Back to Base

I believe this phrase is part of baseball terminology?  For my ninth and last challenge of this second cycle, I have made a map quilt. Returning to base - to making a map, the type of quilt I'm currently best known for. I haven't made a map for any of the previous challenges.

It is called Village Green. This has several meanings. The map represents an English village, set within a variety of green fields. The important one though is the village green - the rectangular area surrounded by houses on four sides.  Traditionally, games are played in the village green. The most common one played I believe is cricket. Baseball is not played that much in England, but we have a version of it, Rounders, which is often played by children, sometimes by adults as well. Possibly also rugby and football (soccer) are played there occasionally.  The village green is also used for fairs and festivals; it is a community resource which brings people together.

So here is my map of a place where games are played.  Freehand cut and pieced using hand-dyed fabrics, machine quilted. 18” high by 27” wide.

Swing to Bat

Not knowing anything about baseball and its terminology, I looked up the phrase ‘swing to bat’ in the web, and this is one of the explanations I liked:

Swing to bat: Successful competitors are not lucky. They simply make more attempts (in other words, they make more calls – they swing more bats).

I liked the idea. It makes sense to me. I often tell my quilting students an anecdote from the book “Art and Fear” by David Bayles and Ted Orland: at the beginning of term, a teacher of ceramics divided her class into two groups. To the first group, she told to make as many pots as they could in the time available; and not to worry about quality.  To the second group, she asked to produce just one pot during the whole term, but they had to aim for perfection.  At the end of term all the pots were compared.  And the best ones came from the first group, and not from the second.

"Map Fragments" 

are small affordable pieces I make for sale in exhibitions.

They are matted and their overall size is 10" square.

“Practice makes perfect” is another phrase that comes to mind, which may be applicable here, but it’s not my favourite.  Practice makes things a lot better, but I’m not one to aim for perfection – I think we can get better all the time.  The fun is in the process rather than in the goal.

This "make more attempts" explanation also reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers”, where he talks about people needing 10,000 hours practice to get good at anything.  Both great books, worth reading.

Cauldrons and skillets

The letter Tet reminds me of my childhood, when my family sent me to Hebrew classes – I never learnt very much, but I still remember some of the letters.  In Hebrew the letters are in their great majority, consonants – the vowels are sort of ‘given’ - with a few exceptions, particularly the letter “I”.  When young children and adult beginners learn to write Hebrew, there is a phonetic system by which the vowels are represented via lines and dots under the consonants – but that is removed as soon as possible, and all ‘normal’ writing is written without the phonetic vowels. And of course Hebrew is written from right to left – not left to right.

ALICIA = אלישיה

Actually, my name – Alicia – in Hebrew, is not that deprived of vowels. Although it starts with A – Aleph – that letter usually stands for an H, rather than for an A.  The last letter is also an H. The two ‘I’s are there in this case, but the last A is not.  However the presence of an H at the end indicates that there is a vowel at the end, rather than a consonant. 

ALICIA = Алисия

I once studied Russian too – a different alphabet again – no problem there of lack of vowels, indeed there are too many of them!  You may notice the A at the end of the word is different from the A at the beginning of my name.  And the grammar is hellish!  Again, I remember some of the letters, and I still can sort of ‘decipher’ the words, but cannot understand the meaning…

Anyway, going back to the shape of the letter Tet, it immediately got me thinking about a current project I have, making quilts for an exhibition next year with the South West Textiles group in the Museum of Somerset, Taunton, UK – quite a prestigious place.  Each artist has to select an object from the museum as a starting point for their work.  

I chose to work with cauldrons and skillets, of which the Museum has a very large collection. Cauldrons are round, with a Tet-like shape, while skillets have long handles. There is an amazing room in the Museum where cauldrons hang from the ceiling – black vessels illuminated by red light.

There used to be many foundries in the area making iron and bronze cooking vessels, church bells, etc, active mostly from the 14^th to the 19^th centuries.  And notice - cauldrons have three legs, not four.

However, to be able to work with their graphic shapes, I went to their research department for help, and have now acquired a collection of great photographs of cauldrons and skillets.  Plenty of material to work from!

Cauldron of the more usual shape 

Cauldron of an unusual shape, more Tet-like

Long-handled skillet

I don’t know yet how the cauldrons will relate to exploring hidden possibility and potential, but I shall investigate!

Alicia

(With thanks to Google Translate….)

Climate Change #2

This is my piece for Challenge 7 - a smaller version of my Climate Change series – the original four Climate Change quilts were one metre square each.

I have taken the four traditional elements – Earth, Water, Air and Fire – to illustrate the problems we are facing with climate change. The sections represent, from top to bottom:

EARTH  - large swatches are being revealed as the ice sheets melt.

WATER – coastlines are being destroyed by sea levels rising.

AIR – pollution makes cities look grey and misty from above.

FIRE – bush and woodland fires become bigger events, and more unseasonal, due to draught.

The quilt is made in four separate sections, each 40 cm wide by 20 cm long, which when added up come to the required length of 80 cm.  The four pieces are joined at the back, to allow the quilt to hang as one unit.

I hope that by showing the effects of climate change on our Earth, people will be encouraged to take action to avoid destruction of our planet and of our lives on it.

