ADVANCE NOTICE - NOVEMBER AGM
We are looking for new people to join
the Committee at the end of this year. This role can be really enjoyable and
worthwhile. If you would like to join us or simply know more about what is
entailed, call any of the Committee Members for a chat. We look forward to
hearing from you.
***** PLEASE NOTE
THERE IS *****
***** NO MEETING
IN AUGUST ****
CHAIR CHAT
I was most excited to see
the first of the Millennium Challenge quilts being shown at the June meeting.
Everyone had responded to the Challenge in a unique and personal way and as
a result, some very exciting work is being produced. Hopefully those of us
who have not completed (or even started) Challenge quilts will find the time
and initiative this summer to get on with them. I look forward to seeing the
next batch. Do not forget that there will be an opportunity to display the
first 26 quilts at our exhibition at Lauderdale House next April. Full details
of the show will be in the next Newsletter.
If you are not familiar with Lauderdale
House in Highgate, I do recommend a visit. The grounds of Waterlow Park, in
which it is sited, are delightful, though very hilly and there is also a bird
hospital/sanctuary. Go for tea or to one of their regular concerts and check
out our exhibition room. It is on the first floor. The room will be closed
to the public for short periods during our show û when regular yoga
classes take place. It sounds wonderful to me practising yoga surrounded by
our beautiful quilts.
Immediately after our last meeting I set
out for a short visit to the Aldborough Festival where I attended some master
classes. Observing excellent singers being criticised and encouraged to improve
their line and tone, made me think about how we could apply such processes
to our work.
It certainly appears simpler to change
line and tone in voice than it would be to change it in pieced fabric. We
cannot simply practice and "just do it again with more depth". Or can we?
Perhaps we can apply the principles before we sew û use more time on
the drawing board and design wall. Overall we could be more open to criticism
and simply re-examine those pieces that just fail to please us in the way
we intended. I am not an expert (singer or quilter) but it was quite remarkable
how the subtle changes made by the singers improved their performances and
I am very aware of hard it must have been to stand in front of an audience
and take, and use, the appraisals. One thing was very clear to me û
that we can always learn more and continue to improve our skills.
My house is being repointed and painted
at present. This means that there are workmen outside every window. I cannot
sew, cook, read, write this or do anything in the house without being observed.
It amazes me how they just happen to be outside the room I am in, all the
time. I am going to make an attempt to clear up my workroom through. Perhaps
I can bore them into moving to another window. I think a persecution complex
is setting in.
Happy summer -
Marlene
THE HELEN PARROTT LECTURE
By Linda Seward
The Celebrity Quilt Lecture 2000 was held
on June 21st in Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London. This new venue and the
evening time slot proved a success
in that many quilters filled the auditorium, hung with antique quilts as well
as the modern works of the speaker, Helen Parrott. Considered to be one of
this country's leading contemporary quiltmakers, Helen Parrott's work proved
to be provocative and stimulating.
A member of Quilt Art and resident of
Sheffield, Helen didn't start out to be a quiltmaker. Originally attracted
to photography, one of her main interests was and continues to be the study
of powerful landscapes, with an emphasis on the traces man has made on them.
After a stint as the manager of a Home Base, Helen did an embroidery course
and became interested in the surface marks made by stitches on fabric. Her
first piece was shown in 1990, made entirely of recycled fabrics. She began
experimenting and created a whole range of work trying out various techniques
and using different mediums, from paper to plastic and, of course, fabric.
At this time, stone circles, maps and geography inspired her work.
1993 saw the emergence of the theme of
anger and further experimentation in her work. One of her pieces, Anger 3
is entirely pinned together; if she removed the pins, the piece would fall
apart. Perhaps this doesn1t fit in with the conventional idea of what a quilt
is, but it achieved Helen's perception of what she envisioned in the work.
Around this time, she created a specially
commissioned piece of work entitled Power Ties, using a combination of metal
loops and hand-dyed strips of fabric in graded colours. Designed to stand
away from the wall so as to create shadows, the fabrics actually resemble
metal, making the piece an enigma until viewed up close. The juxtaposition
of metal and fabric make this an intriguing work.
