Jokulsarlon

My first thought when I red WILD was Tiger. My next idea was the Scandinavien equivalent, lynx. But I changed my mind, and wanted to go more abstract. So I decided to revisit a theme I have played with before. In Iceland, there is a lake  filled with floating mini-icebergs from the nearby glacier. It is called Jokulsarlon, which means "glacial river lagoon". The lines, colour and texture are really fascinating. I painted some fabric in this wonderful green-blue kind of colour of the glacier, cut it up and pieced it together again, and layered it with a polyester kind of fiber, usually used in scrapboking, some of which were manipulated with heat.

I quilted it all with parallell lines and framed it with a simple black binding.

 And some close ups: 

'Wild Thing' by Linden Lancaster

Wild Thing by Linden Lancaster 2014

These extra-ordinary 'Leaf Sea Dragons' are my favourite exhibit at the Melbourne Aquarium. How can such a creature be real?

Fabric was firstly fused to the hand-dyed background, then enhanced with Inktense pencils and a little metallic paint.

I then free-motioned quilted the piece to add depth and secure the raw edges. A few Angelina threads trapped in the quilting adds a little sparkle.

'Wild Thing' detail  by Linden Lancaster 2014

Wild Shine

There are a lot of meanings for the word “wild”. What to choose? Wild nature? Stormy? Ecstatic? Or something mad?

So many possibilities and no decision...

And as usual the idea came suddenly while I was drinking coffee with chocolate. I like any kind of chocolate and get wild of it. Sometimes I forgot to through away chocolate wrappers. What if to make a quilt from it? This wrappers are usually very  shiny. I don’t like a lot of shine in quilts and what if to get crazy and make shiny quilt?

This is the result – “Wild shine”

Materials: chocolate wrappers, felt, beads.

Tui Trio

I chose to interpret Wild as wildlife, and the native flora and fauna of my adopted country.

A New Zealand postage stamp design inspired my subject. We have many extinct and several active volcanoes, most in the North Island. The shape of Rangitoto Island is very familiar to us, lying as it does off the East Coast of Auckland. It has the typical cone shape, but very shallow sides. You can get a ferry to the Island, and to some of the other islands, like Waiheke, which has many  boutique wineries and other local products.

When I was doing my City and Guilds, I spent some time working in my sketch book and taking photos of New Zealand flax, phormium, or its Maori name, Harakeke. In the end I found its growth was rather cluttered, and even though I made samples for its spiral seedheads, I went in another direction. But I still have a hankering to feature flax. Its flower spikes are quite tall and very attractive to nectar loving birds. Down where I live, it is mainly the bellbird, but in the north there are many tuis. Tui is also the name of a beer here, which has slogans with unlikely claims, followed by "yeah, right!". They are pretty sexist, but actually often very funny.

Generally speaking New Zealand wildlife does not have the wonderful variety and flamboyance of Australian birds and flowers. Our birds are often shy and brown, and our plants have green flowers, or subtle colours!

I chose to quilt the background first and then dye it, before adding the plants and birds.

Here is a link to the tui's song. The bellbird has a prettier song, but they seem similar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GT-FJHWwRnA

Buchstabensalat (Letter salat)

After reading our new theme almost two months ago I tought of our garden. As we have had rain every few days at least all summer all the wild flowers and plants grew well. But at the same time summer vacations started and with the children at home all day time to work on the quilt was very spare. Two weeks ago school began. My oldest is in second grade and in the first days at school the children revisited what they had learned last year.

I had used some letter stencils recently in an online class with Ineke Berlyn with ink sprays. With the beginning of the new school year I decided to use the again for my new quilt.
Instead of sprayed ink I worked with paintsticks. I used the stencils in several layers and with several paintstick colours. I never covered the whole stencil but always only parts to add to the wild impression. The final layer is made of single letters. Put together in order they spell my name.

The quilting lines were added at random like pencil lines across a piece of paper. Instead of clean binded edges I cut them with a pinky rotary cutter and left them raw.

