Wingham Wool at Praa Sands

My sister, who lives in Devon, has recently taken up felt-making.  A few weeks ago she asked if I would be the taxi driver for her and a couple of friends so that they could go to the Wingham Wool sale at Praa Sands which was held yesterday.  Wingham Wool http://www.winghamwoolwork.co.uk/ are a mill based in Rotherham who specialise in fibres for weavers, spinners and dyers.   These are made from all sorts of things; even milk powder and soya bean pulp, but a lot of the products are merino and other wools.  They do both dyed and natural fibres and you buy them by weight.

It was very interesting for me to go to this event.  I realised that there is another textile community out there who work in fibre/wool.  The community hall was full of bags of glorious coloured fibres which you buy by tearing off chunks.   There was a group of women spinning in the corner and in addition to the fibres, there were Australian natural dye powders and parts for Ashford spinning wheels.  It was good for me as I was not really tempted to buy anything.  However, there was a small bin containing thread made from recycled saris.  I know I can buy this in Penzance but there was a sample of a bag made from silk heavily couched with sari thread so I succumbed to a skein.  In the same bin there were strips of knitting and 'skeins' made from torn strips of 'glossy' fabrics.  There was a display of wooden needles beside it.  I immediately realised that I could try this technique with the bridal fabrics I have still not used ten years after acquiring a huge box of offcuts from a specialist dressmaker.  So I bought a pair of needles and will have a go.  I couldn't really photograph the samples but here is what I bought.

I did not think to ask my sister if I could photograph her purchases so I shall have to take some photos when I next see her.  If you are interested in Wingham Wool's products they are currently doing a roadshow in the South West.  Details on their website.

Indigo dyeing workshop

Last week I actually did some textile work!  I went on a two-day indigo dyeing workshop with Janice Gunner www.janicegunner.co.uk at Cowslip Workshops www.cowslipworkshops.co.uk.  I had always thought that indigo was a very dirty and borderline dangerous process so I did not want to do it at home.  Now I realise it isn't anything of the sort and I shall almost certainly have a go at home.

I have done workshops with Janice before so I knew I would learn a lot on this one.

Here she is demonstrating tying on the first day.  We did stitch resist, tying, clamping and scrunching fabric so there was plenty of variety in the fabrics we made.  I always forget what a long time it takes to do stitch resist so I need to sit in the sun and do a lot more!

My main aim was to make some cloth that I can use in quilts depicting Hayle. www.hayle.co.uk  In my head these are going to include pieces of rust dyeing to represent the industrial heritage of the town and pieces of indigo to represent the sea that surrounds it.  Here is one attempt to represent waves.  (All my photos were taken when the cloth had dried but not been washed so it looks a bit lumpy.)  I marked the lines with a flexible curve.  I know I also need to make some Arashi shibori, i.e. pole wrapped but as there were fewer poles than participants and as I know how to do it I let others have them..  It is top of the list for follow up work though.

I also did some Karamatsu (the larch) using templates Janice had made.

And at home that evening I made a doughnut with cord placed through a rolled up piece of fabric.

I also have a checked grid but it took hours and hours to pull the threads out and it missed the photo session.  It was linen and very tight.  A lovely effect although one row of thread was too close to the fold and did not really 'take'.  I came to the conclusion that the linen thread I used for stitching everything was really too thick so I must see what else I have.

On Day 2 we began with clamping.  I had not realised that there is a use for all the millions of Klippits I have acquired over the years.  Here is what these gave me.

This was made by folding the fabric samosa style and then anchoring it across the middle with the Klippit.  You can see on the right of the photo how you get interesting patterns from the ridges in the Klippit.  I then tied thick threads across the corners of the triangle I had created.  This means I got some dyed thread out of the exercise as well.

Then I did a small piece with bulldog clips placed on each of the four sides of a folded square.

A wonderful Rorschach inkblot type piece which I think should just be turned into a stitched piece as it is.  Now where are all the bulldog clips we have somewhere in the house?  And the clothes pegs?

These little round ones gave me spotty fabric.

Mixing the indigo vats turned out to be quite straight forward provided you remembered the health and safety aspects.

Ten minutes immersion in the vat and then outside for the pieces to oxidate before immersing them again.

We only had time to immerse pieces a couple of times but that seems to have been enough.  The very pale pieces at the left of the photo were dyed in woad in a communal vat.  What a fantastic colour it makes!

