Gathering and Gathering small things.

12-30 March. Imagination in Detail: Small Stories.

I have been gathering my small works together so I can figure out which small ones will be best to hang at Lady Sew and Sew next week.

Wow, I didn't realise I had so many.

Well, I knew about each set, but I haven't got them all out together before...en masse, as it were.

Dragons to suit the weather -

Tudors - or part of that family

Maps - though I think I will hold these as 'just in case'

My experiments to teach myself Free Motion embroidery

maybe, but I need to have something for samples for the classes I am teaching.

So, anyway, plenty of decisions to make.

ALAW - W-Z - Place

Finishing my map letters from places around the British Isles for A Letter A Week.

W-Waterloo (station)

X- I couldn't find an X town, so I opted for a place in Kent where there were a lot of X marks for railway crossings.

While making it, I remembered that Exeter is on the River Exe, So, the Exe might be better qualified because it says the name of the letter X.

Anyway, we have 2 for X!

Y-York

Z- Zouch

and the backs

from the area in Kent

from the area near the Exe.

I have some ideas for presentation, but also have several deadlines for end of June, so I will try to do the presentation as soon as possible. I have ideas for the other letter set for 2014, so will take it on holiday with me in early July to get it organised.

ALAW - S-V - Place

I got a bit behind on the letters for A Letter A Week because of events and deadlines for other things in May. So, I completed these yesterday.

Places around the British Isles.

S-Slough

T-Thirsk

U-Uxbridge

V-Vale

There were plenty of other V places, but I decided to look to the Channel Islands as we went to Guernsey 2 years ago for our 25th Wedding Anniversary. So, I saw on the map the little village of Vale.

And the backs

ALAW - N-R - Place

Places around the British Isles.
Apologies for the photos. I am finding the coating on the map pages make it difficult for my camera to focus.

N-Newbury

O-Oxford

P-Porthmadog

in Wales

Q-Queen's Bower

I could find very few Q places in the British Isles and those were little villages. Which surprised me.

Quite interesting to find that to be the case in a place where 2 Queens have reigned over 120 years between them in the last 177 years!

(I muddled up the attempt to give the place name a green box like the other letters have. But it isn't so bad if you aren't doing a close up photo!)

R-Reading

ALAW - J-M -place

March's letters for A Letter A Week.

I decided to hop across to Ireland for the K. I was trying to choose places where the place name was enlarged on the map.

J-Jedburgh

K-Killarney

L-London

M-Manchester

and on the reverse

For some reason these all seem a bit blurry. Sorry. (but I do have a headache, so that might have had something to do with the photo taking.)

ALAW - F-I -place

February's letters for A Letter A Week.

I kept to the plan and made a letter each week.

F-Folkstone

G-Glasgow

H-Hemel Hempstead

I-Ivybridge

and on the reverse

ALAW - A-E -place

The new theme for letters on the blog A Letter A Week is Place.

I had ideas straight away. I thought I would use a Road Atlas from a few years ago. I think I got it at the 99p shop. I also thought it would be fun to cut the square from areas where common place names could be found...like Airport, Castle, Moor, etc. So, when A Certain Young man was here earlier in the month, he helped me come up with an A to Z of those kind of places.

However, when I went to start, I realised the scale of the Road map was not close enough to be able to pick out those things. So, I had another think. and then got caught up with a couple deadlines.

Finally I decided to just go with finding a city, town or village which started with the letter. I was still thinking of common names and thought I would write them in some way. But I realised that other than the letter it would not have any connection.

I started finding the places in the map and decided that the majority of the places would have some connection with us. Unfortunately I had used the page with our town (and several other places, like where our son went to uni, I would have chosen. So, some of the places most strongly connected to us aren't represented. and for the ones I had to choose instead, the links are often tenuous. and some like J and Q had to be chosen from the limited list in the index. But, oh well! (yes, I do tend to overthink things!)

I used Word Art to print the letters using the font called Gill Sans Ultra Bold Condensed. I liked the bulkiness of that font to stand out against all the roads and other map detail. Then used the guide for tracing and cutting the letters from the square of map page. The negative is glued to one side of black card and the positive was glued to the reverse.

So, the letters for January.

A-Andover

B-Birmingham

C-Cambridge

D-Durham

E-Edinburgh

I am leaving the inside bits out for this side.

and the reverse.

Now that I have a system, I hope to prepare the letter for the week on that week. Then I will post them at the end of each month.

