Although I auditioned pink/orange/red fabrics for the background to this piece, I found it really needed to be mounted on something glittery; and interestingly silver and pewter didn’t do it, but I did have this tiny gold dots on black, perfect. And there’s still another week before I take this and several other Growth pieces to to my photographer Eduardo. I’m considering adding a few little strings of beads to wander out from several of the puffs to anchor onto the background – or also considering some scattered single beads, just as on top of the puffs, in various places… and I have a few days to think about it, try one out and see…

It took me a while to realise these 3D works featuring beads and sequins really need protection when they’re being handled and in storage; so as I finished each one I’ve made a cloth bag to put it in for that protection. But before I reached that conclusion, I gifted a small one to a friend and can hardly believe I didn’t even put it in a little plastic bag, ye gods!! Anyway, my friend got it home and photogrpahed it on a piece of furniture in amonth a group of several antique silver things, so that’s nice, so the piece made the journey of several hundred kilometers safely.

So often when I need work photographed I’m in some kind of hurry, perhaps only the front looks finished but everything on the back is merely tacked into place! Or, I need the photos back that night to allow for entering some deadline on the other side of the world which is half a day ahead of Montevideo, and until the last minute I’m getting the right sized hanging rod, or tacking the binding into place as mentioned. I’ve declared this is the final one of the 3 new, 3D works I’m asking him to photograph. They’ll be included in my forthcoming solo exhibition in Maldonado; the oldest work is from 2018 but everyting else is more recent and none have been previously shown in Uruguay. It’s way too long since my last solo exhibition, for various reasons, which, if you’re close to my daily life you knew of them, anyway, and if you’re not, don’t worry, that time has passed.

Christmas is coming, and I need to focus a bit on the distant family, order gifts to be delivered from their local vendors, and pen the annual we’re-still-alive-and-hope-you-are-too newsletter to rels and friends, old and new, in places we’ve lived around the world.

I also need to focus a bit on things like organising little label panels to go near each work, organise a guest book, and an album gallery containing my resume, statement and a few things about me for visitors. I can either be quite relaxed about how it’s all falling into place, or I’m hopelessly delusional… One great thing I learned this week is that the earlier information I got that the Casa de la Cultura galleiries are open mondays to fridays AND saturdays (I’d been told it was M-F only.)

The first one of these puff compositions I named Growth, and in the couple of months since I’ve made more and enjoyed exploring them, so they’ve become a series with that name.

Not only did I have no idea what I would do with it, I confess I also bought the gold version on a black background. This fabric is polyester, a very fine jersey knit so a bit stretchy, and when filled with polyester fibre it feels nice and squishy. Very light, so all the large and medium puffs in this group have from 1 to 5 really heavy glass beads right inside to give the group a bit of heft that feels more commensurate with their appearance and size when handled.

I’m currently working on another in cottons and glittery party fabrics in shades of red, orange and pink, both prints and hand-dyed, plus tiny gold beads, of course. It’s the last new work I’m making to include in my January solo exhibition, and I have a date for Eduardo to take some photography early December. But I’ll get back to them sometime early in the New Year, and have plans to go much larger.

For more on how I’ve always chosen and bought fabric:https://www.alisonschwabe.com/weblog/?p=1712 My most important fabric rule is that I only ever buy a fabric that I love, because I know I will use it, sometime. My other rules:

• If it appeals, I buy a 1/8 – 1/4  metre/yard
• if I really like it I buy 1/2  m/yd.
• If it’s something special to me I buy 1 – 3 m/yds.
• If I am quite over-the-top delirious at finding it, which has happened a couple of times, and I’ve just bought what was left on the bolt.   

As I go larger with thee forms, making balls of waste fabric into the core inside to puff covering could become something of a stash reducer. Although as quilt making artists go, my fabric stash has always been very modest (which I attribute to my peripatetic life history) Starting from the time I took up quilt making in 1989, to when I began living here in Uruguay c. 2000, I was used to being able to pop out to a nearby fabric store that stocked only the kinds of fabrics I liked to work with any time I liked/needed to. Such shops aren’t a thing here, which in turn influenced me to explore ways of working with other fabrics, both natural and man made.

