Quilters
CHAIR CHAT Dear LQ Members, In the past week, as the weather has turned more
autumnal, my thoughts have been turning to a seasonal quilt. A packet of fall-coloured
fabrics has just arrived in the post from Pincushion Boutique, and there are
several designs which have been floating around in my mind for years, not to
mention the new chestnut-leaf appliqué design I’m working on. Is this the year
I will finally use those orange, brown and gold fat quarters I’ve been hoarding? The trouble, I find, with seasonal quilts, is
that the mood for making them lasts only as long as the season, whereas making
a quilt is usually a much longer-term endeavour. Two years ago, in the spring,
I started a quilt with blackbirds on a background of mud and spring-green batik.
By summer, it was not yet finished, and now, two years on, it lives in my UFO
box on top of a bookcase. This year’s half-finished project has gone into the
same box. I tell myself that next spring, I will finish one of these, but the
lure of another new idea will probably distract me. I noticed in the first week of October that Sainsbury’s in O2 has Christmas decorations out for sale. Have I already missed
the season? Should I now be thinking of a holiday quilt instead? But no - I
just can’t bring myself to think of a winter quilt before it’s even Halloween.
Even quilts made as Christmas presents are difficult to start so early. (Probably
why they are so difficult to finish on time!) I think I may have found a solution to this seasonal
dilemma - simply make a smaller quilt. A lap quilt. No
- a wall hanging. No - I have it - a miniature! Perhaps this is the
year I will do a series of monthly miniatures. At least this way, if winter
distracts me with some new idea, I will have a miniature quilt to show for
it, rather than another UFO for the box! And that chestnut leaf block should
be the perfect thing.
QUILTS UK MALVERN by Jean
Nissan
As usual, I went with two friends to this very large show. There are so many quilts that I can only give a sketchy idea of the show as a whole and of a few individual quilts. Also because of the number of quilts, I may well have missed some made by our members, but I did find Mount Fuji and the Mayfly by Margaret Scholey-Hill, a lovely embellished quilt using hand-dyed and Japanese fabrics, Christine Restall’s Grayton Beach! - Evening and Alicia Merrett’s Spheres of Influence (which had a prize for use of colour - a very striking quilt indeed). The theme of this year’s show was Neptune’s Realm. This inspired a large number of entries - 181 quilts in this category displayed - and a riot of whimsy and embellishment. My two personal favourites were She Sells...... By Kate Randon of Taunton - a delightful small wall hanging of 3D shells and seaweed moulded from hand-dyed and painted silk and satin, mainly in soft peach and beige, and only partially attached to the background, and Whitby by Kathy Unwin of Kenilworth which used blocks of graded colour set into a dark background to show colour and movement in the night sky and water of Whitby Harbour. It was a lovely restful quilt, and a joy to me amid all the whimsy and embellishment. That said, there were also beautiful underwater scenes of tropical fish swimming in coral lagoons. I was delighted to see 11 quilts in the under-16 section. In fact several quilters were very much under 16. Again a lot of the quilts had a sea theme, but the first prize was won by 13 year-old Sarah Rozelaar of Malvern, inspired by a school visit to France. The second prize went to 8 year-old Jasmin Wells of Luton for her Noah’s Ark. Her comments are worth quoting. "I wanted to make a quilt for my bed. Grandma showed me what to do. I chose the colours and made the animals using bondaweb. I did all the machining myself." At least two quilts were made by 7 year-olds, one as a class project for the Queen’s Jubilee, another by Phillippa Burge in response to a challenge from her Aunt Kathy. I have left the ‘Best of Show’ quilt to last. As usual it was hung so that it was the first quilt seen as you come through the door. At first sight it appeared to be a black quilt with intricate appliquéd blocks and borders in gold lamé; we all described it as ‘glowing’. It is a bed quilt called Baltimore Golden and the background is indeed black, but the appliqué is in varying shades of yellow from the palest lemon to a yellow/orange and contains no lamé at all. It was made by Sue Goodman of Cley, Norfolk and she says it developed from a Baltimore ‘Block of the Month’ class by Jacquie Harvey. The blocks are set with pieced sashing and there are elaborate pieced and appliquéd borders. I can’t do justice to this quilt in words and I am sure pictures of it will soon be appearing in the magazines. Sue says that it is her first bed quilt. I did not hear anyone disagree with the judges over this award. It was a relief to see most of the usual traders in their usual places. As we know, several quilt shops have closed this year, among them Contented Cat, but Joyce Daw still goes to America to buy fabrics that seem unique to her. She was in her usual place right near the door, and as usual, my resolutions not to buy fabric were forgotten.