1995-1996 saw Helen working half time
as a civil servant and half time in school. She became enamoured of the ripples
left in sand by the tide and this was the beginning of a whole new phase of
work, which became very important to her. Using ordinary calico and linen
thread, she sewed lines through the fabric, pulling on the threads to gather
the calico into ripples. These she calls her Sand Ripple quilts. The softness
of the rippled fabrics and subtlety of the stitching impart a three-dimensional
appeal to these works.
In 1997, Helen gave up her day job to
work freelance as a teacher, and to concentrate on her textile art to create
a body of work for solo shows. Inspired by the subtlety of wholecloth quilts,
Helen created a striped effect in wholecloth fabric solely by using stitches
for an 1998 exhibition at the Shipley Art Gallery.
Recently, details of small aspects of
life have fired Helen's imagination. She started working in white on white,
making loops onto a whole piece of white cloth. These loop quilts gave Helen
a sense of peace and space, and she enjoyed the process of creating them.
She experimented with black threads on white (this work was hanging at the
front of the auditorium) and red threads on white. The piece with the black
loops gives the impression of some foreign form of calligraphy, particularly
as the shadows of the loops create secondary designs when illuminated.
Helen stated that she is not interested
in making saleable items, but in pursuing her vision of textile art. Her fascination
for the tactile nature of fabrics continues to captivate her, and judging
by the passion with which she talks about her work (and about fabric), we
can look forward to many more "cutting edge" designs.
Many thanks to Jennifer Hollingdale, who
made this evening possible.
FABULOUS FABRICATIONS
Exhibition
of stitched
and layered wallhangings
by Kate
Cox and Alicia Merrett
at the Mill
Lane Gallery
82 Mill Lane,
West Hampstead,
London NW6 1NL
September
12-23, 2000 Opening hours:
Tuesday
to Friday 10 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Saturday
10 a.m. - 4 p.m.
closed Sunday.
Admission
free.
Virginia
Avery lecture by Alys Robinson
Jazz music and quilting are a natural
combination, at least according to Virginia Avery, well-known quilter and
accomplished jazz pianist. She opened her talk with a brief history of her
sewing career, which began in childhood, when she learned to make her own
clothing "because if I didn't make my own dresses, my mother would." She continued
to sew, teaching dressmaking. When she developed an interest in quilting,
it is not surprising that she was soon making quilted garments.
Virginia then showed us slides of her
home town, Portchester, and her home, a 200 year old farmhouse (that's ancient
by American standards.) She showed slides of the interior, dark, she said,
but brightened by a red and white Indiana Puzzle quilt hanging over the sofa
- her first quilt. She also showed two slides of her sewing room - one as
it is when she's working, and one when it's tidied up - the same slide!
She then moved on to slides of her early
quilts and quilted clothing. A black wool skirt with colourful applique was
one of her first garments - "I made the girl too!" she gleefully points out
- the model is her daughter.
Her later garments all seem to have appeared
in Fairfield Fashion Shows - one is still touring now, so those of you who
went to Strasbourg may have seen it there. She had a sage piece of advice
for those wanting to make quilted garments - if you see a pattern you like,
buy it right away, as the next time you go back, it won't be there. Virginia
says she looks for patterns which have something unusual, some shape which
can be interpreted her way. She is also inspired by ancient designs, such
as the Japanese kimono, and the thousand-year-old Danish bog coat. (So called
because surviving examples, made of animal skins, have been found on Danish
bog people.)
Once she has the garment shape, Virginia
goes to town on the embellishment. Her choices of colours and motifs are heavily
influenced by Matisse, and, of course, by jazz music. The one man in the audience
later confessed to being somewhat intimidated by the number of jackets featuring
her favourite fabric - printed with the saying "Never underestimate the power
of a woman." I don't think many people, having met her, would underestimate
the power of Virginia Avery!
'SEEING YELLOW'
by Claire Crocker
Exhibition at The New England Quilt
Museum, Lowell, Massachussetts, USA, 5/8/99 - 24/10/99.
