Fabulous quilt by Pat Wills

My next Breakdown Your Palette workshop starts tomorrow morning and I’m just about ready. My first Breakdown class was three weeks ago and it was glorious! Since then …. well I’ve been super busy trying to get art made for my exhibition at Festival of Quilts as well as teaching my Introduction to Surface Design classes. I have three groups of students each at different stages of the 1 day a month for 10 months programme. So over the last two weekends I have taught one group paper lamination, one group mono-printing and one group had their second session on screen printing. Lots of preparation, lots of swapping around samples on my design wall and lots of getting things out and putting things away. Because I’ve found that I have to clean up completely from a class before I feel comfortable working on my art.

I did get a special fuzzy feeling when one of my students, Pat, brought a quilt she has made from the first piece of fabric she screen printed in class. Based on rock strata and fault lines it references all the places Pat has lived that have been affected by seismic activity. Fabulous!

The studio looks like an oasis of calm right now but it has got awfully messy in between teaching days. The weather has been dreadful so I’ve been drying soda soaked fabric on two lines strung across the studio whilst constructing and quilting a rather large quilt. Lots of walking the long way around tables and benches to avoid getting soda on everything. This has made me rather twitchy. Lets hope for better weather!

Anne

Debbie

Chris

Lesley

Louise

Merrill

Last week I held my first 5 day Breakdown Your Palette workshop and it was brilliant. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you will know that I am just a little bonkers about breakdown printing. It has formed the basis for my art quilts for the last four years or so and is the subject of my book Breakdown Your Palette. The workshop and my demonstrations roughly followed the structure of the book. However, having 5 days meant that I could spend lots of time with each student and could encourage them to explore the techniques that best suited their inspiration and personal tastes. It also meant that there was time for the students to dye a 15 piece colour family that coordinated with their printed fabrics. The diversity in their work was truly amazing and inspiring, I feel so proud of what they achieved.

And I’m rather pleased with myself. Yes it was intense and I was rather tired by the Friday evening but I can’t think of a better way to earn my living. The next class is in three weeks ….. can’t wait!

Armed with industrial strength antihistamines, nasal spray and eye drops I am back to being a fully functioning human being. Which meant that I was able to spend last week doing the printing I had planned for Easter weekend. Oh yes!

I enjoy every part of creating my art quilts but the bit I love best is the printing. Especially if it is breakdown printing. Turning white fabric into a big pile of totally unique printed fabric is so, so satisfying.

Of course there was a lot of work involved but I printed about 20 square metres of fabric for my new ‘Print’ series. This will give me more than enough fabric to finish the pieces I have planned for my exhibition at Festival of Quilts. The weather was good at the beginning of the week so I was able to soda soak and dry more white fabric. I made up more breakdown screens, some using black thickened dye and some using print paste. For the first time this year I was able to dry some of the screens outside. Others were dried on top of a radiator. Most screens featured grids but I included a couple of screens that I made by using wooden print blocks to stamp dye onto the screen. (All this is covered in my book ‘Breakdown Your Palette’).

Once I had a stack of dried screens I pinned out fabric on my big print bench and started printing. Bliss! I varied how I printed in order to create a palette of printed fabric that included dark, medium and light fabrics. I stopped to wash, dry and iron the fabrics I had printed every couple of days so that I could check that I was getting the ‘balance’ I wanted. Yes, I even enjoy washing out my fabrics! And it is only time you will ever see a smile on my face when I’m ironing. All-in-all a great week. I can recommend it!

I stretched some string across the fabric and added some shredded paper. I used an open screen with rust brown and petrol green thickened dyes. The screen picked up pieces of shredded paper as I printed creating a rather chaotic pattern. I didn’t like the areas of white, unprinted fabric so used a plastic card to scrap very pale petrol green across the whole piece.

Sometimes I wish there was a second me. Alt-Leah would go with the flow; she would be spontaneous. She wouldn’t have a plan A, B or C and definitely wouldn’t track her hours in the studio. Today is a lovely sunny day so alt-Leah would probably have kidnapped her grandson from school and driven to the coast to play in the sand, paddle in the sea and eat fish and chips out of their paper followed by ice cream. Tomorrow she might spend the day making replacement cushion covers for her garden furniture using the fabrics she printed during the Simply Screen Printing workshop she ran at the weekend. Because they really are rather lovely fabrics. Which isn’t always guaranteed when demonstrating techniques.

