A Trip to Suffolk.

 It feels as though I have been working on this forever! It's been a very busy Spring (well if you can call it that in this part of the world!) We have been up and down the motorways of the UK numerous times in the last couple of months.  I have taken advantage of this and used my time in the car to work on my second submission for this year. Using my circles theme - I decided to use Suffolk Puffs (most people hate them and I like to stir things up). But I wanted the images on the fabrics also to be circular in some way - that took a bit of work - and some hunting high and low to find just the right scrap of  fabric.  Then to enhance each one with some embroidery stitching.  This is probably my most major attempt at handwork to date!  Thanks to Trish and my left handed book I think I'm getting better at it!

Just admire that stitching - please!









Those of you with good eyesight may spot that the puffs are not actually stitched together yet - that will get done on our next road trip - in Canada! 

Better late than....

As always I am running a bit behind, though this time it is caused by the fact that I decided to put colonial knot edging around the quadrilobe motif from Chartres Cathedral. The  Cathedral has become a bit of an obsession in the last year or so ( I have written a bit about it on my blog)  and I am fascinated by the representation of women and their faces of old within the Cathedral. There are over 400 representations of the feminine in the cathedral which is quite unusual. The image I have used for this  piece is from a sculpture by Bridan of the Ascension of Mary- it dates form the eighteenth century and so seems a bit out of kilter with the gothic style of the rest of the cathedral. I do love the faces of the angel though.
So  the photos show the original sculpture, then the isolation of the face- some doctoring in photoshop and then printed onto fabric painted with Inkaid and then stitched.

The Block Printer

        Continuing my theme of 'People, Places and Patterns' this piece shows my block printing guru from Rajasthan. I spent a day with him learning some of the basic block printing techniques and found lining up a series of blocks to produce an accurate multi-coloured pattern to be very, very challenging.

           I have block printed the background fabric keeping the ink quite strong over on the right and fading it off to the left of the piece. The block printer is first stitched and then layered with a thin net to produce a slightly translucent image.  The table cloth that he is printing is a partial photograph that I have printed off onto fabric and then integrated into the design. The piece was then quilted and embellished with sequins. 

Pat Archibald

Second self portrait

This is my second quilt in the series concentrating on my early childhood.

 

The portrait was screen printed using a flour paste screen. I tried to enhance the image with running stitch. The trees were also screen printed with a flour paste screen and I did some free machine stitching. I'll be moving on to a different image for the next 2 quilts.



 

 

 

'Indigo and Orange'

 

 

 

  The spiral and wavy lined Indigo in this piece is achieved by sewing the design in small running stitches, then gathering the threads tightly before dying. The beautiful strip cloth on the left is from Daboya in Ghana. I discovered this in 'Safety Line Lodge', down town Nairobi, a place where people from all over West Africa live and sell the most amazing artifacts, fabrics, beads and embellishments!

There is a small strip of Shwe Shwe that Magie gave me. The 'eyes' are cut from a wonderful wax print called 'The First Wife'- they keep an eye on the other wives of a polygamous marriage!

 

 

 

My embellishments are brass spirals I found in Safety Line. There are some ostrich shell beads made in Turkana, Northern Kenya. I discovered the little bone elephants in Mombasa. The others are made by Kenedy from bone. He lives & works in Kibera, the largest slum in Sub Saharan Africa. His workshop is a fog of choking bone dust and a tangle of very dodgy electrical wiring!!