The New England Quilt Museum is always
worth a visit. As a centre for the serious study of quilts, it is good to
soak up the atmosphere, with the added bonus of interesting and challenging
shows of quilts on different themes. 'Seeing Yellow' was no exception. Essentially
a show of quilts using the colour yellow, it was well curated by Rhoda R.
Cohen as an exploration of the various meanings of the colour and how it can
be used.
On a basic level, yellow has a particular
meaning for quilters. It's often been a tricky colour, with a limited range
of shades available until the early 1900's, when the new synthetic dyes available
gave Depression era quilts their characteristic chrome yellow. I have to say
that whilst I like a bright, cheerful golden yellow, I was pretty indifferent
to any other more subtle varieties of the colour. 'Seeing Yellow' opened my
mind to a much broader appreciation.
The exhibition began with an eclectic
collection of yellow objects to demonstrate various uses of yellow, which
are sometimes contradictory.
Yellow:
* Is the brightest colour, and at
its fullest intensity can be seen from the furthest distance.
* Can symbolise danger, or be an
alert - think of fluorescent road safety gear.
* Can be a primrose, a sunflower - or
a bulldozer.
* 'They didn't put that little smile-face
on yellow for no reason' - Joyce Murrin on her quilt 'Rock Garden with Daisies'
* A yellowish cast can signify disease
in humans and plants.
To quote from the curator's statement
'We can take this hue on a wild ride around its living space to the palest
reaches of off-white down to the depths of chocolate brown, passing on the
way such stops as beige, khaki, pumpkin, or spring grass, because our dear
Yellow permeates everything it touches Everyone's skin colour is a yellow/red
variant, every green specimen must contain a bit of it.' So!
'Seeing Yellow' contained a huge variety
of approaches and techniques, from Rebecca Rohrkaste's 'Mary's Pinwheel',
a more traditional tessellating block quilt using warm yellows for an autumnal
look, to Susan Shie and James Acord's 'Fiesta Ware Quilt', a funky piece with
dancing teapots, lots of machine embroidery and 'needle writing' using vibrant
fluorescent yellow fabric. In Rise Nagin's 'Drop Cloth' and Robin Schwalb's
'Hear the Difference', both quilters used a shrill greenish cast of yellow
to create a disturbing atmosphere. Cynthia Corbin's 'Winter Yellows' has a
broad crazy pieced yellow border surrounding the bleak greys and whites of
her central depiction of the bare branches of a 'dreary NW winter'. Mary Allen
Chaisson's 'Garden Path' takes abstraction further, with its modern contained
crazy blocks. 'During a period of fog and gloom, I could not see the glorious
sight of my garden, so I made another. The yellows gave me the warmth I was
lacking in all that gray,' she explains.
Beatriz Grayson's zigzag 'Spring' showed
clearly how yellow sings out against other colours: 'Yellow makes the dark
tones darker; the greens more yellow as they are in early spring. It represents
vitality against the remnants of dried, neutral colored winter debris.' Ruth
McDowell's 'Mullein' and Suzanne Huston's 'Goldfinches' were more naturalistic
depictions of yellow in nature, showing how tiny glimpses of the colour can
still can have a big impact. 'Gull Pond' by Carol Anne Grotrian showed the
rich pinky-orange yellow of rock.
As well a broad range of yellows, the
quilts in 'Seeing Yellow' demonstrated a wide variety of techniques and designs,
ranging from traditional blocks through contemporary takes on crazy to very
modern abstracts. Hand appliquÚ was juxtaposed with raw edges and bondaweb,
textures included shiny plastic, holes in the surface as well as the matt
of traditional cottons. The range was stimulating, and provided something
for every taste.
There isn't room to mention every quilt
- there were many more of equal interest. I can only urge you to visit the
Museum if you get the chance to visit Lowell. You can combine a visit to the
Museum with a visit to the Museum of American Textiles, just down the road,
which is a wonderfully presented account of the development of the textile
industry in the States, with lots of sound effects, wonderful textile pieces
and working looms (they provide earplugs!). The two Museums are definitely
worth a detour. (Parking is available, and Lowell is only a short train ride
from Boston.)
