New Men

I have finally found some time to make some progress with my Voyage Quilts.
Here is no 2 in the series

Skinny Man with hat.
Whilst in Orissa in February I photographed this man who was looking at his goats.
The backgroung in painted with added applique

Here is the third one in the series, again similar technique. I photographed this guy in the Flower Market in Kolkata

I have started on the 4th one, not finished yet but here are the 4 together. 

Gillian

Earth Quotes:If you think the ocean isn't important, imagine Earth without it...........

My third Earth piece is based on the quote:

"If you think the ocean is not important, imagine the earth without it. Mars comes to mind. No ocean, no life support system."

Sylvia Earle

I have used various shades of blue dye with three layers of discharge paste  which were sponged on the dyed background to create the various depths of the ocean around coral reefs. Jacquard discharge paste was used for the layer processes but to achieve a 'white' to show the coral near the surface I used a powder discharge paste  which was very effective.

Some colour was added to the reef with thickened dye and some highlighting with Inktense blocks. The piece was then machine quilted to add additional texture.

Jean

Earth Quotes: Trees are poems that the Earth writes upon the sky......

This quote:

 "Trees are poems that Earth writes upon the sky" by Kahlil Gibran 

was the starting point for this piece. The background was dyed and lightly discharged to give some soft images of tree shapes.

 It was then overdyed, discharged with some larger more definate, shapes.  I then appliqued with dyed fabric the three trees in the foreground before machine quilting the outlines of the trees.  Some Inktense pigment was used to create light falling on the trees

Jean

Indigo

For this month I have chosen Indigo as my subject.  Not a cloth coming from the African Earth - but a colour. I felt that Indigo is significant enough as a dye within Africa that it warranted attention. The plant is grown and used in many cultures across West Africa.  I've created a kind of sampler with many small pieces of different indigo cloths set on the background of a beautiful piece of strip woven Mossi cloth.  These Mossi cloths come with a fabulous hand twisted fringe that I just had to include.  (It is removable if it is deemed necessary for exhibition).  All the fabrics are from West Africa and include examples of weaving, tie-dye, starch resist, and stitch resist. Some are old and some are new. 

Magie

Earth - Quotes "The earth laughs in flowers....."

"The Earth laughs in flowers"    is a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, a nineteenth century American Philosopher - this was the starting point for this piece. 

It is a wholecloth piece dyed and discharged to achieve a textured natural background using Gocco screens I made to discharge the flower images before adding some Inktense pigment to some of the flowers in the foreground.

I machine embroidered flower outlines through the wadding but left some of discharged images  unstitched to give a softer distant effect. Whilst I initially used Jacquard discharge paste for the first discharging, I used Decollorant with pigment to remove and add colour at the same time for some of the flowers.

Jean

GRAND TETON PEAKS FROM THE IDAHO SIDE (Driggs, Idaho)

Detail View

Full View

 I grew up in southeastern Idaho in the United States just 60 miles west of Grand Teton National Park.  The Teton Peaks are a constant part of the landscape of southeastern Idaho and western Wyoming.  We saw the Tetons nearly every day, and trips to Jackson Hole, Wyoming and Grand Teton National Park were regular occurrences.  The Grand Teton Peak rises 13,775 feet above sea level and 6,530 feet above the Jackson Hole valley.  The peaks dominate the landscape and when I see them I can never seem to take my eyes off of them.  It appears to me that the Tetons are always ready to disappear into mist--like Brigadoon.  They never really seem to be solidly in front of me.  It is an old legend that a mysterious race of people lives inside of the Grand Teton and that maybe the mountains are not really of this Earth but are the construct of another world.  To me, they flicker in and out of reality.  I have tried to capture that essence of the Teton Peaks with my third quilt for 2014.  I printed a photograph of the Teton Peaks onto fabric, but I only used small parts of that photograph in my quilt to suggest that when one looks at the Tetons, the mountains move into and out of reality, becoming ghostly and ethereal.

Frances
 

 

 

VOYAGE 2014

 

This is my 3rd piece, it doesn't have a title yet. Again from a Zimbabwean rock painting. It's architectural design is very interesting. I used hand dyed cotton and a wonderful Mulberry bark cloth I found at the Birmingham show last year. It is much harder to use than the bark cloth from Uganda. I stenciled the giraffes using acrylic paint and a stencil I had made from paper.

 

 

 

Voyage 2014

"Ancient Beehive"

My second piece was inspired by an ancient rock painting from Zimbabwe, probably the Drakensburg Mountains. I used some of Magie's wonderful fabrics from Ghana and Gambia and some hand dyed cottons. The edge of the hive is trapuntoed and I machine quilted using rayon threads.

No need to cook

No need to cook - May 2014

The strawberry season is in full flow here in the south of France. The locally favoured and grown variety is the Gariguette, known for being smallish and full of sweet flavour.

I printed some cotton fabric in the colours I wanted, using my Gelli plate. Some of this fabric I used in the two sided border. The background was quilted with the words “gariguettes” and “fraises” (strawberries) and the large strawberry was fused before adding quilting and hand embroidery. The small strawberries were fused and machine quilted.

We have a punnet of Gariguettes waiting in the kitchen for tonight's dessert!

Glacier

One of the aerial views I wanted to do was a glacier. A diffcult one, but the pounded fabric I created last month was the perfec starting point. I unrolled and split a cotton ball and added this to add a bit more white to the quilt. Covered everything with a black tulle and stitched through it. This is how it turned out: