In every medium are many artists who select some grid layout for their design. I learned about about traditional geometric patchwork and quilting as a cultural project while temporarily based in the USA 1987-94, and instantly loved how identical elements are repeated in horizontal/vertical grids, or composed diagonally (“on point”) in that traditional textile artform. However, I only ever made one traditional design (Flying Geese) quilt, because my creative embroidery background took over. By 1989 I was adding mixed media to traditional quiltmaking techniques to produce original quilted wall art in the then fairly new art quilt medium, and in the early 90s adopted improvisational construction techniques. While my choices in preferred techniques and materials have changed greatly since then, my love of grids has endured, and most of my art quilt portfolio is still based on some kind of grid layout.

The pin boards on my own Pinterest site are mostly textile and fibre art related topics. The titles of my pin collections include contemporary hand stitch, textures, grids, sheers, stitch on paint, holes, edge treatments and more you can check here. Sometimes I save an image to more than one board if they overlap, as do the contemporary hand stitch and textures collections, because to a stitcher these are so related. Pinterest is really a vast catalogue, personalised because it knows my particular interests, and while I browse there at least once a week, it’s often without finding anything especially interesting.

But on Pinterest this morning my attention was really taken by this image of the bodice area of a mixed media dress by USA artist Marylin Stevens (who gave permission to use it here)

If you check carefully and look at the full image, it’s only the front part of a dress, not a complete dress that someone could pull over their head to cover their body, but my interest isn’t how she stitched or wove it, because I can think of several different ways I could get something like this texture in a pattern a bit reminiscent of the Greek key or meandering pattern, also used by the Romans. My interest is the textural pattern itself, achieved using whatever process she did… and it will be on my mind for a while!

A few years ago SAQA expanded its mission concept and statement, adding 3D quilted objects to its former focus, the fairly modern artform of wall quilts that descended from historic traditional quilts. Since the late 80s, 3D forms were increasingly appearing in art quilt exhibitions, and SAQA now accomodates popular use of quilting techniques and materials in soft sculptures including the various vessel types of bowl, basket, box and vase that are popular with this group. SAQA started up a 3D Special Interest Group aa few years ago, which I joined, and it focuses on quilted objects that are outside the two dimensional wall quilts that have always been the backbone of the Studio Art Quilt Associates organisation.

I began making art quilts in 1988, but since the late 80’s I’d been paart of the Creative Embroidery movement of that era, during which time I’d made several soft sculptures, among them my all-time triumph, my 1987 soft sculpture of the historic Golden Eagle nugget. (backstory gold nugget soft scuplture)

I made several fabric covered bowls in the late 1990s, and a couple of fabric covered boxes in 1986-7 of which I don’t have pics, but I also experimented in 2021 (pandemic) with box-shapes as a shadow box kind of presentation for some stitchery- and maybe I should revisit that idea.

The other main application of 3D is bas relief 3D elements attached to 2D wall quilts, which is how I’d describe most of my 3D work up until the Growth series of embellished stuffed Suffolk Puffs that I’ve been exploring in the last two years –

Recently on Instragram I visited a textile artist Victoria Gertenbach who does lots of 3D elements and small items like embroidered fabric beads, mats and vessels. In that link are two small vessels she posted last year (2025) showing me enough to work out how she probably makes them. They’re small, and she commented that the left, more yellow one, was still a bit floppy but would stiffen up with more stitching. She doesn’t give dimensions for her works so I’m not sure, but this newer one posted earlier this year could be larger, and I feel she probably added stiffening during that construction. Milliners’ stiffening and lightweight canvas would both work here, and the product called fosshape that SAQA’s in N.America and probably Europe – maybe everywhere except LATAM – all adore working with! But anyway, I have a heap of old Xray photos that will be great. They’re easy to sew through by hand or machine, and for something fairly large I’d machine two of them together to form one (stronger) sheet.

My fans know I regularly visit that site most days of the week, checking recent updates there, and I usually spend perhaps 5-10 minutes, but as we all know, that can so easily lead to an hour or more exploring down some burrow hole before coming up for a breath of air, a cup of tea or a walk outside!

I occasionally write a series on interesting things I’ve saved there, https://www.pinterest.com/alisonschwabe1/ as browsing has led me to artists whose interesting work I maaay not have seen elsewhere, eg https://www.alisonschwabe.com/weblog/?p=3611 and https://www.alisonschwabe.com/weblog/?p=7160

Today I noticed a really interesting image of a tube of sheer fabric showing a bunch of pearl like beads inside it, wrapped around the base of a model’s neck….and in fact there were several similar type constructions that wowed me so much with the potential of this, that I started a new pin board https://www.pinterest.com/alisonschwabe1/tubes/ A bit of googling didn’t bring anything directly like them up, and so far none of them have links to their makers’ or gallery’s websites, so I haven’t been able to ask anyone for permission to use those images, which I saved as the reminder of interesting 3D potential.

