Quilts, trains and sketches

Working on design ideas and sketches from (quite a few) journals. One from 2010 covers a month or so in the US chasing steam trains in Colorado and a museum in Kentucky dedicated to the women who served on the front line of the Civil War. A final train journey aboard the South West Chief from Chicago to LA - a wonderful 3 days and 2 nights tracking for the most part along Route 66. I spent a lot of time in the glass topped tourist carriage sketching, drawing and observing. Some of those sketches became fabric and at last I've made the samples into a quilt top. Lovely to see them come to life and the fabulous memories of quilts and trains.

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The peaceful rhythm of quilting

Three or four hundred upper thread and bobbin changes over the past four weeks. There's a textural effect I'm trying to create with the quilting - that compliments the imperfect shapes of the pieced fabrics. Something akin to wabi, sabi and shibui. The infinite ways that dense, linear quilting can be used to create story are coming to life, one piece at a time. Sometimes barely visible, sometimes contrasting. There is an uneven fullness in the seams that help create miniscule bumps at the end of each line. There are also the seamless directional changes absorbed into the looser weave of some fabrics. Every change and every bobbin. Testing tensions, adjusting for the different threads as each shape submits to the process. It is a peace-filled activity, permanently set up so I can work for several minutes at a time. Never wasting moments. I get immersed in the meditative quality of the quilting and thinking only about the stitch. Some of the combinations I use: using the same ...

Carvings and the meaning of life

Carving a new print is relaxing but requires full mental presence and even more patience. A rushed cut or slip results in nothing printable at all. The grevillea leaf is one of my favourites. Spiked points and gentle curves mean it can carry many meanings in an art work. It can speak to nature, trees, the outdoors, Australian native plants at a very obvious level. It can also carry deeper meanings about our lived experiences. This one is carved in soft plastic - which generally works better than lino on fabrics. It has a little more give and manages to get the full print onto the substrate whereas sometimes the linocut version leaves an imperfect mark. Getting to the final carving is an evolving process. Then there are test prints on paper, choosing paint, ink or decolourant (dye stripper) and how that works (or doesn't work) with a particular project. Sometimes I will use discharge paste and strip out the dye before offset and overprinting with ink. This gives t...

TYOM W1 5 October 2021

Midnight came and went. Seven more hours of suffering before we go to hospital and that was probably the best birthday decision of all. Turning 60 in the ER. Another 4 days before I am home and the positive takeaway is there WAS a stone blocking the duct to the liver, and it WAS the cause of me turning yellow. It WAS NOT copious, continuous comsumption of champagne. They had landed that one on me 8 weeks previously, and I obediently and conscientiously avoided said champagne for almost 7 weeks until the weekend immediately prior to TYOM. So there WAS a bottle of Dom Perignon 2010 consumed between four of us - deliciously sipped down to the last drop. It WAS true the pain started sometime in the next 24 hours and truer that I thought this was the end my relationship with champagne. How blessed to be wrong. They had managed to rule out all forms of known hepatitis, some novel considerations including HIV, drug use in my younger years, clots in one or more vital organs, a...

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