Chilton Polden Landscapes

Hi all, I did my Fabric Collage Landscapes workshop at Chilton Polden Stitchers a while ago and in the last few days, I have received 3 pictures of finished wall hangings. Aren't they fab? k3n x

Eileen's Tor

Hilary's Landscape

 

Pauline's Blue Ridge Mountains

Dislocation

Hello everyone,

I was fortunate to have my quilt accepted for the Contemporary Quilters Guild challenge this year on the theme of Dislocation. The quilts were exhibited at the Festival of Quilts in August and will be 'on tour' at various venues including Veldhoven in Holland, QuiltFest in Llangollen and at the West Country Quilt Show at UWE in Bristol from 13th to 15th November. If you can't make any of these shows (or even if you can and would like a souvenir!)  you can order the book here http://www.cqchallenges.org/cq-books.html.

Dislocation

Geneva Exhibtion

I've been googling around trying to find pictures of the exhibition in Geneva that 4 of my quilts were invited to take part in. I wasn't able to go myself and really wanted to see how my work looked in situ! I found some photos on this blog My quilts can be seen on the far right of the second photo, if you click on it you get a bigger image. Gave me quite a frisson to see them hanging there in such illustrious company! k3n x

Forthcoming Workshops

Hello all - I am such a rubbish blogger (!), my last post was back in June so if anyone is still bothering to follow me, here's some news about a new workshop I will be premiering at Barrington Patchwork near Ilminster on Friday 19th September. Called Freemotion Fantasy Flowers it is aimed at those with some experience of freehand machine quilting and who would like to expand their horizons a little! You will design and stitch your own mini wholecloth design and then embellish with fabric crayons and beads if you like (and why wouldn't you?!) I'll give lots of guidance and ideas for the design process - I know how intimidating a blank piece of paper can seem. See below for my little piece, 12" square. To book a place, please contact Janet at Barrington Patchwork.

Student Landscape

I did my Fabric Collage Landscape workshop with Polden Stitchers last Friday and had a really great day (and a fabulous lunch with scrummy pavlova for dessert!) and just received a photo of a finished piece - done in a week and rather fabulous, I'm sure you'll agree. k3n x

Liz's Quilt

Science and Art in Geneva

Hello everyone,

I am so excited to have been invited to display my Cosmic Evolution quilts (pictured below, 2 posts down) at an Art Exhibition in Geneva Switzerland in June that will run alongside an international scientific conference about Radiation. For more details about the exhibition see this website. The exhibition will go on to be shown at the European Patchwork Festival at Val d'Argent in France in September and then onto the Prague Patchwork Meeting in April 2015. I sent them off today and it's strange to think they'll be gone for a year but so exciting to think that they'll be seen in so many different places in Europe. k3n x

Student's Stitch n Flip Cushion Cover

I just received this photo from a student at my recent workshop in Ilminster Arts Centre. The gentleman who made this is a retired Saville Row tailor who has recently taken up patchwork. I love the colours in this and the secondary design formed by the dark red fabric.

Merv's Cushion

New series underway!

I have just finished the first phase in my new series of pieces entitled Evolution. I am planning to work my way through all aspects of this theme from the Big Bang through to the present time so it should keep me quiet for a while! All pieces will be mounted on 24" x 24" canvasses and there will be either 21 or 24 in total - all triptychs.

So here is the first triptych 'Cosmic Evolution' - in the words of Julie Andrews, 'let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start...' I've been reading a lot lately about Astrophysics and watching all those nerdy spacey programmes on TV (love 'em) and three aspects of cosmology grabbed me. The first is Dark Matter (and Energy) the realisation that all the stuff we can detect, measure and study in the known universe accounts for only around 5% of what there actually is  - quite mindblowing! So for my piece, I dusted off my rudimentary knowledge about pie being squared (!) and calculated the area of my 3 circles to represent 5% of the total quilt. The rest is the unknown Dark stuff, rendered in various textile art techniques and embellished with lots of hand stitching to make the darkness of it really textural and interesting.

Cosmic Evolution I - Dark Matter

The second quilt is Redshift representing  the Doppler Effect whereby sound, or light in this case, shifts depending on whether the object is moving away from or towards the observer - the classic neeeeee-um of a racing car as it passes. In the case of light, an object moving away stretches the light waves to the red end of the spectrum. This is one way in which the fact that the universe is expanding was proven. I used flip and stitch and raw edge techniques.

Cosmic Evolution II - Redshift

The final quilt in this triptych is my favourite! It shows part of the Cosmic Microwave Background, light left over from the Big Bang that is still 'visible' in the sky - at least it would be if we could see microwaves! A false colour image is usually rendered in these colours to show the hotter and colder spots. Heat and cold in this case are relative, it is somewhere in the region of -270 deg Celsius. It was discovered the year I was born quite by chance by two chaps who weren't looking for it and didn't know what it was when they found it but got the Nobel Prize anyway! This quilt is made largely of fabric mosaic with some of my favourite 'fabric bubbles' for texture and lots of fabric confetti held in place with angelina fibre and masses of tiny zig zag stitching. In real life it's really sparkly.

Cosmic Evolution III - First Light

The next triptych is Stellar Evolution and I've just started on a star-forming region of space working with an image from the Hubble Space Telescope in rusts and turquoises. The universe is really beautiful! k3n x

Ready for Christmas!

Pat did my landscape workshop a while ago at Barrington Patchwork and her finished hanging from the day is pictured in an earlier post. Now she's gone on to make this beauty - I love the silhouetted buildings against the sky.