The obvious thing of course would be to just copy that idea and make myself some art to wear, as I have plenty of ‘why on earth did I buy those beads?’ in my stash – but that’s not my style. However, other ideas include a change of scale, taking it up to something pretty big in a sculpture intallation; or couching lines of such sheer bead containers onto a 2D piece including it in a fair bit of other texture…. and my recent Out of Order 9: Volcano piece is calling to me for further development – using this idea perhaps?

Mike and I are planning to sell this large house and move into an apartment sometime soon. So I’ve started a gradual process of clearing out surplus and unnecessary stuff we’ve accumulated, and my personal goal is the removal of 2-3 bags of ‘stuff’ per day. Many drawers and cupboards have already been processed. Yesterday while cleaning out some of the unwanted magazines and old books on my studio bookshelves I found several catalogues that I’d completely forgotten, books I hadn’t opened in years. Some I’m happy to pass on to one of several well-placed people ro inspire them or help them teach, but there are others that I will never part with.

One which I had not looked at for a long time both surprised and pleased me very much. It’s a hard covered catalogue of an exhibition I attended in 2005 at the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum, Golden CO. 

In full colour, it begins with a very well presented history of the art quilt movement, and the museum’s decision in the early 2000’s to begin adding a collection of contemporary art quilts. The museum’s organisers decided to concentrate on 50+ artists with some connection to Colorado, including yours truly because I lived in Denver while producing Ora Banda, which was my first quilt selected for Quilt National,1993. Donors were also asked for a statement about our work and several other images, and two of those also appeared in this book; plus the introductory text essay contains a quote from my statement. It was so interesting to re-read this book’s outline of the history of this modern medium, and note how my statement about my work still holds true today. The plan for this collection included preparation of this important catalogue for the 2005 exhibition of the donated quilts, which I attended on opening night. I’m proud to have been included in this particular project.

A few years ago on a trip to the US I bought Shelley Rhodes’ Fragmentation and Repair, from the same publisher, Batsford, and I’ll never let that one go, as I open it every few months to enjoy, and never get sick of being inspired, it’s fabulous. Perhaps having done a StitchClub workshop with Shelley in 2020 is a factor, too.  Another book I will never let go is Needlelace and Needleweaving by Jilly Nordfors, which I bought in Darwin in 1976, over 50 years ago! It was one of the first needlework books I bought while enrolled in creative embroidery class at the community college that I took there to help keep myself sane during the Wet Season. While I haven’t done much with those techniques in the past 30 years, the book remains inspiring, so who knows? Never say never.

I’ve recently been considering the terms inspiration and influence, raised recently on a FB page I follow. They are not the same at all, and eventually the terms derivative and copying need to be considered in this context too, but I’ll think more about those and might come back to them later, or not.

Two important influences in my art are

(1) the long background of the decorative art of embroidery which began in my childhood home and was strongly boosted by the creative embroidery movement in Australia in the late 70s.

(2) A brief time I spent learning construction of, and the culture around, the traditional American patchwork quilt when I relocated to USA in the late 80s. Many traditional American quilts are of course appliqued, a technique I knew as an embroiderer; but geometric piecing I knew nothing about, and had a great time learning. That field of textile art still influences my own so that grids are my design layout of choice. Grids have become symbolic because a regular one is a perfect metaphor for stability and normality, whereas an irregular or broken one suggests instability and disruption.

I’ve concluded that in my own art there are there are two principal sources of inspiration:

(1) I’ve had a lifelong interest in Landscape Landscape shapes and textures feature in my art as repeated units of abstract patterns in fabric, thread and other materials. Landscapes are marked and shaped by both violent events (earthquakes, Tsunamis, floods and volcanos) and gradual change (the actions of wind, water and temperature in cycles of erosion and deposition) In a Life, the passage through birth and maturity to death displays both major life events like marriage and medical events which can suddenly impose dramatic changes to a person’s body or life, but there are also smaller, gradual changes we barely notice, like skin wrinkling and greying hair. 

Most of my landscape inspired works are named after a place I’ve visited or lived in, that connection being referred to in the work’s title or statement.

Recent inspiration comes from my concern with the growing disruptions to the agreements for rules-based order that since the mid C20 have provided relatively stable international networks or sets of rules governing how communities, nations and companies operate, cooperate and cooperate in areas of trade and finance, economic development, and all kinds of information sharing.

Around the world today populations, companies and governments are facing political, financial, technological and climate change pressures, and our familiar systems threaten to buckle into disorder and sometimes even chaos. My responses in stitch and texture are in this Out of Order series featuring elements placed within increasingly disrupted grids.