It has been a number of years since London Quilters made a group quilt and one of the suggestions made by members at the last AGM was why don’t we make quilts for charity. So the committee thought it would be a good idea to combine the two ideas and make a group quilt which we can raffle. In the recent (May-Oct) issues of Quilters Newsletter magazine (QNM) there has been a series quilt by Cynthia Sherbourne featuring many foundation pieced houses, trees and flowers. This lends itself very well to being a group quilt as all the blocks are supposed to be different and foundation piecing will help them all be the right size. I have contacted both QNM and Cynthia and we have their permission and encouragement to go ahead without breaching copyright. I have put a picture of the original quilt on the web site and there will be one at the desk at meetings. The patterns and signup sheet will be available at the AGM in November when I can answer any queries. We can also decide which charity or charities we want to support. We would like each member to do one house, plus a tree or flower block in bright colours. Some of you might like to embellish the house so it’s like yours (i.e. put a cat on the mat) or make a Japanes, African or other distinctive house to suit your tastes. For anyone who’s unfamiliar with foundation piecing I hope to have a couple of open Saturdays where you can come round to my house and we can do some together. A great chance to develop a new skill.
Contemporary Art Quilts 2003
Walking into the village hall at Uffington, the first thing that met my eye was a large, mostly black, incredibly ugly quilt. It appears in a pristine state at the front of the exhibition catalogue, but it did not remain pristine for long, as visitors were encouraged to deface it, using anything from scissors to chalk. Many were reluctant to do so, even though the quilt was made for this purpose. It seems to me that most of us would prefer to work out our frustrations by creating something new rather than by destroying anything. Once inside, the exhibition itself was one of the best I have seen. Two large quilts anchored a collection of smaller ones, hung gallery-style. For those whose quilts did not get in, I can only say that there was no possible way they could have hung any more quilts in the space. Many of the quilts shown incorporated non-traditional materials such as bubble wrap, paper, pebbles, and wire mesh. Joanne Tinker’s Fanciful, made of foil wrappers and plastic, certainly stretched the definition of 'art quilt'. The pieces which stood out the most for me were those which mixed traditional and modern techniques and materials, so that the design, and not the materials used, took centre stage. Seaspray - 2002 by Niki Chandler, uses a profusion of materials such as bubble wrap and PVC, yet the bubble shapes of the design are what first catches the eye. Of Night and Light and the Half-Light by Kate Cox contains paper and scraps of strange and wonderful fabrics, but it is the colour and composition which stands out; only on closer inspection do you start noticing the individual scraps. (and coveting them.) The high point of the opening day in Uffington was a lecture by Jette Clover, a Danish quilter currently living in Florida. Jette had a lot to say about the differences between American and European quilts - with England falling firmly on the European side. Jette’s current series of nearly monochrome, primary-coloured quilts are, she says, her effort to get comfortable with using bright American colours. Her inspirations range from walls layered with graffiti to the paintings of Mark Rothko. She says she does not "wait for ideas", the important thing is just to go into her studio and work, and things will happen. The next Contemporary Art Quilts exhibition is in 2006 - meanwhile, if you missed this year’s exhibition, catalogues are still available. Please contact Carol Mowat Tel: 01367 820336 email:caq2003@hotmail.com Following are some web-sites of interest: www.nga.gov/feature/rothko/rothkosplash.html is a good site for Mark Rothko's work, from the National Gallery in Washington DC www.galleryfxv.com/Jette.html has some pictures of Jette's quilts.
