Where are they now?

I thought I would try to find out what all our former members are doing now. Some left quite early on to pursue their artistic endeavours elsewhere. Some stayed the first 2 years, and then moved on.

This is my summary, but if any of you former members want to write something personal about your art, or if anyone knows about the people I can't find at the moment, please update us.

It  was fun to share part of the Latitude journey with them.

I think we could easily identify Katie's work here. Katie Pigeon - https://www.canadianquilter.com/photo-gallery/trend-tex-quilters-challenge.php?year=2014

Meta is working with metal and electroplating fabric. Meta Heemskerk – www.metaheemskerk.com

Linden's detailed and careful work is being exhibited in Australia and with a travelling SAQA exhibition. Linden Lancaster -

www.lindenlancaster.com

Heidi is still mainly working with her yarns and fibres. Heidi Wulfraat -

thewoolworks.blogspot.com

Janice Stevens is exhibiting with SAQA.

Www.Janicestevensquilts.com

Gurli Gregersen has changed her focus to photography recently.

Gurligregersen.com

Judy Haas, I can't find any links to.

Pamela Priday is doing a lot of experimental dyeing with plants

https://craftyquilting.wordpress.com

Deborah Wirsu. Deborah had developed a weekly video tutorial in aspects of FMQ and thread sketching. This is a fabulous resource freely available.

Www.deborahwirsu.com

Amanda Sievers – not sure what she is up to or where. Margy and Nicole might know more than me.

Vivien Zepf – Vivien is working on curating and print making.

Sevenpinesdesigns.blogspot.com

Gabriele Bach is the contact for a German quilt group 

http://www.groebenzeller-quiltgruppe.de/., which also has a Fb page.

Sabine also, haven't heard about for a while.

Julia

Gradus ad Edinburgh

My extreme quilt was based on a photo of the Edinburgh skyline. It was inspired by a study of Paul Klee's Ad Parnassum in which he successfully abstracts the shape of the building and infuses it with detailed colour. This was combined with work done for a class with Lisa Call looking at repetition in rhythm and flow. The exercises were completed with a view to creating a design that could be used for this quilt. Two designs were created, one using extreme colour and the other using line and extreme lack of colour.

The background is the cap from a red/green bucket exchange dye, there is no way of telling what will be created with these caps. It was added to the bucket about half an hour after the first fabrics were immersed and is a silk noile. The colour shows subtle shifts from green to red, the perfect texture and colour for walls. The black lines are created using a variety of threads from a black Oliver Twist thread pack. Stitched with 50 weight thread and backed with hand dyed fabric from the same bucket. It is faced, a new technique for me and one which I like and may use for Edinburgh Sunset

Final challenge for the year - Reflection

As we come to the close of our 3rd year's journey together, we can reflect on how far we have come. I think we can see how much we have developed since some of us started with the Carnival challenge. We have played with new techniques, adopted some, rejected others, and narrowed our focus.

This challenge will be made up of two parts: a quilt in our chosen series and  a written reflection on how Latitude has helped us to develop as artists. This doesn't have to be a long essay, but this is a good time to summarise our thoughts.

For the final quilt in the series - and it may be the final quilt we do together, we need to talk about that - we should include something that involves the idea of  the essence of our theme. I am always impressed  by Picasso's works on The bull. It is amazing how he distills the essence from a tonal drawing to a few curved lines. 

Consider the essential elements of your theme and show them in your work. It could be like this Picasso series of drawings, going minimalist. But if you prefer to show more detail instead of less, that is OK too. This is your opportunity to draw on the previous 3 quilts in your series and work on an aspect that you particularly like about your subject.

Sometimes we are a little alarmed at a challenge theme and can't choose an idea. Maybe it will be easier with more freedom, but maybe not!

Sun, rain and mudflow

This summer in our city was the hottest for the last 135 years. The average temperature was +38 C. Sometimes it was unusual rain with hail and the size of it was as cherry. Besides that it was several big mudflows at the mountains and some of it reached the city. Fortunately nobody was killed. Some houses and cars were ruined.  

As I live at the foothill the whole July and August we went to bed having our documents under the pillow in case of emergency of mudflow.

So it was really extreme summer!

This quilt is totally about it. Here can be sun, rain and mudflow in one day!