I tried out a lot of different weights of fabric ranging from silk organza to delphina cotton.  I have decided that the shibori techniques work better with lighter weights such as cotton lawn although you do need to take account of how tight the weave is if you are going to hand stitch it.  I seem to have come home with an awful lot of scrunched up pieces of different weights.

There are a few more pieces that I will photograph at the next stage of their development.  I have pressed everything carefully but in this household there are other influences.  Hinemoa took one look at the basket in which I had put the pieces and decided it would be a nice new day bed.

I hope she isn't High on the smell of indigo.  That was yesterday.  I have had to find another container for the fabric and turn this one into a new bed for her with an old pullover inside.  Meanwhile her sister, Pania, had decided to have a bath on the pieces I had got out and was musing about how to use.

Never share your creations with cats - unless you are prepared to get all the hairs off with sellotape or similar!

If you feel inspired by this, Janice has written a very good book: Shibori for Textile Artists which you can probably find on Amazon although I am not sure where it is in terms of editions.

Quilt Backs

At the beginning of this week I determined to assemble the back of the wedding present quilt ready for it to go to the longarm quilting person later in the month.   I am afraid progress has been painfully slow.  Last Saturday I bought a second piece of fabric to combine with one I probably bought about eight years ago.  That was a remaindered bin end and I knew it would come in  handy one day.

The blue fabric is the new piece and the William Morris the old one.  I washed the new fabric (mainly because the old one had been washed) but that is as far as I got for several days.  On Monday I received a the results of a biopsy I had some weeks ago for what I call my 'wobbly legs syndrome'.  It said I have a rare degenerative muscular condition called Inclusion Body Myositis.(IBM).   The consultant had mentioned something 'old people get' when I saw him months ago.   I don't consider myself old by today's standards but maybe that isn't the case.  The condition has no known cause (I guess it's age) and there is nothing they can do for it except physio.  If you look it up on the Web you find that the long-term prognosis isn't good but I have decided that something else could finish me off first and as at the moment my arms are fine, I just hope it progresses slowly and I don't have to give up sewing for years yet.  However, spurred on by twisting my ankle badly about ten days ago when one leg went as I descended some stairs in a shop,  I have started doing an exercise for my thighs (three times a day) that I found on the Web, begun practising Tai Chi again (I should really go back to the class) and made sure I have been swimming twice this week and for a two mile walk on the other days except for one when it rained.  All this seems to take up a lot of time that should be going on sewing.  Oh, and my GP told me I should not travel until I had seen the consultant which isn't till the end of May so I have had to cancel my spring holiday and find something else I can do in the UK in May.  Living down here you need to get away occasionally but John doesn't travel because of his fibromyalgia and I am used to doing a lot of things on my own.  Not such a good idea when I might fall and break something.

So here it is Saturday and all I have done on the quilt back is cut the pieces to length.  That's when I found the second problem: the blue piece was the end of the bolt and it has stretched.  In my youth when I made all my own clothes we used to hold the opposite corners and pull the fabric back into shape but at 88 inches long I thought this would be very difficult.  So this afternoon I have sat with a pin and pulled out a thread across each end and then cut along the line with scissors.  It seems a bit better.  Now for the third stage.

I had planned to make a 'frame' of the William Morris fabric but once I had cut off the uneven ends and cut it to length I realised I did not have enough for a piece at each end.  I was going to make it like this one.

I hope you enjoy the moving cats.  That is fairly typical in this house.  I made this quilt in 2000/1 according to the label and it is called Pacific Rim.  I machine pieced it but it was all hand quilted - hence the time taken.

I like unusual backs.  Here is another one where I took all the leftover pieces from the front.  Getting them to fit together was a bit of a nightmare with hours and hours of rearranging them on my bed as there was nowhere big enough to lay it all out in our old house.

And here is the front.  I made templates of the patterns on the Makower fabric and hand-quilted them.  This quilt always reminds me of sore hands as I developed slight carpel tunnel syndrome from all the cutting.  It was the first quilt I made from Cut Loose Quilts, the book by Jan Mullen that I have used for both nephews' wedding present quilts.

So tomorrow in between all the exercise I have to cut the William Morris fabric lengthwise and sew everything together.  I am currently thinking of putting a 'stripe' of the William Morris somewhere across the middle.  I think I may need to do this because in cutting the blue fabric straight I lost several inches and there may not be enough to use from top to bottom.

