Ramshackle Villages: a few details

Here are a few of the work in progress photos for Ramshackle Villages - currently at the Textilsammlung Max Berk/Kurpfälzisches Museum in Heidelberg from 13 September 2015 to 10 January 2016.

Complete work

After the Exhibition at the Textilsammlung Max Berk/Kurpfälzisches Museum, the work from the exhibition will be at the Kreismuseum Zons (24 January to 28 March 2016), in the Textile Museum St. Gallen / Switzerland (13 April to 26 June 2016) and at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham/UK (11 to 14 August 2016). It is possible that they may take the exhibition to other venues.

cutting out houses

keeping the houses safely in order

waterhouses cutting started

more water

and a detail after all the stitching on the whole piece

some of the issue with the busy print meant that my normal lines were too thin

especially for the houses further up the hill - they just blended in

I cut the lines bigger which helped. But still was not happy and I was days from sending in the entry form.
Then my friend Jane Glennie visited for something and suggested a wash of dilute acrylic paint. okay...I have seen that done, but never having done that, I really didn't want to try it out here! But as we chatted, I thought. Crayons...white crayon!

So, I did a little test with grey and white and decided on white.

Then I got to work on covering the hillside with white crayon, working into it to get good coverage.
Then I stepped back and saw...a snow covered hillside.
Oh. Not quite what I wanted, but I will reserve that thought for a future snow covered hillside.
detail of a sample piece I had to send with the entry form

I took a bit of cloth and scrubbed back the white. This was much better. The hillside is hillside. The sky is sky. and the houses on the skyline are fading into the distance. Phew.
You can see another glimpse of the different in the close-up photos of the waterhouses above.

The issue was that working into the fabric with the white crayon, it was impossible to keep it from going onto the black. I did use the iron on the binding to melt the wax away, but that would be too big to work for the small lines. I decided to use my soldering iron to press into the lines

and so got the crisp black again. I had kept the actual houses the original colour.

Then I took the piece to show to a few friends. I rolled it up loosely.

When I brought it home I had another moment of panic! oh no! The white crayon is brushing off onto the backing (which is black).
This will never do, because it might rub off onto other people's work! Eventually I dallied long enough about this problem that I had no chance to get spray fixative like you would use for pastels. But I remembered that hairspray can be a substitute. After trialling it on a scrap, I went ahead and gave the piece a good dose of hairspray. And, after drying, covered it well when I was rolling it up to send....

and there we are! Ramshackle Villages