Materials: cotton, beads.

Machine piecing, machine quilting, hand beading

Pineapple Emerging

 I decided to continue with my method of designing in PaintShop Pro with the aim of producing something very bright and rather abstract. I eventually settled on a very simplified design of a pineapple set against a background of kiwi fruit cross sections. I love fresh pineapple, but am allergic to it and get a more extreme reaction to it every time I eat it.

I started with a simple drawing of a pineapple which I scanned in and then I found a good picture of kiwi fruit. I manipulated the kiwi fruit picture and then changed the colour of the pineapple and the leaves to differentiate it from the background. 

 I used TAP for the lettering on my last quilt, but I have never used it for a whole quilt and I have never had to match and join sections of a picture onto fabric. It’s quite difficult and I did mess it up a bit. I have since worked out how to crop accurate section for printing and to join them together with masking tape before ironing it all on to the fabric in one big go.

My intention was to do some dense quilting over the background in a light colour to knock it back and make the pineapple pop out, but this did not work as effectively as I had hoped. To rectify this I had to reinforce the stitched black outline of the pineapple with a black pen and then go over the background with a pearl-white Markal stick. If I'd had time to practice I would have faded out the background before printing it.

Reverse view

Golden Tulips

Our challenge Extreme combined with my personal one, Tulips could give many solutions. But tulips tends to grow very long stems even after they have been put in a vase, so I decided to focus on that. My tulips have extremely long stems compared to the heads. I also wanted the stems to weave together, not standing straight, and as I drew them, they suddenly became brother at the bottom.
For once, I also wanted to work with golden foil - so golden tulips. But I needed a focal-point, so I put in one tulip, bowing down to the viewer.
This done in my sketchbook, I had to figure out how to interpret this in fabric. I decided to quilt the whole piece first, then paint in the stems with fabric paint, glue and foil for the heads. The big one was red fabric bonded on before the gold foil was put on. And a little quilt finish just as a hint. I have not tried to make realistic tulips, just a suggestion.

and some close ups:

Falling Leaves

FALLING LEAVES

This quilt is the third in a series that will consist of four or perhaps more quilts with the theme LEAVES.

The challenge this time was EXTREME.
At first I thought of heavy embellishment with lots beads and embroidery, but finally I come to think of some design guidelines.

Simplify, Exaggerate and Repeat. For example, simplify your images, exaggerate the contrast, repeat images, colors and similar shapes and lines.

The inspiration photo is the foliage of an eucalyptus tree. See below.

I have tried to simplify the image, exaggerate the contrast with just a few colors with high contrast among them, repeated the colors and repeated similar shapes.

Although I am not sure that this quilt can be called Extreme, perhaps only by comparison with my two first "Leaf Quilts".

The background is a commercial cotton fabric. The red dot come with the fabric, as well as the red raw edged appliquéd circles, that I have cut out from other parts of the background fabric. The light leaves and dots are white cotton stamped and stenciled with gold, bronze and black acrylic paint by means of a Gelli Plate.

The background leaves are painted with a gold Markal Oil Paintstick and machine quilted with a gold metallic thread.

Dawn patrol

My ideas for extreme fencing settled on the most unfriendly fencing you can get, razor wire. I was able to get a few source photos to give me ideas, and this one had a strong idea of Notan, so I used dark wire on the light half of the background and light wire on the dark half. I wasn't sure if the quantity of wire would seem overwhelming, but it turned out fine.

I played with the idea of just having an abstract based on the coils of wire, but it seemed to need a context.  I  made up a silhouette of a soldier, but I didn't want him to look threatening, so I put the gun onto his back. The metallic black thread really catches the light, which you can see in the close up.















 I was really fortunate to have a small piece of surface designed fabric in the right colours that turned out really convincingly for the soldier, conveying his face and camouflage clothes.

The background fabric was painted with thickened dyes, as illustrated by Laura Kemshall in a recent DMTV show.
After I had completed the barbs, which took many hours, I felt the lack of colour made it seem more dismal than I intended, so I added a turquoise thread inside the border, and some Inktense pencils gave me the dawn glow.

Without this challenge idea, I would not have thought of this interpretation of fencing, as it seemed initially very negative. However, I am really pleased with how it turned out.