Textures home and away

It is just a year since I was in Venice so I have been looking through my photos again.  As usual I haven't got round to printing any out but now I that I can think about art quilts again I will.  One of my favourite textile artists is Fenella Davies who does wonderful work based on Venetian walls.  http://www.fenelladavies.com/shadows.html
I don't want to seem as though I am copying her style so I need to think carefully about what I do with my images.

I think trying out some of the fancy filters in Elements should be high up the list.  Cropping this image of a palace and then using the new 'photo' might be good.

and I have two or three detail shots that have potential.

It wasn't easy taking photos when moving around in a group and unfortunately the tour did not have much free time for me to go back to places.  However, I can see all sorts of possibilities with this shot - and I do have a couple of more detailed ones of the same building.

I have also been slowly collecting similar photos locally so I might do something that compares Penwith and Venice.  How about these from Hayle and Penzance?

This is a wonderful piece of old iron wall on the beach at Lelant near Hayle.

Here is the side of a rusting ship in Penzance harbour.

And this piece of old iron was beside it.

And back in Hayle I found an old door with an interesting knocker. and bolts.  As you can see, I am rather fond of rust!

Spring at last

I don't know what happened to February.  The winter seems to have gone on and on so I didn't get out to take any photos and this blog did not get updated.  However, I have made progress on the quilt front!  The churn dash top is now all but finished (just the mitred corners of the pieced border to do tomorrow) and I have found someone at the other end of Cornwall who will longarm quilt it for me.  That feels like a great relief.  I really did not want to spend months trying to sandwich it together on my dining table (not really big enough) and then trying to quilt on such a complex pattern.

I have also completed the first bag from the yellow scraps and am making good headway on a second.

The second one has stitching in purple as well as yellow.  I have reduced the number of layers and will sew the bag with a proper lining.

After weeks of wet weather it has finally cleared up.  What a difference to see the sun.  On Monday I was at Tate St Ives for the annual 'Home Day' for staff.  It was held in the cafe on the top floor which has views to die for.  I was lucky enough to get a seat next to the window so I could gaze out on the beach, the bay and the coast looking north, all day!  No photos though.  On Wednesday I paid my first visit of the year to Tregwainton http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-trengwaintongarden.  Not very many flowers out yet but some nice light on the bark which I will show in another posting.  Yesterday I decided it was time to walk up our nearest valley.  We are lucky in that although we live on the edge of town it is only a few hundred yards to a road that goes up onto the moors and which is an easy walk providing there is not too much traffic.  The signs of spring always appear reasonably early here.

This stretch goes through a small wood and there were plenty of daffodils out.

They are wild but I think they are escaped cultivated ones - the seed having blown from the fields as the whole of this area has been a commercial daffodil growing area for a very long time.

There were also plenty of primroses in the hedgerow as it is quite damp.

The third plant that is a real mark of spring in Cornwall is gorse.  We have two varieties, one which flowers at Easter and the other (which I think is Western gorse) which flowers alongside the heather in August and September.  It is a real mark of Cornwall but some years there have been awful problems with vandals setting fire to the heath, burning all the vegetation and displacing/burning the birds.

Yesterday there was still a bitter wind, though, and the horses were still in their winter overcoats.

At the top of the road there is a typical Penwith dwelling (at least I assume someone lives there). It consists of a caravan and an old shed, possibly a pig byre.  Parked beside this is this wonderful old car.

I am not sure what it is although I think it is the same as the first car that my father and his brothers owned in the late 1930s.  This year it has spent most of the winter parked round the corner from us here.  As it is obviously a vintage something (I suspect a relic of the US forces from WW 2) and was parked right on the corner I got a bit concerned when the snow came in case someone ran into it.  So it was good to find that it had returned to its summer quarters.

This valley and its vegetation inspired a spring Journal quilt a couple of years ago.

I gave this one to my sister-in-law for Christmas as I have reached the point where I feel they should not languish in boxes and folders.  This year I am having a rest from Journal Quilts.  This is supposed to free me up to do some new art quilt work but I have to admit that so far I have just done the Churn Dash top and finished Zelah's quilt which together are the most traditional pieces I have made in years.    Now I can see the way forward and I hope to get started on something more exciting this month.