British Museum Exhibition by Margaret
Cooter What could be of interest
to quilters in an exhibition that seems to be about medicine? In "Medicine
Man: the Forgotten Museum of
Henry Wellcome", quite a lot! The founder of a big drug
company (which now funds the Wellcome Institutes for the study of the history
of medicine), Henry had
the interest and opportunity to collect a tremendous variety of artifacts related
to all aspects of medicine. If you visit the British Museum, or the online
exhibition (http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/medicineman/)you
will be drawn into a world beyond imagining. The objects are old and
exotic. Masks to scare away the demons of illness rub shoulders, as it were,
with paintings of ordinary
people stripped of skin to show anatomical details. These could easily call
up shudders of horror for sensitive souls. The small ivory teaching
models, of people from which the internal organs can be lifted, might touch
other emotions. They are
sensitively shown in the short silent film at the end of the exhibition. What a mixture of things
- there is a case of artificial limbs mainly in metal and wood, another showing
a great variety
of metal forceps, another with Greek votive pottery objects left at shrines
by people praying for cures. Of course there are a few familiar medical implements
- a very early stethoscope, for example - but more interesting are the implements
from other cultures. Not to mention a lock of George III’s hair and Napoleon’s toothbrush. Many of the items in the
exhibition have to be seen to be believed - the beaded African mask, complete
with long fringes of
beads, has the zingiest colour combination imaginable; the beaded staff beside
it has dear little beaded birds perching on it. The lighting is subdued,
and the arrangement of objects is excellent. The captions in the cases are
hard to see, but they are
all printed - in large print - in a "newspaper", available in the first room,
where there is also a table of objects with a selection of audio commentaries.
This exhibition is an eye-opener that will get your creative thoughts whirling. It is on until 16th November
at the British Museum, and admission is free.
Buy Fabrics! Fabrics can be bought inexpensively
through the Fabric Guild in Leicester. It might be worth doing a car pool sometime
so that
a group of LQ’s can go together. Please call to make an appointment first. Address of Fabric Guild
is: Fabric Guild
, Kisko
House , Cobden St. Leicester LE1 2LB Telephone 0116 262 0569
QUILTERS’
GUILD NEWS Dear All, The website was updated
a couple of weeks ago. New things include a link to the Twisted Thread website
where there is a list
of Festival of Quilts winners and report of the show at the NEC. Dates for
2004 are already fixed and will be the week before the bank holiday weekend
(19th-22nd August 2004). Other new links include Goldsmith's College, which
includes the Constance Howard resource centre, and the Winchester Textile
Conservation Studio. There is now a list of quilt
groups on our website. I
have not included phone numbers and contact details as yet as I do not have
permission from all the group organisers to do so. Contact should be made
via e-mail with me in the first instance and I will give out the details
on a personal
basis. If you wish to have your group listed, please e-mail us. If you know of any events
or links you would like to see on the site please let me know. You are welcome
to forward this e-mail on an individual/ personal basis to others who might
be interested in its contents
or who may wish to receive bulletins from us in the future. If you know of any events
or links you would like to see on the site please let me know. If you wish
to unsubscribe just send
me an e-mail. Best wishes, Cathy Corbishley Michel Members representative
- Region 1 e-mail: qgrl@yahoo.com website: http://www.qgrl.freeserve.co.uk
EXHIBITIONS Kaffe Fassett’s Collection
of Quilts and Costume in a Kaleidoscope of Colour - The
American Museum in Britain, Claverton Manor,
Bath, 22nd March - 2nd November 2003 Patchwork
Trios Quilting Exhibition -
Roberts Hall, Christchurch, The Broadway, Bexleyheath,
8th November 2003, 10am - 5pm The Knitting & Stitching
Show -
International Halls, Harrogate, 20-23 November 2003 Turner
and Venice -
Tate Britain, Millbank until Jan 11th 2004 (and this one’s free) Committed to Cloth - 17th -
29th October.
An international exhibition of textile artists including Jane Dunnewold, Melody Johnston and Michelle Griffiths at the Greenstede Gallery, Chequer Mead
Arts Centre, East Grinstead. Mon-Sat 9-6, also some evenings and Sundays (to
check tel: 01342 325577).
A patchwork poem Spotted by Susan Chinn, this poem was chosen as BBC's Poem for Britain to mark National Poetry Day (9th October). There are more details on the BBC and Poetry Society web sites.
Harvest Time: A Needlework
Map Commemorating the Millennium by Con Connell Our village holds no special place
In history. Its public face
Would cause no traveller to
pause,
Its landscape merits no applause.
We love it though. And love declares
Its memories, in patchwork squares,
And fabric images that bind
The heritage we leave behind.
Each public, private thought portrayed,
Each delicately appliquéd.
We stretch our memories on frames,
Without exaggerated claims,
Knowing each proud biography
Embroiders our geography.
This warning, too, our needles know,
That as we reap, so shall we sew.
INTERNET INFORMATION The London Quilters website
address is: http://members.lycos.co.uk/London_Quilters/ It is run and maintained
by Tricia Revest, whose e-mail is: p.a.revest@qmul.ac.uk