Taming The Wilderness - detail

Or, in my case, make a quilt!

I should be in the middle of a busy teaching schedule here in the studio but I’ve find myself with two ‘empty’ weeks. I have been isolating for the last week and have had to cancel next weeks workshop due to students having problems.

Why isolating? Well it’s a bit complicated. Our grandson lives part time with us and his dad, our son Joe, and part time with his mum and her parents. Last weekend a person in his mums household tested positive for Covid so everyone in the household was contacted by track and trace and told to isolate. Including our grandson who had just switched to our house and so was told to spend his isolation period with us. Isolation is tough on adults and would be totally cruel on an 11 year old who is pretty worried and upset. So we have been isolating as a household …. hence I had to cancel the workshop. The students have been wonderfully understanding, the family member with Covid has recovered and we’ve all been testing negative on our daily lateral flow tests. Panic over.

Some people might see two ‘empty’ weeks as an opportunity to relax, chill out, watch some TV etc etc. Hmmm …. so I have done a little bit of that but I just don’t have it in me to not find something ‘productive’ to fill the gap. Hence the quilt. It’s only a little one (30cm by 196cm high) but I’m rather pleased with it. I’ve called it Taming The Wilderness (detail above) and I will be entering it into a Contemporary Quilt exhibition called ‘Uncharted’. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while you’ll know that I work in series and don’t make my quilts with entry to themed exhibition in mind. But if the theme fits with a series that I’m working on then I will make a piece that fits a specific size requirement. Which is the case with this one.

My current series is called Cadence and is about the joy of process; the joy of making. I’m using my favourite colours and my favourite techniques …. I’m making comfort art in an uncertain world. Cadence is a musical term and I used a specific type of cadence to determine the layout of Cadence 7 and plan to use another type of cadence for my next ‘big’ quilt. So musical connections are generally buzzing around in my head.

During the pandemic I have found myself listening to more and more instrumental CDs and have been playing a lot of music by a band called Explosions In The Sky. One of their CDs that I brought a couple of months ago is called The Wilderness. It has the most fabulous cover art by visual artist Jacob van Loon that I could loose myself in for hours. In my head Uncharted = Wilderness = my new quilt. The jurors will probably consider the connection too tenuous but making this quilt has filled my empty week and made me happy.

And happy is good.

Taming The Wilderness (detail of backface)

I am very pleased to announce that you can now buy my first book, Breakdown Your Palette, as a digital edition on my website! This version costs just £12 and you can find out more about the book here and buy it here.

It is nearly two and half years since I published this book and I have been overwhelmed by the response. But I know that shipping makes it expensive for those living outside the UK and, since Brexit, sales within the EU have decreased significantly. I did look at selling it via Amazon using their global print on demand service but, frankly, the quality of the printed copy I received just wasn’t good enough. Yes, Amazon would maybe bring in lots more sales but this is my baby and I’m letting my heart rule my head this time!

Instead I have created a digital edition of the book and hope that you can help me spread the word!

As a little incentive I will donate £1 from every digital book sold during the month of July to the charity that I’m supporting this year, YoungMinds. The charity supports children and young people with mental health issues in the UK and it’s work is more important than ever as children's lives continue to be impacted by the pandemic.

I am running out of the printed version of the book but have decided to order another print run for those who want to order a physical book and for selling at shows and other events. So if you see a ‘sold out’ notice on my website don’t worry, the book will soon be back in stock!

Bye for now, Leah

‘Two layer’ breakdown printed fabric by Julia Green

Breakdown printing is more than just an obsession, it is the process I get the most pleasure from teaching. Those of you who follow me on Instagram and Facebook may have spotted that I’ve just had another fabulous five days teaching my Breakdown you Palette workshop. It is just magic seeing the breadth of work my four students achieved - from tentative beginnings to confident use of colour and adding second layers of print. I really do love my job!

I’m teaching more ‘Breakdown' workshops this year than I would normally do as I try to catch up on all the delayed workshops from last year. If you would like to join me I have a few places left. It is very short notice but I have one place left on the workshop that starts on Monday 28th June. I have two places on the 12th to 16th July workshop and two places on the 23rd to 27th August workshop. The workshops cost £400 and you can find more information here.

I know that many people are still nervous about mixing and especially about travelling and staying in hotels. I work hard to make sure that my studio is a safe space and encourage students to use lateral flow tests before they arrive and part way through the week. I’ve also had some very good feedback on my local Premier Inn (Trafford Centre North) from students who’ve stayed there over the last few weeks.

But if this year is too soon I am very pleased to announce that I am now taking bookings on my Breakdown Your Palette workshops next year. I’m only planning on teaching the workshop three times in 2022. The dates are 16th to 20th May 2022, 6th to 10th June 2022 and 27th June to 1st July 2022. You can find more information here.

Can’t make it to my studio? I also offer this workshop as an ‘on demand’ online workshop. You can join at anytime and work at your own pace. There are over 24 hours of videos, detailed notes and support from me via month Zoom meetings, a private Facebook group and by email. The online workshop costs £240 and you have access to the content (and me!) for twelve months. Click here for more details and to sign up.

And, of course, there is still my Breakdown Your Palette book …. really detailed instructions for those of you who want to have a play at home … be warned it is totally addictive!

Below - students gallery - fabulous work by Julia R, Julia G, Gerry and Janet!

After a couple of weeks break due to teaching I have spent the last few days finishing my latest art quilt. It is called Cadence 7 and I’m sharing a detail from the piece. Yes it is made from breakdown printed fabrics. Yes turquoise features heavily. And yes there is lots and lots of straight line quilting. But it needed something more.

The addition of a thin strip of complementary colour and some curved lines have helped to bring the piece alive. I absolutely love it and hope that some of you will get to see it in the Art Quilt section at Festival of Quilts at the end of July. Because the quilt is big (297cm wide and 101cm high) it should get displayed on a white wall …. I design my pieces to be exhibited on white walls and don’t enter them into shows where they would be displayed against black cloth. My art, my choice!

The next couple of months are super busy. As well as teaching my own workshops I’m delighted that Christine Chester and Ruth Brown will also be teaching in my studio. There are a few places left if you fancy a fun packed staycation in (hopefully sunny) Manchester. Details on my workshops page. And then there is Festival of Quilts where I will be demonstrating breakdown printing on my stand in the Quilt in Action area. I have everything crossed that it goes ahead - it will be such a boost in so many ways!

And whilst I like to fool my husband that I can bend time to get a couple of extra hours out of every day the reality is that teaching is all absorbing (and knackering) so I’m unlikely to get much ‘art’ time. I certainly won’t have the time to start the next Cadence quilt but I might find time to do a little sampling of some new ideas ……..

Time has done that weird thing again. The four week gap I had between workshops looked so long and held so much potential for making art …. and it feels like it has gone by in a flash! Don’t you just hate it when that happens!

My studio is nearly ready for tomorrows and next weeks Breakdown Your Palette workshops. I just need to pack away my sewing machine which I can do in the morning. I am determined that before I go to bed tonight I will have finished the straight line quilting on my latest quilt. I had hoped to get this done and the two halves of the piece sewn together but that might be too much to ask. I have a gazillion ends to sew in which I can do in the evenings but I will have to wait two weeks before I can finish the quilt. It is exquisitely frustrating to be close; to know what you want to add to a piece to finish it and to know how you want to start the next piece in a series …… But such is life!

That said I will be spending the next two weeks breakdown printing with the added bonus of having students in my studio! I can live with that.