Map no.12 - Chester, Maine

The last 2013 journal quilt for Contemporary Quilt. These have had the theme of Maps and the size was 8"x12" landscape format. And it was finished around 8pm last night. So it wasn't even the last minute!

This was the hardest map because it is where my family live. But because I thought about it so long, it came together quickly. This map is not to scale and probably not quite accurate either. I did use proper maps to get the general gist of things, but it is more about memory than accuracy.

Part of the reason why it was hard to make this was because the life was hard. Coming to this place in Maine with no buildings, no running water, no electricity - 8 people in a trailer and all sorts of animals in a $9 barn we built with scraps of things from the paper mill. All because Dad wanted us to learn responsibility.

Okay, that bit worked! But no one else we knew lived that way. Milking 2 cows by hand before school every morning and then going up with a lantern to milk them again at night. Helping with haying on other farms so we could have some for ours...even though the temperature was over 100°F. Carrying numerous 5 gallon buckets of water to the cows in winter because they needed a drink even when the temperature was around -40°F!
And no female I have ever known, besides my sister with me, earned college money by cutting wood and selling it to the paper mill or to people who wanted wood for their wood stoves.

However, it has come full circle this year as A Certain Young Man is living there now - he wanted to! (I still don't get that part.) And yes, learning responsibility...because my dad can no longer do the hard work it takes to live there. So A Certain Young Man has been cutting wood, fixing holes in the roof, and shovelling snow and ice...and so on. And because he chose to, it is still an adventure to him and he is contemplating having them get some animals again!

The Penobscot River runs through this map mainly representing North Chester, with some of North Lincoln and Winn on the other side of the river where Route 2 or the 'Military Road' travels north accompanied by the railway track.

Our Land is on the far right (detail above) and goes right down to the river. The land below the road is pretty swampy though.

The bridge to cross the river is on the far left of the map. Various neighbour's homes are marked. Two different saw mills on the river side of the road and a large patch of veg farm marks the place approx. 1 mile down the road where I had my first 'real' job working for our friend's uncle picking fruit and veg. Other plots of land were also theirs and on all of these they also grew potatoes. (Maine is known for being potato country.)

This post is now linked to Off the Wall Fridays at Nina-Marie's.
If you have come from there, you can also see another finish from this week.

Map no.11 - finished

Things have calmed down a bit so I was able to finish the November map which was about Reading. I placed beads for the 3 different learning centres where I taught for New Directions.

The quilting has really made the roads stand out.

This post is now linked to Off the Wall Friday at Nina-Marie's.

Map no.11 - stitched

This past week at meetings and one or two evenings watching some telly with my husband, I have stitched the map for November.

Now to finish layering it, add a bit more stitch to hold the layers and then bind it. This one is about Reading and extends to the places where I taught for New Directions community college.

I am still working on the piece I gave you a glimpse of, but I'm not ready to show more of it yet.

Map no.10 - suddenly developed and here it is

Last night when I hadn't enough brain to actually tackle a waistband, I thought I would see what happened with the map which has been peeking out at me amidst the blouses and other scraps on my table.

I did my City and Guilds Qualification in Hemel Hempstead. Nearly every week for 4 years. Through the traffic on the M25 at whatever o'clock in the morning. If you left at 10 past 7, you got there at 8:00 or so. If you left at 7:30, you got there after the class started at 9:00. So, I often took a nap in the carpark of the college. OR finished stitching whatever it was that was the current projects.

Apart from fighting the traffic on the various motorways on the way there. There was the daunting run the gauntlet experience of getting across the Magic Roundabout. So, I decided I would use the diagram of it in developing the map. I used the printer/photocopier to enlarge it.

when I went looking for what fabric, I decided to use this piece which was a mop it up blotter fabric from a Masterclass I did with Rayna Gillman at FOQ a few years ago. It was about printing your own fabrics.

So I fused the back and began to cut out the shape. I decided to use the roundabout as a design motif, rather than using the map of it as I have mostly been doing.

I found a background that was quite a bit more subtle than the surface designed piece. I liked the contrast of the grunge looking piece with one that seemed more elegant. In a small way, it represented the wide areas of interest in textiles I have developed as a result of the C+G (not that the course itself was particularly encouraging to someone who wanted to think outside the box! but we had a very good teacher for design who opened up worlds for me by showing anything was possible in design.)

Once I laid out the cut roundabout motifs, I fused them into place.