A last snippet from the 'Seeing Yellow'
catalogue which I found interesting:
Other ways to say yellow:
almond - beige - fawn - maize - muslin
- dandelion - jonquil - canary - buttercup - gold
ochre - honey - mustard - cream - coffee
- chocolate - walnut - wheat - sand - tan - buff - doe
stone browns - deep bark - autumn leaf
browns - deep earth browns - bronze - brown - khaki - tobacco - raw umber
- olive brown
(from ISCC Dictionary of Color Names)
SAN
FRANCISCO VISITORS
by Margaret Scholey-Hill
During May we had the opportunity to meet
members of the San Francisco Quilt Guild, whilst showing them some of the
London sites of interest to quilt makers. The party comprised 18 quilters
and one husband (who was a good chaperone to the group) plus the daughter
and delightful grandchild of one of the group. I had met the leader, Caroline
Lieberman in San Francisco some years ago when I joined her group for a few
weeks. On this occasion, the other group leader was Janet Glessner (Michiko
Totama) a textile artist using indigo techniques and Japanese fabrics.
Six London Quilters (plus two more members
who just happened to be there on other missions) gathered in the Nehru room
at the V&A to meet the SF group. Confusion reigned because the BBC was
filming an Antiques Road Show in the foyer that morning and the well-planned
visit to the quilt laboratory had to be cancelled because of staff shortages.
Nothing daunted, put 25 quilters in the V&A and you will realize that
there was a lot to talk about over beautiful textiles from all over the world.
We gravitated to the embroidery section where our distinguished 'founder members'
were able to give little lectures on the examples on display. One of our visitors
said that it was worth the trip to England just to hear them! We then dispersed
in small groups to visit the costume collection, Art Nouveau exhibition and
other rooms of inspiration. It should not surprise us, but showing visitors
around our wonderful collections refreshes one's perspectives and is also
great fun.
In the evening a party of 32 met in the
upstairs room of an Indian restaurant and very quickly the bonds of friendship
were being forged as we exchanged photos and gifts. Many of our guests belonged
to Caroline's Older Adults program of the San Francisco College. They specialise
in designing group banners or wall hangings, using amazing applique techniques;
some of these are now displayed in museums and commissioned by institutions.
They take it in turns to be the artistic leader and we were invited to see
their next exhibition. Then we all went to the lecture by Virginia Avery which
was most enjoyable.
The next day I was invited to go with
them to the Conservation Department in Hampton Court. The staff members are
eager to show interested groups around their state-of-the-art laboratories
and are willing to discuss problems and the philosophy behind the conservation/preservation
debate in textiles. This would make a good visit in the future for some of
our members.
Just before they left for home some of
us including our Chair, Marlene, had tea in the British Library before wandering
round the exhibitions there of illustrated texts, which can be such a rich
inspiration. I know that they appreciated meeting us and we certainly enjoyed
their visit. Hopefully the exchange of ideas will continue between our two
groups. Thanks to all those London Quilters and friends who came along to
make our guests so welcome. There may be an opportunity to visit their exhibition
in 2002. Who knows?
PADUCAH STORY
by Em Dahlgren
Among the beautifully crafted and wonderfully
inspired quilts at the American Quilt Society's exhibition at Paducah, Kentucky,
there was one quilt which viewers could not look at, without pausing for a
closer look and without a few tears. It was the Donor Quilt. It was constructed
of blocks, probably eight to ten inches square and made by many different
hands, with varying degrees of skills, but obviously much love, as a memorial
to those people who, in their own death, had given a final gift to someone
in need of a body part, or several, in some cases. These blocks were made
by loving survivors, in a number of techniques: applique, counted cross stitch,
photo transfer, patchwork, crewel, embroidery. Each square gave a name, a
date of birth, and date of death. Babies, toddlers, school children, adolescents,
young adults, and some more mature adults were honoured in this way. One could
not help but feel the pride, as well as the grief, these survivors had put
into their stitchwork, and hoped that making these blocks made their grief
more bearable.