New Challenge- Extreme

Throughout the history of art, artists have pushed themselves to step outside of the accepted forms. We see this in textiles, paint and sculptures, every area where there is creativity. The natural progression is to learn the "rules", the techniques and skills, use them until they are comfortable and old and then step out of that comfort zone.
Ask what if?
How much can I change things?
What is the most extreme form I can create and still have something I want to make and will be happy to have made?

Hibiscus with Plumeria Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O'Keeffe pushed the limits of size.
Amongst other artists who stepped out into new areas are Kazimir Malevich, Paul Klee, Joan Miro, Richard Diebenkorn, Jackson Pollock, and perhaps my least favourite artist Willem deKooning. All challenge us in one way or another and make us restless with the work we make.

Paul Klee Ad Parnassum

Quilters and textile workers also love to push boundaries and work on concepts. Who are your sources of inspiration? Huguette Caland challenges me with her lines and dots- repetition
Gloria Loughman with her colours and the intricate details of her landscapes.

What will you choose:
work with only one design element, line, colour, value etc
an extreme range of colour or work in white
very large images or very small                                
complex  or simple
abstract?
The choice is yours.

City flowerbeds and oriental tiles

May be you have noticed that I like circles and wavy lines. 

So I‘ve decided to use these shapes for Art Deco theme.

After the design forms were chosen it was time to find the main idea of my “city” quilt.

I live in a very green city with a lot of flowerbeds and at the same time we have many building with oriental tiles and I decided to combine these two beauties in one quilt.

Rosehip Seeds

I wanted to produce something in the American Art Deco style for this challenge. My original idea was to design a seed packet which fits in with my theme of fruits and seeds quite nicely. As I progressed though, it seems to have metamorphosed into a poster.

I created the final design in PaintShop Photo Pro X3 using vector graphics and then used this as a template for the piecing.

The rosehip was made separately using a reverse appliqué method and then attached to the background as a whole.

All the fabric except the black is hand dyed by me as per Helen Deighan’s method for graduated effects from her book Dyeing in Plastic Bags.  

The lettering was achieved by printing onto Artist Transfer Paper (ATP) and ironing this on.

I decided not to do lots of free machine embroidery on this piece as I wanted to keep it clean and simple.

This closeup shows how the yellow fabric has been left around the seeds during the process of  reverse appliqué

Leaves á la Art Deco

The theme I have chosen for this year´s 4 quilts, is leaves. The challenge this time was Art Deco. After some research about Art Deco I have tried to interpret this challenge by using strong colors and stained-glass, which resulted in these 3 geometric, colorful, abstract, eucalyptus leaves and its seeds on a background with rectangular forms surrounded with black strips.

The black parts  in the leaves are kunin felt - under the circles, as well as under the red square shapes -   and black cotton fabrics.

The black lines in the background are bias strips. The background is pieced and the leaves are appliquéd as well as raw edge appliquéd. The piece is machine quilted and some hand quilting is made on the light grey background pieces to obtain some texture.

Size: 15 x 20 inches

Crossing the line

I really like Art Deco - one of my assessment quilts for the City and Guilds was based on 1930s stained glass windows. To accommodate my theme of the year, fences, I checked out a lot of Art Deco inspired railings, bannisters and fences, but most of them relied heavily on symmetry. Somehow, they weren't going to express anything I felt in tune with. So I turned to travel posters, which have that graphic quality I am frequently drawn to explore.

This worked much better. I found an art deco style font, called Kaikoura. This was especially apt, as the town of Kaikoura is only about 2 hours drive from me. Kai means food, and koura means crayfish. The ocean is particularly deep, with the Hikurangi Trench just off shore. This brings a lot of seafood to the area, crayfish (a kind of lobster), paua (abalone) and other fish, which attract seals, dolphins, whales and orca. Kaikoura is a whale-watching town, with boats and planes going out any time the weather is good enough. It is also unusual in having mountains coming right down almost to the sea.

But Kaikoura also has a race course, which I think only has one race a year. I took a liberty here, as the racing in Kaikoura is harness racing,  not gallops.  But I like the simpler outlines of the horses and jockeys. Here I could incorporate my fences in an art deco setting. I was happy!