Unfortunately there is no alt-Leah, just me with my somewhat ambitious exhibition at Festival of Quilts to make art for. So these lovely fabrics will join an increasingly large pile of fabrics that I can use as teaching samples. But I can at least give them an audience! And, of course, there was the wonderful work my students did!

This piece was printed using a thermofax screen and screens made using positive and negative sticky back plastic resists. Again I used rust brown and petrol green thickened dyes and killed the white space with a layer of very pale petrol green.

In this one I used masking tape to add a resist to my screen. I used the screen to print on top of crumpled fabric. After each print I moved the screen and carefully transferred the textured dye that had clung to the back of the screen onto this piece of fabric. Difficult to explain but a great technique. Same colours and again finished with a layer of very pale petrol green.

This was the piece of crumpled fabric that I printed onto. It gets a bit messy as you rearrange the fabric in-between each print. I got distracted when I was printing this and stopped too soon. There was lots of white fabric so I added a layer of intersecting lines using a thermofax screen. Same colours and same final layer.

Top left: Val Lewis breakdown printing. The screen was made with black thickened dye and she is pulling through with a slightly muddy golden yellow.

Top right: Val again, she used a thermofax screen and great colour control.

Bottom left: Pat Allen’s breakdown printed fabric. The screen was made with a black grid and objects embedded in turquoise dye.

Bottom right: Hilary Fidler using a plastic card to add a final layer of pale colour. Her first layer used an open screen on fabric that had shredded paper and paper circles scattered it. Her second layer was thermofax motifs in a mustard yellow.

I had a wonderful Easter weekend planned. The weather forecast looked great. Perfect weather for breakdown printing. And so I soda soaked a big pile of fabric and made up some screens to get me started. Brilliant.

But things don’t always go to plan. On Wednesday afternoon I had a massive hayfever attack that just kept on going into the weekend. I have had hayfever since I was a child although it has become less severe as I’ve got older. And (you will not be surprised) I plan for it. I start taking antihistamines each day from 1st March and these are normally enough to keep it at the ‘snuffly’ nose level through the spring and early summer. This year I got caught out with my first attack in late February so will start taking antihistamines from the beginning of February next year. But even taking extra antihistamines this weekend didn’t help. Which has been very annoying!

Some people might just take time out but I have an exhibition to get ready for. I knew that it would be hopeless trying to print but I always have a Plan B. That is the joy of working in series and of working on multiple pieces at once. So, in between spells lying down in dark room calming my nose and my breathing down, I have been doing what I call ‘quiet’ work on one quilt. Sat down, drawing out shapes then fusing on hundreds and hundreds of circles. And have been stitching down facings on another quilt. I track my time in the studio and can see that I lost 13 hours compared with the previous week but at least I have achieved some things by switching from Plan A to Plan B! Hooray for Plan B!

Work in progress by Maggie Pearson

In my old life I used to do spend some of my time training people how to use particular pieces of equipment or how to carry out specific tests. I knew the equipment and tests inside out. There was always a correct and incorrect method. A needed to be followed by B which needed to be followed by C etc. With experience I learnt to pass on the information more effectively but it was always the same information.

Teaching surface design is very, very different. Yes, there are a few rules that have to be followed if you want the colour from your Procion dyes to fix to your fabric. (Always remember soda + moisture + heat + time). And I do supply my students with sets of recipes that they can choose to follow rigidly (or not!). But pretty much everything else is about personal choice. There are no rights or wrongs, just choices. So my role as a teacher is that of an ‘enabler’ providing encouragement and support. And I am still learning how to be a good teacher. The more classes I teach; the more students that I spend time with, the more I am learning to tailor my support to fit different needs. My students tell me that I am very well organised - writing class notes, preparing lots of samples, labelling all the cupboards is stuff that comes easily to me. Learning how to nurture the creative process in others is harder but so very satisfying!