We met a fellow quilter at breakfast one
morning, quite by coincidence, who had received a new heart. As none of us
had ever met anyone with an organ not their own, we asked what probably were
the usual questions, and she was very patient with us. As a fit and youthful
fifty-year old, who carried no extra weight, was careful with her diet, and
exercised regularly, she was shocked to learn that a virus was quite literally
killing her heart. She had received the heart of a twenty-eight year-old man,
whose family members she never met. She had written a letter to the family,
expressing her gratitude, but they did not reply, and they let her know they
wanted no further contact, no doubt to spare additional anguish had the heart
been rejected. Then our fellow quilter told us that her mother had made a
shirt for her, embroidered with the words, Young at heart... other parts a
bit older!
NATIONAL QUILT
CHAMPIONSHIPS
Ascot, July 6 - 9, 2000
by Christine Restall
The Patchwork Association is no more,
but the National Quilt Championships live on, at Ascot this year, and run
by Grosvenor House. Commercially speaking,
the return to Ascot must be considered a success, with well over 12,000 attendees
(and all the traders I spoke to seemed very happy). So - presumably - profitability
is assured, and the future of the show safe. By the way, I heard that Malvern,
also run by Grosvenor House, was equally a commercial success, with more quilts
than ever before and record crowds - certainly the day I visited the marquees
were packed. We must take all this as good news, I feel.
Am I carping at the idea of commercial
success? Certainly not, since we all need to benefit from these shows, for
them to continue. After all, the standard of exhibits at Ascot was pretty
high this year - some spectacularly brilliant quilts, and perhaps fewer questionable
ones (by which I mean derivative, or design failures, or poorly made). We
are making progress - especially in shows like these which are not juried;
anyone can enter, they are truly representative.
Additionally, London Quilters had quite
a few exhibitors - a glow of pride and recognition all round. Stefanie Rickard's
magnificent New England Fall deservedly won 1st prize in the novice section,
and Kate Cox, Alicia Merrett, Tricia Revest and myself had quilts shown.
The Champion quilt was a worthy winner
(Give a Life, by Janet Cook), with its stark reminders of the plight of Africa.
As usual, there were some winners I could applaud, but others take issue with
the judges or even be lost in puzzlement. There were wonderful school quilts,
wearable art (Titania by Karina Pickering), Hoffman Challenge pieces, group
quilts, and, above all, interesting exhibits by some of the professional quilters
(Annette Claxton, for instance) - the usual wonderfully varied mix.
But my major carp is with the layout this
time. Perhaps it's a chronic and insoluble problem with the Ascot venue, it's
always been a bit of a jumble there, with the higgledy piggledy spaces. The
quilts were displayed alongside the traders throughout the whole show - better
lighting and background fabric than ever before, it's true - but such a mele
with stall holders and buyers bustling and jostling about, interrupting and
bumping into people trying to view or photograph the quilts. No sense of an
exhibition, more like a fairground - and very difficult to find specific sections
of the show, too. Frankly, I missed Olympia. But if Ascot is the best compromise
available, rather than lose the Championships, so be it.
2000
- 2001 CALENDAR
21 August: NO MEETING
18 September: Sue Wademan (from
Australia and New Zealand): Introduction to Antipodean influences in
quilting.
18 - 19 September (Monday and Tuesday):
Sue Wademan's Collage for Art Quilts workshop. The Roundwood
Club, Longstone Avenue, Harlesden, NW10.
16 October: Irene MacWilliam:
My Work
17 October (Tuesday): Irene MacWilliam's
Machine Applique workshop. The Roundwood Club, Longstone Avenue,
NW10.
20 November: AGM.
11 December: Christmas Party? Dinner?
Any ideas?
15 January: Anja Townrow: From
Tulips to Triangles.
19 February: Caroline Crabtree:
Indian Textiles and Embroidery.
YOUR NEWSLETTER NEEDS YOU!
Next deadline 3rd October. Hand your
contribution, e-mail it, or post it to Alicia Merrett (current Editor) or
Linda Seward (next Editor).
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