Greetings from Montevideo, from Alison Schwabe, Aussie quiltmaker

My own examples of stitchery from this workshop included these four little pieces, about 8" square.

We had to design and sew a small piece each day, two layers of fabric, outline the image in chain stitch and then infill the image, its background, and, once we learned about borders, apply this knowledge in some way to what we were doing.

Some even managed to finish off the edges of their pieces. In my own defence, I must say I did another one in addition to these, which I traded to Tracey W. in a dyeing class who ran through a couple of silk scarves for me....I have plans to stitch them Kantha-style. On the other hand, they have come out beautifully blotchy, I might not obscure them with stitchery...

I don't remember exactly how we were to search around for design motifs, so can't tell you exactly aWHY the roos, and the gum leaves and nut, but the other was in response to one direction we were given to design something embodying a wish you have. Apparently, the Kantha women embody hopes, plans and dreams into their works.

The next pics show a beautiful old piece of hand made broderie anglaise, age unknown, approx 2oocm x 43cm, which I bought on a market stall down on Tristan Navaja one sunday several years ago. It has been removed from something - possibly a priest's robe - it still has a fine lawn placket attached at one point.... and the US$7-50 price tag is still attached.

The Expressive Stitch workshop also addressed the matter of mending, too, and we were asked to take some examples along, and also some examples of hand sewn fabric of either decorative or purely functional nature. dorothy had a number of wonderful old mended garments, and this piece of broderie anglaise had a couple of mends, one nice and neat, the other pretty slapdash, in a hurry perhaps.

This pic shows how the lace has been joined - my mother would have called this hem stitching, and it might have been done by machine, but it also might be hand done faggotting, it is hard to tell. The edge of the lace is a finely turned machine edging, variable in parts. 

In one area of this amazing piece of lace there was a very roughly done mend, and I feel it had been in quite a hurry compared to the next pic

This same piece of broderie anglaise had a very nicely executed hand sewn mend, too....

Since I last wrote I have been travelling, at speed with very little time to even read emails let alond download pics and upload them with thoughts to my blog - dear reader if you are feeling deprived, normal routine should now resume with luck and a fair wind. In addition to family and house and hearth matters, while in Western Australia I attended the Expressive Stitch workshop at Fibres West in Bunbury. Great workshop by Dorothy Caldwell of Canada, in which we were introduced to the technical and cultural aspects of Kantha cloth from NE India, particularly the state of Bihar. The women in the villages which produce these textiles communally decide the content, and several stitchers work on the same piece. In the pic on the right hand side above, is an image of a whole piece about single bed size, constructed of two layers of cloth through which are sitched about half a million small running stitches filling in various desiogn elements outlined in chain stitch. The whole quilt is designed around the impressions of New York USA, felt by a young 19 y.o. girl who accompanied a group of the textiles there for an exhibition. The upper left pic shows a panel in detail from the whole view, featuring a pet shop and all the doodads and gadgetry obtainable there for the pampered pets inNY society, all of which she found amazing.

The last pic, in white on black, is my version of an exercise the whole class did stitching our responses to particular words and phrases, while blindfolded. The dots down the rhs of the pic are french knots which were the starting point for each different response. To our right on our table was a threaded needle for each response, all of which we prepared before we took up our blindfolds. I don't recall what each was, but the thing that looks like a spectacles frame was I think 'space' and certainly the bottom one was 'positive and negative'. All of us had at least one very interesting outcome, which we then used to build further later on in the class. In future post I will show pics of some of the stitching I did that week.

These wonderful knotted constructions were part of the naval display down at the port on ddp - the strange format of this posting is the best I can achieve after many tries at loading them up... so apologies. I just really wanted people to see these.

The top left and top central pics show knotted cording on oar handles to give a better hand grip, obviously. On the far right is a wonderful construction, a "bolster" may or may not be the right word - clearly to protect the bow of the boat it is mounted on; a closeup view of that is at-left-hand-down-a-bit . The lowest left is an ordinary vehicle tyre covered with heavy nylon cord, and I imagine it too is used as a boat protecting bolster.

Feel free, anyone, to correct my terminology - I didn't think to ask the couple of sailors in attendance.... I think they are all fabulous.