Climate Change: Water, Fire, Earth, Air

Climate change is the greatest challenge of our times. I have tried to highlight some of those problems through my quilts. Each set is inspired by a specific real situation - although that is also repeated elsewhere – and each has either two or three stages, to show the 'before' and 'after'.

The four elements:

WATER:  floods, sea levels rising, coastal wetlands affected in Britain; also in places like Egypt, Bangladesh. Buildings destroyed, agricultural land lost, affecting food supplies; contamination of water supplies.

FIRE:  earlier onset and higher strengths of bush fires in Australia, tundra fires in Canada, wildfires in USA: destruction of woodlands and dwellings. Burning vegetation releases stored-up carbon into the atmosphere, exacerbating global warming.

EARTH:  large swathes of land are uncovered by the melting and receding ice sheets in Greenland, the Arctic and the Antarctic, and by retreating glaciers in many places of the world. Sea levels rise; fresh water supplies disappear; oceans become less friendly to algae and plankton, crucial for the food chain.

AIR:  a grey blanket of air pollution (gas ozone) hangs almost permanently over Mexico City. This is happening throughout the world, particularly in urban areas, and in many developing and industrialising countries, causing respiratory illnesses. Vegetation is affected through acid rain.

I made the first of the four quilts, Water, for the International Contest at the European Patchwork Meeting in 2012 - the theme was Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow.  I made the other three, to complete the Four Elements idea, for my exhibition at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham, this August 2014. It made an impression on a large number of visitors.  The explanatory paragraphs were printed on the wall.

For the next challenge, I hope to use the same idea, but fitting it into the 40 cm by 80 cm size set by Hsin-Chen.

Alicia

Colour and Line

… and many stitches not in time.

This was a puzzling challenge to me, as I’m not a hand-stitcher,  nor a ‘mender and saver’ – so it felt a little ‘alien’.  Eventually I decided to make something I simply wanted to do – to play with lines and colour, without much of a design in mind, and see what came out.  It turned up to be more difficult and time-consuming that I expected.  Partly because I came to it after a long period of hard work for my gallery at the Festival of Quilts, the writing of a book/catalogue for it, curating an exhibition, and being a juror in another.  And after the exhibition, a complex quilt to finish for Carrefour du Patchwork in France, and some time-consuming family commitments.  All the while feeling I needed a holiday!

Finally, here it is.  It looks simple in design, but to get it right took longer than I expected.  I feel it is more in the style of “modern quilting” (which I’ve been getting very interested in), although I used black instead of the more commonly used white background.  It is also some sort of irregular ‘medallion quilt’.

It is all quilted in black thread on black fabric, so it is very difficult to photograph without proper studio side lights.  I take my photos with the light from a big window on one side, and white reflecting surfaces on the other side.

The quilting is more visible in the detail photo, but then the black does not look so black, it looks more like very dark navy.  There is no quilting at all in the colour sections.

18” by 27”, made with hand-dyed cottons and commercial black fabric background, machine pieced and quilted, applied bits of colour on the edges.

Stitches in Time...

...or, the time when I started stitching.

That was a long time ago, in Argentina.  I was about seven or eight years old. My mother was a wonderful stitcher and crafter, and I used to watch her work, fascinated by her skill and imagination. She made beautiful dresses for me and my sister, knitted us nicely-fitting cardigans, and made household things like oven gloves, aprons, tea cosies, etc.  She also made decorative things, from all sorts of materials, and was also a competent photographer.  I know that in the past she had tried out other crafts, such as pyrography, but she always went back to textiles. Later she made unusual soft toys.

May be, in different times and circumstances, she would have been an artist.  But the awareness and opportunities were not there. So she became a creative homemaker.

My mother had a treadle sewing machine, which I was too small to be able to use.  A bit like this one:

But one day, a friend of my father travelled to USA and brought her back an electrical portable Singer sewing machine. It was really an all singing, all dancing model. It had attachments that performed all sorts of tasks, including completely automatic buttonholes. And my mother taught me how to use it.  The pedal was placed on a stool so I could reach it.  I started stitching simple flat items, but soon graduated to dolls' clothes (and my dolls acquired a very ample wardrobe!), and eventually, to making my own clothes. (I never made household items though!)

This is exactly how that machine looked like, with its black box and the black pedal.  Every one of its details are here in this image.  Isn't the internet wonderful?!

My love affair with machines probably also started then. I moved on to typewriters (typing with all my fingers), cameras, music machines of all sorts, and eventually, to computers.   

We had sewing lessons at school, too, and I hated them. It was hand sewing, and little bits of embroidery, like for a handkerchief. It may sound odd, but I was almost bottom of the class in school sewing, while at home I was spending as much time as I could at the sewing machine.

Where am I going with all this?  A stitch in time, it does not mean 'saves nine' to me. A stitch in time is to do with time for stitching, stitching times, stitching places, occasions, opportunities, excitement, imagination.

And I better go back to stitching now!  On my all singing, all dancing, wide throated, up-to-the-minute sewing machine.

But I wish I still had that old machine!  I couldn't bring it with me to England when I first came, and I left it with my sister, to look after.  But she is not a stitcher - although she is an artist - and she lent it to somebody, and it never came back.

Alicia