The other difference is depth of knowledge. Or in some cases, lack of depth. I have spent hundreds of hours over the years screen printing (especially breakdown printing) and dyeing and, although there is always more to learn, I can teach with confidence. But there are some areas of surface design where I have not spent hundreds of hours, where my skills are a little ‘wobbly’. Of course I rehearse before class but the reality is that I will be learning just as much as my students. I facilitate, I enable and, in return, my students inspire me. Which is actually kind of wonderful!

Lynda Edwardes

Tracy Fox

Jean Martin

And a fabulous feather by Debs Nixon!

Time to get real ….. I’ve auditioned fabrics and stitched some samples but now I need to commit to a ‘proper’ piece. And for me that inevitably means a large scale piece. Time for a quick drawing on a scrap of paper to work out exactly what size and I’m off!

First I take all my beautiful breakdown printed fabrics and cut them into rectangles. I don’t ‘cherry pick’, I just cut everything up. I take the cut pieces and jumble them up then close my eyes and pull them out one by one ready to lay them down in rows on my big print bench. I try to make this process as random as I can. The control freak in me would agonise over this part of the process and would inevitable produce a background that would not be as interesting as when I let serendipity happen.

I sew the pieces together into long rows and put them up on my design wall. I like to leave the rows up there for a while and allow myself to change a handful of pieces to balance the colour and composition of the background. Just a handful - I do not give in to the temptation to change too many pieces!

I then prepare my backing fabric and my wadding (I use acrylic felt as I like how flat it is). Having cut them to size I use an adhesive spray to stick them together. I draw parallel lines, 2 inches apart, on my wadding and use a ‘stitch and flip’ process to sew my rows together and to the backing in a single process. This way I can ensure that my rows are sewn together accurately. Yes, I fully embrace my inner control freak for this part of my process! And it has the advantage that I don’t have a separate basting stage. I have always hated basting quilts!

I now have my background. It is ready for me to add what I call my top structures and to add stitch. As with my Ruins series I am stitching lots and lots of parallel lines in my new Print series. I can’t image not adding stitch but at the same time I don’t want the stitching to distract from the fabrics. Simple lines seems to work well with fabrics that contain so much detail. In one of my samples for this series I stitched a word as my top structure. I’ll probably use this idea for one or more of the pieces I will make in this series but for this first piece I had a light bulb moment and have gone in a different direction. And it is a direction that could not be sampled on a small scale piece. Yes my ‘sample’ is 290cm wide by 100cm high and is going to have a prime position in my upcoming exhibition so you only get see these work in progress shots!

There is a saying that fortune favours the brave …. I’m certainly hoping so!

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about my upcoming solo gallery at this summers Festival of Quilts. I’ll be exhibiting new works from three connected series. The newest of the three is inspired by the evolution of the print and publishing industry as it has responded to changes in demand and in technology. As with all of my recent work the ideas evolved in my head and at the bench whilst I was busy working on other things - as I said last time I don’t sit round waiting for the muse! So here is the story of a series that I am calling ‘Print’.

Last summer I took a few days out from preparing my studio (and myself) for teaching to do some breakdown printing. I set myself the challenge of just using black thickened dye in a squeezy bottle to create lots of different grids. I had sort of started thinking about writing my first book and thought this would be a good starting point. I also wanted to create a small breakdown printed quilt to use on my stand at last summers Festival of Quilts. I wasn’t thinking ‘ART’ but as I started cutting into my printed fabrics I was started thinking about the print industry and my connections with it. I made a small quilt which I called Process Colour #1. And went shopping for some old wooden print blocks which I thought I might try to incorporate in ‘something’ … no firm ideas of what but wheels had started turning in my subconscious.

A couple of months later and everything seemed to come together in my head … In my old corporate life I was involved in printing tufted textiles on an industrial scale, in my art life I printed my own unique fabrics. I sometimes use thermofax screens which utilise old technology from the 1950’s. My daughter and her partner have long been involved in the self-publishing / zine movement (check out Good Press). I had spent the autumn trying to get my husband to throw out some very old Gestetner printing supplies 30 years after he used a Gestetner duplicator to print his own zines. And now I was going to self-publish my first book (Breakdown Your Palette). So many connections. And there is so much history when you look at the print and publishing industry. So many changes in technology. Wood block printing to movable type. Printing presses to lithography to inkjet and digital printing to 3D printing. The written word being accessible to the privileged few to mass publication to the growth of the internet and ebooks.