You can see that I chose to create more interest on the background. I decided to use other parts of the road system around the college. I used a map I had printed from the college way back on the first week so I could figure out how to get there. I cut away sections leaving the roads around the college. Then I used it like a stencil inside the open space of the roundabout motif using a silver gel pen.

detail

I thought some of the outside spaces could do with more, so I used the section of the road system which included the roundabout and some of the roads I took to get there. I traced them with both metallic and opaque gel pen colours.
and then for just a bit more, I used a very small version of the roundabout to create star-like motifs in other gel pen colours.

And then stitched it. and found a similar colour fabric to the background for a binding. and it was already done by 10:00pm tonight! I usually hand stitch the binding at the back, but I thought I would just experiment with machine stitching from the front. Okay, it works and is quicker, but I prefer the hand stitching as it is tidier.

So there we are! October's map before the end of October! are you in shock?

I am linking this to Nina-Marie's Off the Wall Friday.

Map no.9 finished

And here we are. The brown binding works to bring it all together.

Map no. 9 (Warning - scroll to the bottom if you just want to see the map)

On Monday after I submitted my piece for Water, Water, and while I was wondering 'what now?' I thought I may as well get on with the next map. It was meant to be for September - it would at least be started in September!

I decided to do a map that was still related to my time at college. The first place I went to was digs in West Springfield...and then later I had a job for a couple years at a Steak House restaurant - also in West Springfield. I had already selected the area I wanted to depict, so next was to consider how to do so.

Most of the other map Journal quilts have had a lot of pre-planning for the design. This time I thought I would just see how things developed.
First I found a random piece of fabric I had used as a sample of some tie and dye techniques. But the dye came out quite pale blue.

And the story...
I started college in January and about 2 or 3 days after I arrived, it was the worst snowstorm the North East of America had had for some time. Some places had to call out the National Guard to clear the roads because the snow had come so quickly that people were stranded on the roads in their cars. and then there was so much snow, the cars were covered. So clearing had to be done by hand. So, the pale blue would work to reference that.

I think if I had been able to get directly stuck into lessons and events at college, I would have been fine. But because it was a small college and because everyone was housebound, there I was in a strange place all on my own. I was studying theology at the college, so I began reading the Psalms. So much of it spoke to my situation...left alone, surrounded by strangers and being fearful about everything. Psalm 27 became my favourite. Time and again in the years to follow as I went through one thing and another - growing and becoming an adult - I connected with the expressions and cries of David the Psalmist.

So, the map. I used the main roads of West Springfield and the street where I first lived.

I traced them onto the fabric using a light box. And then I decided to write out Psalm 27 across the map.

Lately, because I was searching for fabric with script like I used for the first Ramshackle House and for the Horizons piece, a few people have suggested I write on fabric myself. Up to now, I have found it difficult, because many of the fine permanent markers bleed into surrounding areas. So, I decided this was the time to try something out.

I ironed the fabric to freezer paper to support it and keep it from moving around while I wrote on it. Then I used my DR Pilot drawing pen with no.1 tip and wrote out the Psalm. I didn't have a plan, only to make it rather journal like.

The writing worked rather well. Not sure how permanent it will be, but for this it works.

I kept the text to the sides because I thought I might decide to do something different in the centre. I wrote across roads when I came to them but only to the point where you could still work out the words even though some letters were missing.

At this point I decided to write the last verse of the Psalm again larger in the open space I had left.

I have always thought it interesting that David felt it necessary to re-state the waiting bit... how true to life! So many times we have to learn and re-learn a lesson! (Or I do anyway!) It took me quite a few years to get to the point where I was courageous and didn't get in a flap, but rather waited to see what God would do. (Okay, sometimes I still have to learn this again about something else that comes along!)

Then I sandwiched the quilt and set the machine to Free Machine settings and began to 'colour in' the roads and the bits of river which were in that area. So far so good.
Except even though it was sandwiched, it could have done with stabiliser, so it was rather puckery.

Then it was Tuesday and I went to a meeting in London. In the evening, too tired to try anything complicated, I decided just to stitch the top layer to the wadding using thread that would blend in...(while I watched telly.)

This helped to control most of the puckering. I decided to go over the centre verse with black stitching on the machine.

Today between other things and still not having much energy for much else, I did quite a bit more stitching.

And so now I am at the binding stage. As it has shrinkled, I will probably lose some words under the binding, but I think I am okay with that. It is not so much about seeing all the writing as it is about it having a journal look and a main thought to focus on.

I was tempted to do the binding in the same pale blue, but seeing this photo posted, I think it will be brown to visually connect with the roads. By the way, the roads are brown because that was the colour of my uniform at the steakhouse.

And if you got this far, well done! and Thank you. I should be able to get the binding on tomorrow.