Leah x

Quilting my new piece is progressing slowly because this week has been a bit of a box ticking week. I’ve been working through the list of ‘stuff’ that I decided to get done before I teach again on the 17th. The most time consuming, and the most fun, has been working through my pile of demo / sample fabrics and making up some new fabric packs for the website. Have a look at the fabric section of my shop. I’ve added a few more Wonky Print Inspiration Packs, this time in Cotton Poplin rather than Plain Cotton, and a few Absolutely Darling Hand Dyed Packs. I’ve also added two new types of pack. My new Cool Coordinating Colour Families contain fifteen different coloured pieces of hand dyed fabric. I love working with colour families - using dark, medium and light values of two starting colours you get fifteen pieces of fabric that will always ‘work’ together. And I have introduced a new pack called One of a Kind. These packs contain larger pieces of breakdown printed fabric that are just too good to chop up and use in my Wonky Print packs. Some of the pieces are samples from my Breakdown Your Palette book and some are demo pieces from my Breakdown Your Palette workshops. These new packs are priced individually based on the amount of fabric in each pack. I hope you like them!

I have also added a new gallery page to my website featuring my Print series. OK, so this should have been added 18 months ago but I got distracted! I’m not sure if these pieces will ever get an outing again but at least now they are ‘out there’ in the virtual world!

And I got around to adding three new Thermofax designs to my shop. I designed these for my online version of Breakdown Your Palette and rather love them. I’ve also asked my silk screen manufacturer to make me some square screens (which should have been done a year ago!). They will be 16 inches x 16 inches and I’ll add them to the shop as soon as they are in stock.

Other boxes ticked …. I fixed the toilet seat in the Bog Shed (it’s a glamorous life!). Thanks to the lovely Sue I’ve managed to find an electrician to check the lighting circuit in the studio which is playing up. He can’t visit until early June but at least he answered his phone. I guess electricians are in demand. I brought some plants for the garden which are sheltering in the studio porch because the weather is awful. And I’ve ordered a coat stand for the studio porch. Its turquoise. I’m very excited!

Now back to my quilting …

Another week has passed and I’m feeling really positive about the piece I’m working on! Having got a lovely stack of breakdown printed fabric I spent a couple of hours cutting about half of the fabric into long strips. I cut them in three widths - 2.5inch, 1.5inch and 1inch - without thinking about where the cut landed on the fabric. I think I’ve mentioned before that I don’t cherry pick which fabrics to use. The beauty of breakdown printed fabric is the density of mark you get and the fabulous combinations of colour and mark you get when selecting fabric and using fabric in a random way.

I then divided my pile of cut strips into two groups - a darker value group and a lighter value group - albeit a few of the strips sort of sat in the middle and could have gone in either group. And then the real fun began! I took the pile of darker value fabrics, opened up the strips and jumbled them all together. I closed my eyes and started plucking strips from the pile at random. I pinned the strips to my design wall in the order I picked them. I wanted the finished quilt to be about three metres long so needed about 4.5 metres of strips - good job I have a big design wall.

Next I inserted paler sections of fabric of varying length into each strip. Although I selected the fabric pieces at random I based the length of each insertion on a short musical score of twelve notes. The earlier quilts in this new Cadence series were constructed using ‘pleasing’ shapes with no intent other than to enjoy the process of making. But having regained my creative confidence I wanted to link this new piece to ‘cadence’, in this case a musical cadence. Because the width of the strips varied the repeat pattern was not immediately obvious but I know its there.

It is always very tempting at this stage to do some ‘tweaking’; swapping out bits of fabric that maybe don’t have a lot of interesting marks on them or switching fabrics around to avoid two strips cut from the same fabric sitting side by side. But it is often these ‘imperfections’ that pop and create interest in the finished quilt so I resisted temptation and moved onto to constructing the quilt.