And so I spent another week printing more fabrics. Just using black thickened dye but incorporating embedded wooden print blocks with my grids. Playing with new ideas. Auditioning fabrics. Making a sample utilising thin strips. Promising but still not quite right.

All more fuel for my mind to mull over. At some point I decided that I would create pieces using the same ‘brick wall’ background as I wanted that connection with my Ruins series. And sampled this as a piece for my Cloth in Common group. In this quilt I stitched the word ‘offset’ on top of a background made using my breakdown printed fabric. Definitely going in the right direction. Which is just as well as I need to make pieces for the exhibition. In my next post I will share the process for making my first large scale piece in this new series. My ideas will continue to evolve as I make each piece …..

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

We all create differently. Some people positively glow with creativity as a deadline looms; others become paralysed as that dreaded date approaches. Some thrive in a chaotic work space; others get distracted if their pencils aren’t lined up correctly. Some sit in front of a white page or piece of white fabric waiting for the muse to strike; others just get started confident that the ‘muse’ will turn up at some stage. OK, these are all generalisations. We are all individuals and there is no right or wrong way to be creative whatever form that creativity might have.

But self awareness; taking the time to understand and, critically, accept the way that works best for you can make you more productive and less frustrated. This is something that I took the time to think about and I am a much happier ‘creative’ for it. Let’s take the muse / deadline bit first. For me ‘waiting for the muse to strike’ is like waiting for Amazon on Christmas Eve to deliver the thing your loved one wants more than anything in the whole wide world, that you have told them they will get, that they have posted on Facebook that they are getting. Normally your neighbours would take the parcel in but that tried and tested method isn’t working - they have gone on holiday. And so you take a day off work, you get up early just in case, you sit around in your front room as you know your doorbell doesn’t always work and Amazon guy doesn’t hang about long enough to knock twice. And, of course, the first time you nip upstairs to the toilet the doorbell rings and ……

Now I don’t mind sewing on labels and adding sleeves the day before an exhibition starts but I don’t apply for gallery space, let alone announce it to the world without having a plan of what I am going to exhibit and having confidence in my ability to deliver. For me this is made easier because I took a conscious decision a few years ago to work in series and to have multiple but connected series going on at the same time. Even if the newest series is just in my head I am never ‘starting cold’. The thought is just too scary, too uncertain. My ideas evolve as I work, they do not just appear fully formed. I also started logging my studio hours and analysing how long different activities take. I know how long, on average, it takes me to create 1 square metre of finished quilt so I can back calculate when I need to start work on pieces for an exhibition based on how many pieces and of what size that I want to have ready. Or, as was the case for my solo gallery at this summers Festival of Quilts I was able to make a decision to include a few older pieces in order to free up time to work on another, equally important project, in this case my first book.

I also understand, and embrace the fact that I am not productive / creative when surrounded by chaos. A well known quilter once told me that before she can start work on new ideas in her studio she cleans her house. At the time I was still working in a room in our house and I totally agreed with her. Thankfully when we built my studio at the bottom of our garden the need to create in a clean tidy space transferred to the studio. The house could be an absolute pig-sty but so long as my studio was clean I was happy and productive.

When I was getting ready for my exhibitions with Helen Conway last year the studio was all mine. Messy was a few threads on the floor and a dirty coffee cup in the sink. But now I share my studio with my students and I have had to figure out how to ‘work’ in a different space. Turns out I need to clean up everything after a class before I can settle to create my own art …. even a pile of dirty drop cloths in the corner waiting to go through the washing machine bothers me (solution = dump them in front of the washing machine in the house!). Turns out I also need to move the tables around. Physically pushing the student benches together to create one big table switches my brain from teacher mode to artist mode. Yep, self awareness is a powerful thing!

Over the next few months I will be moving the tables around a lot!