Yellow Tulips

Tulips are such elegant flowers, simple in shapes and in so many wonderful colours. And since Art Deco is very simplified, it was a perfect match for my personal challenge, tulips. Looking through images from my garden, I settled on the one I used in an earlier challenge, LOVE, and used it as a template for raw edge applique, with hand dyed cotton.
As a background, I used something that reminded me of radioes from the 1930s, freehand cut and pieced commersial fabrics, on top of pale green linen.
 

 The quilting in the background is simply straight lines, the tulips are free hand machinequilted, with French knots.

100 King Street

It was interesting to compare the Art Deco movement in the UK with that in America where buildings sweep into the sky with great power and confidence in the future. Buildings in the UK seem to  sprawl, there is a gentler feeling they settle into the landscape and don't challenge or dominate the history and environment around them.

Posters from this time follow the trend, images soar upwards using perspective to enhance that feeling and express confidence and the promise of the future, colours tend to be limited and lines are clean in their design, and that was what I wanted to capture in my piece.

100 King Street was designed by Edwin Lutyens in 1928 for Midland Bank and was constructed in 1933-35. It is classified as either Art Deco or Modernist Classical depending on the reference site. At four stories high this building reaches up from the four roads that surround it. The lovely angles gave me the opportunity to once again play with perspective, this time using 3 point, and exaggerate that height. This time looking looking inwards through the windows I filled the building with silver and gold a nod to the wealth and lights burning brightly as people go about their business.

Materials used: Commercial fabric customised with Inktense pencils, blocks and fabric paints, metallic voile, netting, screen print, machine appliqué and quilting

screen print through freezer paper stencil

Working in a Series, some thoughts

Some of our members have done classes with respected teachers on working in a series. It is generally accepted that this way of working will help any artist to uncover elements that have personal meaning, which will in turn produce a body of work that has artistic integrity.

I came across an artist recently whose paintings could easily have been expressed in fabric and stitch.

Valeriane Leblond is of French/Quebec origin and now lives in Wales. Her paintings are often oil on various wooden substrates. She has been exploring her adopted homeland since 2007. Her landscapes have a fresh charm, and encapsulate the essential features of Welsh rural and coastal life.

The way she works illustrates how we can explore a subject by using different scales, colour palettes, horizon lines and all the design elements, such as rhythm, repetition, harmony, that we read about in our Art and Design manuals and course notes.

I will give the works their English titles, as the original titles are in Welsh. When I look at these paintings I can so easily imagine the quilting lines, hand stitching and textures.

Would that it was still summer

There is no catch

ebb and flow

autumn equinox

gold moon

Notice that there are traditional quilts featured in some of her paintings - a bonus!

Value and How to Create it

Value is an interesting design tool it can create drama and mood.
Dark values carry a sombre feel while light colours give a feeling of peacefulness. If you want to create a focal point, surround a light area with a dark one, it will create a frame that draws the eye like a magnet. Used in conjunction with texture, colour and line, interest can be heightened and intriguing images created. In his picture Temple Gardens, Paul Klee uses value to draw your eye around the painting.

Temple Gardens

A grey scale image makes this clear, as your eye dances around following the black shapes or the light ones.

In quilting, then, the key is finding enough pieces of fabric in your chosen colour to create the values you "need". 

Edinburgh Sunset

Edinburg Sunset, challenged my stash, and as I have 5 large boxes of fabric and odd pieces tucked here and there in drawers and on shelves because the boxes are too full, I just couldn't explain the need for more fat quarters when all that was needed was a tiny square or two. 

Fortunately I have a wonderful tin of Inktense pencils and a selection of textile paints. 

The pencils were used to darken the fabric for the windows. To use them just colour, then brush with a barely wet paint brush and iron once dry to set the pigment (protect your work surface with a piece of paper or plastic sheet). Then the fabric can be bonded using any bonding agent of your choice. The textile paint was used to create the orange red sky fabric,  foreground and windows on the dark house. A good range in value can be achieved by dilution of the paint with water (again protect your work surface), or more than one coat. Lightly sprinkling with salt while it's wet will create texture, if it is left to dry without moving. Again heat set the colour with an iron set for the fabric, in both cases I protect my iron with baking parchment. As both paint and pencils blend and mix with water, you only need a few colours to create a wide range. I would recommend this as an alternative to buying more fabric if small pieces are your passion and you enjoy a little colouring.