africa, one of the countries plundered for the slave trade.

The men and women traded were put in boats and sent to the plantations of the Caribbean and the United States of America. From there goods such as cotton, tobacco and sugar, grown with the toil of shacked workers made their way across the Atlantic to the bustling seaport of Liverpool. The ships reloaded with textiles and alcohol - goods to barter for human cargo - and completed the triangle with voyages back to Africa. By the close of the 18th century 40% of the world's, and 80% of Britain's Atlantic slave activity was accounted for by slave ships that voyaged from the docks lining the River Mersey.

Even today there are streets around the city whose names stand as testimony to the nefarious history of Liverpool. Rodney Street, known as the Harley Street of Liverpool for its conglomeration of medical practice rooms, is named for Baron Rodney who was a champion of the slave trade. John Gladstone, father of Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, lived on Rodney Street. He made his wealth through the sugar plantations in Demerara and Jamaica.

Goree was a bare rock off the Cape Verde Islands where slaves were assembled for transport and which gave its name to the piazzas near the docks.

Hardman Street was named after the landowner John Hardman who earned his money in the slave trade.

However, despite the fact that slavery permeated Liverpool's institutions ( 16 mayors were slave traders and the town hall retains a frieze of a kneeling slave) the city also bred Abolitionists. Roscoe Street is named after William Roscoe, a lawyer (I am proud to say) who was the Member of Parliament for Liverpool in 1806 when he cast his vote for Abolition.

Every day, when I go to work, I walk past buildings which, whilst built after Abolition, were founded on the back of Liverpool's wealth and success as a port nation, achieved during the slavery era. These days the renovated docks house the International Slavery Museum which explores the city's historical legacy. However it is also currently housing an exhibition, Trafficked , highlighting the forms of slavery which still exist in today's society. Whilst we all celebrated the election of the first black president of the USA and his slave-descendant wife, modern slavery is the fastest growing form of organised crime in the world today. To find out more visit the website for the Anti-Slavery Organisation.

This quilt is made with a piece of tie resist fabric from Guinea, sourced through The African Fabric Shop and chosen for its chain like pattern. The degree symbols are beads also from West Africa. Street signs of significance are formed into luggage labels to represent the Trans-Atlantic voyages of the enslaved and to encourage the viewer to consider how far (or how little) we have come since Abolition. The quilt edge is unfinished, both to reveal the cotton, previously picked by slaves and to represent the incomplete extension of ftrue freedom to all human beings.