London Town

In August I set off for London and met up with my friends Colleen and Helena at the airport.  We arrived, finally at Covent Garden at this building below - our air b'n'b for the next 2 nights.  It was perfectly located for walking just about everywhere! 

 We walked to Buckingham palace, saw a few guards marching by and then headed off to Harrods and the V&A museum.  So lovely to have the museums be free - you don't feel that you have to see everything in one go.

A little bit of  a display of William Morris.  

The London Eye is still going strong but this is as close as we got.  We walked to the Tate Modern to see a fabulous exhibit of Georgia O'Keeffe's work but unfortunately couldn't take pictures.

Westminster Abbey - with too long a line to get in!

St Paul's cathedral - the sun shone on it just for a minute.

A quilted outfit from 1640!  

Trafalgar Square

 and Big Ben

Festival of Quilts 2016

The Festival of Quilts has just finished and I have so enjoyed it!  There are so many different aspects to it.  The British Guild exhibit, modern quilts, special displays by Russian, Korean and Japanese quilt artists, Claire Benn, SAQA, EQA.......  And lots of vendors!  And a section where teachers have a small booth to sell their books and kits and show their work. 

Below are some of the first prize winners.  

Immediately below is a piece by Laura Kemshall which is a photograph that is about 30x70" (total guess on my part) which has been quilted with words and patterns. Detail in the picture below.

Laura Kemshall - Quilters Guild Challenge

Sarah Humphrey - Modern

Robin Fahy - Contemporary

Sandy Chandler - Traditional

Leah Higgens - Art Quilts

Sussex Spectrum - Group quilt

Elefriede Grooten - Pictoral quilt

This is a quilt by Linda Forey made with blocks given to her by the Beaconsfield Quilt Guild when she left Montreal

More quilts to come! 

Cape Cod

Our second annual visit to Welfleet where Doug and Sandy have rented a cottage. It overlooks the Audubon Wildlife Sanctuary.  I wish I could say that we saw lots of birds but we didn't - it always seemed to be low tide when I looked out

There is a park where one can walk around and it's very pretty and overlooks the swampy areas.  We came across a number of wild turkeys on the walk.     

We had a nice  walk on the Great Island Trail which took us along sand dunes and then across to the ocean side beach.  It was very beautiful and interesting to see the various landscapes - oak forest to grasses to extensive beach.

   

And we had our afternoon swim at Lecount Hollow Beach at Maguires Landing.  It was very hot and the water very cold!  Last year we saw seals in the water but not so this time.

A walk along the beach at the Great Island trail provided the source for a small quilt that I made for an assignment for my course with Elizabeth Barton.  The theme for July was rhythm. 

More Indigo

The dye bath that we used at our retreat is still kicking.  It's been boosted a few times with thiox and I think may finally be losing it's oomph but I haven't thrown it out yet.  It's not quite as iridescent as before.  However it did a great job of over dyeing Colleen's emerald green scarf.

and these are going to be fun socks to wear. 

 This is a pillow case that was looking rather aged.  The dye is definitely fading. 

 And a little of nature's indigo!  Blue jay feathers.

Text'Art Retreat

Once again the group of us spent four lovely days at the cottage with a variety of things that we organized to do.  This included felting scarves, indigo dyeing, sewing and just relaxing.


Lauma organized silk organza for us to make scarves using wool roving to felt into it.  It was a labour intensive work involving lots of water, lots of rolling in bubble wrap, and having our arms shaken out of their sockets using a sander to pound.  Many hours of work per scarf and many hours of work for Lauma who kindly saw that we did it right and came out with great success as shown below.

my scarf

On the side, I prepared an indigo dye bath using ProChem's PRO Indigo mixed with lye and thiox and it grew to a lovely colour - an iridescent purple crust on top and a lovely lime-green below. 

the studio

dressed for action

when the fabric comes out of the dye bath it is greenish and oxidizes to a lovely deep blue.  The more often it is dipped, the darker the blue.  Below are pieces tied, twisted and scrunched to produce various effects.

Colleen keeping her work down - it floats otherwise.

Of course, the cocktail hour is an important part of the day, which includes the above work, walks and swims.

some of the results.

getting started on my scarf