Greetings from Montevideo, from Alison Schwabe, Aussie quiltmaker

Working with fabric on leather, I came up with the core of this idea some time ago: I realised I could very quickly and evenly make lines of tiny holes on leather, or single very small holes in one spot, by using my machine and sewing with a large, very blunt needle but no thread top or bottom. (To make an old needle reeeeally blunt, scrape the point on a metal file, a brick or cement) Even normal sewing machine marks on some fabrics are almost impossible to remove, but on leather and plastic they're permanent. Then the other day it occurred to me that on the very tightly woven poplin I'm using I could do lines of dots with the machine to indicate the grid for the layout of the pieces on this design, and then use the holes either to actually quilt through by hand or cover easily enough by machine quilting over them. I ruled pencil lines on the back and sewed along them, which produced a tiny raised edge around the hole where the blunt needle bursts through the fabric.
I decided to hand quilt this with a linen viscose thread exactly matching the fabric, which doesn't shine, but has wonderful texture. You can see the horizontal stitches in the middle of this pic, running in and out of the holes, and a vertical line of holes just to the left of centre. Even as I have written this I have thought of other ways this might be useful - so I'd love you to let me know if it leads you to another idea....

So, today I put up a few of the blocks I have done so far, just to see how the whole thing is coming along, and given that among the approx 250 or so I reckon I'll need, I am satisfied that the colours so far are going to be lovely - DD wants a lot of jungle prints included and so they shall be, some appear already in this selection.

Once I get more prints I might do something with lights and darks in groups of 4 but that remains to be seen. And, I might not settle on this block arrangement -tomorrow I will arranged them with the arcs all readiating out in the same direction and see how that looks. After all, there is time to fiddle a bit.


In colour schemes there should always be a value of yellow, not necessarily much, and lots of colours can do the job of yellow - in this case there is a beautiful citrus colour which will be scattered throughout the quilt - plenty of it showing hanging and in the blocks on the wall - there's also a much more subdued mustard colour, and several other golds and mustards will appear at times, I just haven't got round to them yet. 'Yellow' is relative, and it can be a colour from greeny yellows to orangey and browny yellows and greyed values of those colours, too. If you are auditioning colours for a quilt, take out anything with yellow in the print or any fabric that reads as yellow, and you will see the difference.

These blocks have been trimmed to 6 1/2 inch squares.

Labels: art quilts, freehand cutting and piecing

On saturday last I went to what was billed as the first national gathering of quilters in Uruguay. Now there aren't a lot of us/them and two, Graciela and Soledad, have been in contact with everyone most of us know of; several came in from places several hours away from Montevideo but we still numbered only about 10 with several apologies - there's a lot of 'grippe' ie coughs and colds, around in this freezing weather. I am the only non traditional quilter among them, no surprise there. But from discussions during the day it is clear that several of the quilters would like to learn some of what experimental quilters everywhere else are learning.

I went along wanting to initiate discussion about something I have noticed about all the work I have seen so far in Uruguay, from all the quilters I have met over the past few years - it's more properly described as an actual lack of quilting. Apart from traditional geometric patterns, and they do tend to be the less complex ones at that, the one thing that has always struck me is that here the quilting is structural, minimal, period. None of that quilting-as-an-additional-surface-design-element so evident in some of the quilting done in many other countries. And in many art quilters' works just now there is a huge range of minimal up to quilted-to-death, but overall traditional quilters generally add at least a moderate amount of quilting, but not here, and I've been wondering why. So, I took along Dijanne Cevaal's machine quilting book, the latest QN catalogue, several recent quilt magazines from various countries, and one of my own quilts with a lot of close free machine quilting, and raised the question. Even the arrival of Polly whom I'd not met before, bringing several large bed quilts with lots of quilting, didn't really defuse my questions. Polly lived in Canada for a few years and got totally hooked on P&Q there. And she was well taught.

We had a long discussion on this, with one comment being that Uruguay has no cultural background of quilting and even further, that there is very little societal value placed on technical excellence, key word excellence, in hand made things, which is interesting, and on reflection is at least partly true. A lot of beautiful things are hand made here, but often lack the highest levels of technical excellence reached elsewhere by many artisans in most media, and although this has been addressed by organisations such as Manos del Uruguay and the Hecho Aca's shops and annual expositions, it is still evident.