Because my sewing machine only has a 7 inch throat I construct large quilts in two halves and put them together as late in the stitching and quilting process as possible. I prepared two pieces of backing fabric and wadding, using basting spray to attach the wadding to the backing fabric. And then I used a stitch and flip method to add my strips, in order, to the wadding / backing. I love this method of construction because it eliminates the basting process .. I am making my ‘quilt sandwich’ as I join the strips. But also because it allows me to keep the long edges of all my strips parallel satisfying the control freak in me! In the photos below you can see that I use a sharpie to draw parallel lines, 2 inches apart, on my wadding. In my Ruins quilts all my strips were 2.5inches wide so each raw long edge lined up with a drawn line. In these Cadence quilts the strip width varies but I can still use the drawn lines as a guide. And so I have spent three days this week stitching and flipping! And as I’ve been sewing I’ve been thinking about the quilting and thinking about the orientation of the finished piece …. wondering what it would look like turned through 90 degrees?

I find myself in the envious position of having four weeks between teaching commitments with very few demands on my time. My online Breakdown Your Palette workshop is ticking along smoothly, there are no hints of impending crisis / distraction on the family front and my ‘bits and bobs’ to do list is pretty short.

So I am free to make ART! I have a ‘Cadence’ quilt in my head that is screaming to get out so the timing is good. This new series is inspired by the joy of process, the joy of making. And it certainly is joyous to be able to immerse myself in it. The fact that spring is here and we’re enjoying a spell of warm, sunny weather just adds to the sense of well-being that comes with making.

Now that I’ve cleared out the drain on my screen washing trough (it’s a glamourous life!) I have been able to spend this last week breakdown printing. I started by making and drying 25 embedded object type breakdown screens. I used the same set of objects over and over again so that there are common shapes and marks on my printed fabrics. I worked with seven of the darker value colours from a colour family and kept each colour separate so have printed a set of mostly monochromatic fabrics. And what a glorious collection of fabrics they are! Ranging from turquoise to a muted grey-purple these are definitely fabrics that make my heart sing. And I have plenty - I printed about 18 square metres this week and have lots of lighter value fabric in the same colourway left over from an earlier printing session.

Next up - cutting the fabrics up then ‘composing’ the quilt! One week down, three to go.

A very big thank you to Judy, Lis, Mandy and Sharon for being the first students back in the studio after a 6 month plus gap and for being the first students on my Colour Your Palette workshop. We had a great five days. It was so good to share my studio with like minded company who’s surname isn’t Higgins! (Not that I don’t love my Higgins boys ….). There was lots of chat, lots of laughter and most importantly, lots and lots of colour!

The workshop is a deep dive into understanding and using colour when working with dyes although large elements of it are equally applicable to other media. I’m a great believer that we learnt best by ‘doing’ and that’s what we did. We mixed and scrapped hundreds of swatches as we explored the impact of the hue bias in each of our co-primary colours and as we looked at the complex colours you get when you start mixing complimentary colours. We explored different colour schemes and considered how our colour choices are determined by our artist styles and our preferred techniques for applying colour to cloth. And we worked through colour studies based on different sources of colour inspiration. Lis and Sharon even found time to print some fabric as well. There are a couple of tweaks needed to my timings and demonstrations but I’m pretty happy with how the five days went and am looking forward to teaching Colour Your Palette again in July and October.

In fact I’m looking forward to all of my workshops scheduled for this spring and summer. My next workshop is Breakdown Your Palette on 17th to 21st May, assuming we ease restrictions on hotels and travel on the 17th as expected. I have one place left on this workshop and am going to start an hour later than normal at 10.30am so that students can travel to me in the morning. I also have a few places left on Breakdown workshops later in the summer. Breakdown is my favourite thing and my favourite workshop so if you fancy joining me please click here.

I also want to thank those of you who tuned into my first live workshop yesterday as part of The Creative Craft Shows Craftfulness Festival. I was a nervous wreck leading up to it - mostly worrying that the technology wouldn’t work but, in the end, everything went well. It did however take half a bottle of red wine and a tub of Ben and Jerries to peal me off the ceiling afterwards!!!

Needless to say that I’m planning a quiet few days ………