Fabric: commercial and dyed cotton sateen fabric by Heide Stoll-Weber
Thread: cotton
Batting: polyester
Stenciled paintsticks

Sabine

 

Wild Scraps

Gabriele Bach - Wild Scraps 

Wild Scraps - detail

When I read the theme for this challenge, I thought, I just have made a real wild quilt. "Backside Mystery", my quilt for the last challenge, is wild.

Ok, this is a new challenge, there are waiting more "wild" ideas. See also my post "TOO MUCH" .

I have a box full of little fabric scraps, which I can't throw away. I often try to use them but it is very difficult. They are a wild mixture of colour, pattern and style. Now their chance had come. I looked for dark red scraps and used them just in the size they were. With some trying I got a pleasing design. Again the seam allowances are on the right side and the thread ends are not hided, but short cut. 

I embellished the quilt with little red feltballs and when I embroidered very much beads. Sometimes I throw a lot of beads on my quilts and then I don't have the heart to embroider them. I fear it may be to much. This time I did the opposite and got wild with embroidering beads. I just set a space, there the beads should be.

The background is self dyed cotton.

Wild about quilting

 When the theme "wild" came up my first thought was that now I will go wild with quilting. My last pieces "Roots" and "Spaced Bottles" were not quilted as much as they probably should have been, so this time I wanted to focus on dense quilting. As that was my focus I thought that an abstract design would be a great choice for this activity. I like curvy lines so I made some value sketches with lots of swiping curvy lines to resemble some kind of pods.  Even if I have not got wild with colors, there are a great range of values of pink and grey. Fabric used are cottons and the piece is fused. The piece has  a narrow binding.

Lables. Ann-Mari  Franzen, dense quilting, cotton fused  hand dyed fabrics, Rayon threads, Wild with quilting

Here Be Dragons

Wild was a great opportunity to conciously explore abstract design and then colour it using all the colours of the rainbow, paying attention to Design Principals. 

It started well, three sheets of paper, black, white and grey were cut freehand using an 80/20 proportion of curved to straight lines. That was hard, the ratio went off but never mind, it's freehand.

Some of these pieces were then arranged and pasted on an A4 sheet of white paper: Good design, good balance of value. It's still abstract and my brain is creating shapes, a boat on a surging storm wave! Rearrange them to a square format and it looks even better. I really am being quite wild in staying on track.

 Here is where it all took on a life of it's own, no wild colour, crazy quilting, beading or metallic threads. At this point the complimentary colour scheme, restrained quilting, beading and metallic threads insisted on their presence, Here on the edge of design Be Dragons.

Techniques: Appliqué, beading, metallic threads, machine and hand quilting, commercial and hand dyed cottons

Hilma af Klint 1862 -1944
Painter
In August Elizabeth Barton wrote in her newsletter (Art and Quilts, cogitations thereon) about why female artists are little known.

Below you can see an extract from this newsletter.


"There are many reasons why female artists are little known. In her book Woman, Art and Society, Whitney Chadwick explores several centuries of female artists. Even though excellent woman painters have always existed, academies, such as the Royal Academy in England, preferred to relegate them to the subjects of paintings, rather than the makers of paintings. Art history books, museum collections, auction prices etc. all are evidence of a complete and utter lack of respect for work by women. Alas, the lack of recognition was widespread : not just in art, but politics, religion - even sport - though that is certainly beginning to improve as people realize that intelligence and elegance are at least the equal of power and aggression.........
So whenever you research art ....whatever the era: the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Age of Reason, the Victorian paintings, modern and abstract art, post modern art into the present day - look for Women!!
Their work is strong, it´s tender, it´s fresh, it´s waiting to be discovered. Let´s create a demand for it! And I´m still waiting for women to rule the world!"


Elizabeth Barton. Aug.20.2014


Last year there was a big exhibition at The Modern Museum in Stockholm which exhibited lots of paintings and drawings by a Swedish female painter,
Hilma af Klint, so much before here time, a Pioneer of Abstract Art.  In her will she stated that her collection of paintings and drawings should not be exhibited/shown until 20 years after her death.


I would like to share with you a video about this remarkable female painter, Hilma af Klint, which 20 years after her death has been discovered.
So just click the link below and look for the video that can be seen there and enjoy!


http://www.modernamuseet.se/Stockholm/Utstallningar/2013/Hilma-af-Klint/


and below is an article published in New York Times about Hilma-af-Klint.