When a new neighour took me along to the local guild, ACQ, one night early in 1988, I was immediately hooked, and my interest in fabric and stitch turned from creative embroidery to traditional American patchwork and quilting. I took some construction classes, joined a bee, and made one Flying Geese pattern wall quilt. This southwestern (US) colour palette for home decor was in vogue at the time 🙂

Within the year, though, I’d begun making my own original design art quilts:

The bee I joined called themselves the Friday Morning Block Party, which was, at the name suggests, quite traditional, but it soon became clear they were a very creative group, and some were just starting to explore non-traditional quiltmaking. By the time I left Denver six years later to return to Australia (1994) we’d renamed ourselves The Over The Edge Quilters; Sherry and Barb had written and published a fun book on quilting bees; lawyer Janet Jo had a nice number lecturing groups on copyright issues, and had began selling her hand dyed fabrics; two more of the group had become accredited quilt judges, and another helped start a critique and ideas group for several of us seriously exploring art quilts andgetting into art quilt sections of quilt guild shows – I made Quilt National’03. They were the hardest group I’ve ever had to leave anywhere.

But of course, when change happens there are always several diehards who resist changing anything. I remember back in the late 90s at a West Australian Quilt Guild meeting, a traditional quilter sniffily informed me that her quilts were always totally hand pieced and quilted, and always used only 100% cotton fabric and thread… as if this made her work somehow better. The other side of that coin is, though, that I’ve also heard barely concealed disdain in an art quilt maker’s comment about those who take great pleasure in carefully following published patterns.

Tradition is a two sided coin.  One side of that is the very human wish to preserve the skills and knowledge from the past for future generations, and I’m quite sure quilt making skills and traditions are being well preserved by traditional quilt guilds today.  When I became hooked, the rotary cutter and cutting mat were still pretty new, and hand piecing was being largely replaced by machine sewing. Other tools had appeared, too – including a variety of plastic rulers and templates, curved safety pins, and of course long arm quilting machines.

In my field of quilted textile art, techniques have also seen a lot of change, including foundation piecing, stack and whack©, image transfer technology, and online workshops of all kinds, both paid and free.  We can shop for fabrics, notions and books on-line, and traditionalists can still get the books with traditional patterns and instructions in magazines and books from shops and libraries. But the biggest change is how much informational material is available online, much of it free of cost through YouTube, Pinterest, artists’, teachers’ and groups’ websites, digital newsletters and blogs. Another important thing about techniques in contemporary fibreart is that previously clearly defined textile areas like beading, knitting, crochet, surface embroidery, lace making, quilting, patchwork and more, are all now being freely borrowed by creative fibreart people and used in combinations not previously imagined.

As long as modern fibreartists continue to tinker with the traditional crafts, the overlapping fuzziness at the edges of individual textile arts will continue to further stimulate creativity. 

I’ve always found interest in the processes that produce landforms on different kinds of material, so much so that I studied geomorphology at university, so not surprising perhaps that the Earth’s surface has influenced my art. In the 80s, I was definitely aware of being inspired by the shapes, lines, colours, and textures of Landscape; but I wasn’t thinking much about my emotional reactions to it.

This poor quality image is of a 1995 work, “Pahoehoe 1” and there are several other works from that time based on these landforms.

I addition to the those two, there are others prompted by an experience while I was an artist in residence in Katherine NT, one very hot afternoon hiking up a dry river bed of rounded stones to a bush picnic spot. I did several based on that memory, including Sunburnt Fragments and Afterglow, below:

I’ve done lots of creating with these shapes in 2D, but as my regular readers will know, I am increasingly interested in 3D soft sculptural forms, including Growth, which will be showing in my upcoming exhibition in Madonado Uruguay opening January 2nd.

In a recent sunday morning browse on Pinterest, I came across a wonderful sculptural fibre piece, and followed the link to fibre artist Tininha Silva’s website . Her clear, brief statements really resonated with my own inspiration from organic patterns in and on the Earth’s surface.

The longer I spend making fibre art, the less surprised I am to discover links back to my past, like threads running through the different parts of my life.

Which brings me to my recent puffs craze. While finishing off the backs of the latest orange, red and pink puffs, I’m continuing exploratory sample making, as shown in several previous posts:

I have several metres of waxed polyester thread/cords in appropriate toning colours that I’d like to loop about and have hanging down, but wandering stings of glass beads are a thing I like at the moment, too, as they add to the organic look. Yesterday I found some vibrant pink rattail cord and some waxed polyester ones (dull almost burnt orange, hot pink and a rich red) so I’ll be adding something else 3D to this piece – strings of beads, wisps of organza or looped and hanging threads, and maybe all three… and just as I’ve done for the others, I’ll finish it with hanging loops on the back or mount it on an artist canvas, giving the choice to display it horizontally or vertically.