Using Yellow Offcuts

I have spent a lot of time this week making Churn Dash blocks.  The problem with this pattern, especially using the Cut Loose Quilts method, is that you are left with a lot of small pieces of the fabrics used for the Churn Dash pattern.  In fact, I nearly decided not to use this design for this reason.

Here are the first few blocks laid out.  I have now made nearly forty (I am aiming for at least sixty as I have not finally decided on the size of the quilt and I probably need a few spare ones).  There is now more variety in the backgrounds as I have a wide variety of blue and green fabrics for these.

I thought hard about what to do with the leftover yellow strips.  Then I realised that I could make 'fabric' out of them.  I need something that I can hand stitch, to take on holidays for one thing and for sitting in front of the television.  I used to be a keen hand quilter in the evenings but over the last few years this activity seems to have passed me by.  Here is a piece that I made a couple of years ago.

This was made from very lightweight fabrics; mostly cheesecloth, scrim etc. that I had dyed and pieces of polyester voile.  I mounted them  directly onto wadding and a cotton backing.  It was good and flexible but in places you can see the wadding (top centre of photo).  I stitched it with variegated threads.  It took forever!  I have never done anything with it and told myself at the time that it was a sample.  I loved the rippled effect of the rows of stitching.

My yellow pieces are much heavier than this.  In fact I may have overdone it as the fabric has a calico base, then wadding and then a patterned cotton backing and is of course cotton.  On top of it all is a layer of net.

 However, I am aiming to make bags from them so this means they will be relatively sturdy.
 I am using Fine Mercerised Cotton from Stef Francis.  This is variegated and  I already have a vast collection of different colours. I have decide to change colours from time to time to give more detailand am using some red/pinks in the piece that has red in some of the fabrics.  As the second piece does not have any red in the fabrics I think I shall introduce purple as being the complement of the yellow.

My plan is to donate these bags to the Quilters Guild fund-raiser at the Festival of Quilts.  Every year there is a fund-raiser organised by one of the specialist groups.  Two years ago Contemporary Quilt did Journal Quilts.  This year the theme is 'Put 'Em Ins' which means any kind of container.  I have already unearthed one or two unfinished or unloved things that are suitable and having a goal for this project will be good.  For more details go to www.quiltersguild.org.uk and click on 'Specialist Groups'.

New studio bench - at last!

It must be three years since we had the garage converted into a combined studio/utility room.  It has always been an untidy mess because I could not decide what I wanted in the way of furniture and storage facilities.  The space is not huge and as we have almost no storage space for the things you would normally put in an attic or cellar, there are also a lot of general household bits and pieces that live here.  Finally, I was allowed this studio on the understanding that John could have one corner of it for his DIY.  That's the back left hand corner in this photo and, as you can see, it still needs further tidying up.

The black shelves from B and Q hold general household things although the set on the right are 'mine'!  I already had several large underbed storage containers which had to go under the bench.  They contain all my wadding, large pieces of fabric, the remains of my 'wedding dress shop' remnants box etc.

I keep most of my sewing supplies in my bedroom/dry studio in the house.  This studio is where I do 'wet' work as they say.  The wall shelves are new and will be a great help for smaller bits and pieces.

At the utility room end I have two sinks which is wonderful.  It is so good not having to walk from one room to another with pots of dye, dirty Thermofax screens etc.  The lights are two daylight fluourescent strips.  The ceiling is very low but there is nothing I can do about that.   The wall to the right of the picture is the former garage door and is mainly glass: the door and two windows, so the light situation isn't bad.

The table is our old kitchen table and the yellow thing behind the dryer is my printing board which is MDF covered with an old blanket.  When it is in use I cover it with a drop cloth made from a genuine WWII Utility sheet that belonged to John's grandmother.  When it is suitably covered in leftover marks it will make some good recycled items.  John built the new bench from MDF with metal supports screwed to the wall and bannister rails from B and Q holding up the front.  Many years ago he built us a kitchen on this design (but without bannister rails) so he used the same principles here.  I think he rather enjoyed the whole process once I had decided what I wanted as  he has spent the last couple of days wondering what else he could build!

While he has been doing this, I have started on the wedding present quilt.  That's some of the blocks lying on the table.  It needs a lot.  I have made twenty but I know I will need at least fifty.  I have two unfinished from yesterday so I am going back to this work now.