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/arts/artsspecial/Giving-a-Swedish-Pioneer-of-Abstract-Art-Her-Due.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2&

Life in Salisbury

Moving recently to the medieval city of Salisbury, located in the county of Wiltshire, United Kingdom has been extraordinary. The city is home to the Salisbury Cathedral which boasts the tallest spire in the country, the world's oldest working clock and the best surviving copy (one of four) of the Magna Carta. The cathedral is over 755 years old and appears in several of John Constable's landscape paintings.

Salisbury also enjoys a strong artistic community with numerous galleries and an art's centre in the city centre and many, many artist studios within the county covering everything from textiles to ceramics, jewellery, painting, sculpting, metal and woodwork. I have yet to find quilters but I am relentlessly continuing my search. This weekend was the first Contemporary Craft & Heritage Fayre held within the Cathedral grounds. I dragged my husband along and we enjoyed several dozen artist's work, as well as demonstrations, talks and of course, afternoon tea. He actually had a good time!

 

It certainly got the creative juices flowing! Unfortunately, I don't have my sewing machine back from getting it's service yet (the first thing I did when I arrived) but I did bring a few materials with me in my suitcase (everything else was sent by sea freight and not arriving until the end of the month - patience, my dear, patience) so I can still do a few things by hand. At the Fayre, there were several felt artists producing amazing work using both the needle and wet felting methods, so I was able to extend my rather limited knowledge of the craft. I was so impressed, I signed up for a 10 week course here at the Salisbury Art Centre starting later this month!

One of the felt artists, Rose Hatcher, produces exquisite wall panels using the wet felting technique. You can check out her gallery at: rosehatcher.co.uk and the local artist who I am doing the course with is: www.suziegutteridge.com, also producing wonderful work.

Having moved from a large studio space in Thailand, I will no doubt find it challenging working in a smaller space here in Salisbury, however, I feel it may make me work in a more organised, tidy way...or then again, who am I kidding, probably not! We shall have to see how that idea pans out. It will no doubt encourage me to be more inventive with the smaller space I have, or encourage us (or rather, me) to find a larger place to live. Anyway, I am enjoying exploring this new place and meeting all of its many wonderfully creative people...and please, hurry up with my machine!

Until next time, stay happy and stay creative :)

Amanda Sievers

TOO MUCH

By Gabriele Bach

Linden wrote a fine article on this blog about inspiration and Deborah a very interesting about clean working space. In both I am interested and for me they belong together. Often I gather or buy things for special ideas. Beside time I have TOO MUCH from every other item:

- too much ideas

- too much techniques I would like to try

- too much fabric

- too much other material like threads, yarns, beads, colours etc.

I always have a lot of ideas. One difficulty is to decide which one I will realize. Another is, when I am doing a big and/or time-consuming quilt I don't want to be distracted by other inspiritations. Using a sketchbook doesn't help. It needs time too and I will end up with so many ideas I never could realize in my lifetime. And it is frustrating to see over the time how old some good designs are and still not done.

For my quilt "Backside Mystery" from the last challenge "Under the Surface" I first gathered some red fabric scraps. They are still laying on my working table, I like the view and maybe I will use them for the next challenge.

At the same time a friend and I dyed fabrics. After washing, drying and packing away all the fabrics, the gathered loose threads look pretty and they too could be used for the next challenge.

Otherwise I want to use red felted balls. I bought them many years ago and embroidered with beads they look awesome.

Near the felted balls lay silk cocoons, some I had bought and some I had dyed. They also would be great for a little quilt.

Mixing everything in one quilt is too chaotic, even if our next challenge has the theme "Wild".

All of these ideas will give me much stuff for the next challenges. Only that I will see enough new things and get other ideas. In two weeks I will visit the European Patchwork Meeting in Val d'Argent http://www.patchwork-europe.com/. There I will see so many extraordinary quilts that all my own ideas seem to be boring. Besides all my good intentions I will come back with some stuff, one or two books, very many fotos and a lot of new ideas.