At the end of September I travelled with my friend Sue to Contemporary Quilt Summer School in Birmingham . When I arrived at her house, before I could take my coat off , we went gathering horse chestnuts on Ealing Common, filling an African basket's worth to take with us!
We had a lovely weekend : excellent food , good company ( great to catch up with so many friends) and excellent , insightful tuition and guidance from
Helen Parrott. I've used her book on
Mark-Making a lot , this loopy piece '
Red Stapelia' took years, a labour of love .
The workshop was based on her new book '
Mark-Making through the Seasons' ( I bought a signed copy at Knit and Stitch later ) . On the Saturday evening she unrolled her fabulous quilt ' Nine Yards ( or thereabouts)' which was juried into
Fine Art Quilt Masters 2016 and talked about its background based on the 1773
Mary Ware notebook and techniques used ( I loved the old ruler used a wooden batten)
The first exercise on Friday evening was to make a collage based on colours and shapes using 5- 6 images from magazines / photographs then to write on a post-it our thoughts on it.
Mine were : " Contrast of different yellows against dark. Nights drawing in .Abundance of fruits :reds, oval and round shapes"
We then went round the room , looking at everyone's collages and left a post -it with comments . The work was as you might expect, very diverse and it was interesting on returning to your own to note what other people had seen in your own collage.
The following morning we went for a walk around the grounds with a focus on structure ,colour and detail gathering images as well as items. I took lots of photos and picked lots of leaves and berries
The dried teasel leaves were particularly interesting and I gathered some of them to draw but left the fungi in situ !
I was wishing I'd brought my hand lens when it came to examining our finds in more detail but the phone camera wasn't too bad. I was reminded how inspirational the
Kew Plant Glossary is for diagrams of leaf shape, flower structures, stem joints .
Helen shared some of her methods for tracing, simplifying, looking at the details , the angles of stems, where things join and how to develop patterns in this case drawing with chinograph pencil, repeating marks : " Repetition is how you get good at things "
She then showed how she developed these into stitching through production of samples , looking at the difference qualities of solid and dotted lines, overall pattern or isolated element, use of colour, working from centre or in a grid. She covered the materials she uses : fabrics, needles , batting, threads and methods such as use of templates and the corded line and had lot of the samples from the book which we could look. I particularly liked the
' Radiance ' patterns developed from Cow Parsley
So I started with a birds-eye view of birds-foot trefoil seedpods, drawing to capture their shapes and variety then moving into stitch on 2 layers of fabric
I prefer the stitching on the back ( they show up better on the plain cloth)
I then used couched paper string to depict the curves of the teasel leaf
I did several drawings of them , including layered marks on Abaca paper " Conker Calligraphy"
And raided everyone's collections of fabric , cutting out chestnut shapes, pinning then tacking them to a section of Japanese fabric I'd brought with me
It's now one of my current train stitching projects "100 Chestnuts (or thereabouts)"
Besides the practical tuition, Helen shared her inspiration including poetry ( eg Thomas A Clarke and Nan Shepherd) and thoughts on the seasons , posing questions about what made up our our personal year. She also devoted time each day for personal one-to-one sessions, the opportunity to discuss current and possible future work was incredibly useful and helpful
So much joy, friendship, laughter and inspiration in a just a few days, banked for the future.