Those present marvelled at free machine quilting as per Dijanne's examples, and since I myself have done quilte a bit of fmq and non-tradiitonal hand quilting, I can see some demos and learning sessions coming up. Another general comment was agreed, that it's only because no one knows how to do that nor been able to show them.

One girl, Susana blew me away with the very fine and very even quilting she was doing through much of the day - I kid you not, the needle was barely one inch long with an eye there is no way I could get a thread through, and she had the rocking-the needle-motion thing going, would get a few stitches on the needle, and then use a little non-slip grabber thingy to pull the needle through, rather slow and quite painstaking with amazingly long fingernails. Athough I could never work that way, and I'm quite jealous of those fingernails, she says that's the way she likes to work and there's no way I would try to persuade her otherwise: people quilt the way they do for all kinds of reasons, and I respect that. It will be interesting if she or some of the others ever become interested in experimenting.

Suitable cotton fabrics are difficult to find here in uruguay, even and perhaps especially plain colours. But it seems there is a great store over in Buenos Aires, and there was clearly quite a bit of fabric coming in from travels and some mail order. One quilter, Ines, is really interested in dyeing about which I know little or nothing - and she's considering getting dyes down from the US, and buying a bolt of two of fabric from BA, and possibly sharing it with some others. she still needs some good quality tuition, though. I know I heard of someone doing shibori dyeing here, and will ask around to find that person and see if she can help - Uruguay is an amazing place, there is always someone working quietly in some corner that you rarely hear about.

After a lot of show and tell, I did another demo of freehand rotary cutting and piecing for those who hadn't seen it and experimented at last year's workshop... see next post.

Soledad revealed that Mosca, the large stationers in several places around the city including a branch out near us, told her they are no longer stocking rotary cutters and blades - she bought the rest of their stock, probably enough to last a lifetime - about 15 cutters and God knows how many 5-packs of blades, priced at about $1 and 50c respectively - no those are not typos. I'm off down to Mosca in the morning myself....but it might only be the store in her area, of course.

So, in many ways it was rather like a gathering of quilters anywhere else I've been to - so small it was more like a bee. Towards the end of the afternoon it was suggested that a group project would be fun - which I will do my best to avoid being caught up in! But it all depends, time will tell whether it ever gets off the ground, or indeed, what kind of idea is proposed. Although I don't want the group to become a set of classes with me being the teacher and expected to come along each time with something new to teach, I am prepared to demo and show stuff that I know in small and relevant doses. I noticed for example that good quality neat, flat, square bindings were not much in evidence. That can easily be refined, and so I will do up a set of samples of my favourite french binding that I learned years ago from the Mimi Deitrich book, "Happy Endings" and take them along next time.

Labels: attitude issues, freehand cutting and piecing, montevideo quilters

I blogged the first stage of this work last week, and this is how it is proceeding.
Already, other ideas are coming into my mind and I think I will need to put a few of them on paper. Back around 1992 opffspring #1 gave me a blank paged journal which I have used intermittently to sketch ideas into - not really an organised journal , more just pencil sketches of ideas, diagrams really. The other thing that goes on some of those the pages is lists - sometimes titles that I think of as I'm going alongwith the quilting, or different tchnical possibilities to tackle the same idea. Also, now that these pencil diagram/ideas go back so far, I sometimes look back and see something with a fresh eye. Sometimes ideas have led to particular works and I have gone in and written the name of the quilt and the date on it in that case.

Despite a good burst of progress this afternoon, I was not able to finish the stitchery but could do so tomorrow.

What is helping it move right along is listening to "Emma" by Jane Austen, read by Prunella Scales with her wonderful voice and sense of appropriate expression. It is many years since I read the book or saw a movie version, and I have found this recorded book totally absorbing, and rather reminiscent of the style of my two maiden aunts' lives. Emma's father's obsessions about health issues, the weather and in fact any activity that might have any bearing at all on on his state of health (always precarious/delicate, at that ) is a male version of my late aunt, J. Her sister, M, who remains alive, is not likely to read that comment, and if she does, not being a lover of good literature, she won't understand the allusion anyway.

Labels: leather, new work 07

Structurally there's nothing interesting about this box of apartments, but I have always loved the whimsical surface decoration. Not only does someone have a sense of humour, but the dedication and will power, or the money to pay for them, to be painted so precisely on the bricks and maintained over quite a number of years now.