Pomegranate Studio

Applique, Embroidery, inspiration, Uncategorized

Pheasant/Phoenix

I am hardly ever proud of what I have done. I follow a curve of getting very excited about something and then thinking it’s a pile of rubbish. I am with all those artists who say that there is massive frustration in what is in your imagination or mind’s eye and what you are actually able to achieve. But, for once, I am absolutely delighted with this piece, an embroidered fabric collage of some sort of bird.

I started this piece on a lovely weekend at the wonderful Shore Cottage Studios on the Wirral. I have written a lot about this magical place on my blog before. This time I went with my Grate Frend, Mike, who is a brilliant maker of fabric collage, and who I thought would like the studio and Sue, who was our tutor, and fabric dyeing (all of which he did). We went for a walk on the beach and gathered some inspirational stuff: stones, feathers, crab shell, seaweed and so on. Then we did some drawing and in the afternoon some microwave and rust dyeing. The following day we started to make our pieces.

I found all this so exciting that I couldn’t sleep on the first night, so I did some sketchbook work and got prepared for the following day. This is my sketch of what I intended to make:

It’s a pretty wreath with all those elements we found on the beach. I went on to work out all the stitches I would use, and was ready to go.

In my hotel room, however, was a copy of House and Garden, which I very seldom read as the houses really are grand, and my house is not. But it had a picture from an exhibition at Waddeston Manor:

I thought he was rather magnificent, although rather more striking than pheasants I have encountered. Anyway, I ummed and ahhed, but finally decided to make a pheasant rather than a wreath. I used the fabric that I had dyed the previous day and supplemented it with a bit from Sue’s stash, and in the bottom right hand corner a pale turquoise piece that Mike had dyed. I very carefully hand-appliquéd a rosy red piece for the body using the needle-turning technique. Bit of a daft mistake. No-one can now see my exquisite (!!!!!) hand appliqué and it meant another layer to stitch through, and it was thick by the end as much of what I used was weighty furnishing fabric.

It is one of my new-found pleasures of retirement that I was able to take it home and work on it the following day. Here are some details of the feathers:

I hope you can see from this photo that I over-dyed some printed fabric – you can see the white lines of the botanical design. I stitched into that with some of the hand-dyed threads we produced.

This shows the next layer of feathers which were stitched with a variety of threads, some commercial and some from the workshop. This was the first stitching and really brought the piece to life and convinced me to keep working into it.

These are the same feathers showing how the embroidery secures them but also allows them a 3D effect. It also shows some of the fraying I did on the feathers’ edges. My fingernails did not thank me for it.

These are the back of the neck detail feathers. The stitching here is with a very fine variegated silk thread produced commercially.

This shows the beads I put on his chest. I bought them for the project and astonished the woman in the bead shop by my speed of choice. The darker faceted beads really catch the light. I wanted to use the turquoise ones to try and capture his brilliant flashes of jewel colours in the photograph source material.

The other things that I knew were going to be really important in this piece were the beak and the eye. I wanted him to look very proud and fierce and defiant. I left the features until last because I knew that they could easily ruin the whole thing which is a bit silly when you think about it, but I knew if I got it right they would bring him to life. So, I deliberately exaggerated his beak and make him much more raptor-like:

I used the Anna Scholz gold fabric I described in my last post, and then I stitched over it with fine cotton perlé to knock the gold back a bit, and also to give it the 3D curve of a beak. I tried very hard to integrate the gold into the face, as it can jump out, but I think it sits okay here.

Then I went onto the eye and thought about several ways of approaching it, including painting it, but in the end I went with a simple satin stitch in black perlé cotton and a small pearl bead:

I really wanted that evil glint in his eye, and I think it more or less worked.

I am really pleased with him, but as I was stitching it, I thought, it’s not a pheasant at all, it’s a phoenix, and not to come all over poetic and wacky woo woo, I think he is symbolic of my new life after being a university teacher for so long.

29th September 2017/4 Comments/by Ann Rippin

Frugal quilts, Joy in work, Patchwork, Shopping and supplies, Uncategorized

A joyful piece from leftovers

If you have read previous posts on this blog, you will know that I hate throwing things away. I also like to make other projects with the leftovers of previous pieces. This little wallhanging is a good example of this. It is made with leftovers from a much bigger piece which I showed at the last Bristol Quilters exhibition:

I started the piece with this tiny leftover square:

Those half triangles in the centre are about 1 cm-1/3″ square and are the trimmings from a block where you sew a small square to a big square and then press it back to give you another shape:

I also included more leftover strips using Kaffe Fassett and Philip Jackson fabric which I had stitched together to form one long random strip which you can see on the outer rows of the small piece. I was really pleased to be able to use this gold fabric:

I got this in an Anna Scholz sale. Whenever people compliment on a frock or coat, it is always by Anna Scholz. Occasionally she sells off really luxurious fabric off the roll at ridiculously cheap prices for fashion students. Somehow I got an invite and then to meet Anna, who was lovely. I had to stagger back to the tube with all this stuff, but the bargains were stupendous. The gold would not have cost more than a fiver a metre, but it takes hand stitching really beautifully. Pulled the stitches quite tightly to give that rippled effect. I had intended to do more stitching on the piece, but the fabrics were too ‘shouty’ and didn’t need more detail. You can just see some fly stitch in the top left hand corner of the above picture. I more or less left it at that.

I now have to decide what to do with it. It is cushion-sized, but I think I would prefer it as a small wallhanging. For that I will need to do the binding.

The thing I thought was interesting, though, is what a happy piece it is. I can’t help but wonder if this is because it was the first piece of patchwork I did after I got my retirement options sorted out. The piece came together in an afternoon, and I think expresses my delight at being able to get on with the next phase of my life.

27th September 2017/2 Comments/by Ann Rippin

Applique, Beads, Creativity, work in progress

Welsh Tweed Eggs

The medieval historian and I are just back from our annual trip to Pembrokeshire. The family joke is that we go for the dogs, but actually, we go because it is so beautiful and we never tire of the beaches and the walks and the small towns. A very regular place of pilgrimage is Melin Tregwynt (pictured above) which is a Welsh woollen mill in the absolute middle of nowhere, but a bit near Fishguard. It makes traditional Welsh wool fabric, not sure you can call it tweed if it isn’t Scottish, but the designs are modern, the palettes contemporary and the whole thing very high end. You have almost certainly seen some of it on television shows on fancy sofas, or in hotels you might have stayed at – the Mercure chain has it for example. It is pretty expensive but fabulous. I bought a throw in the half price sale last year for our 30th wedding anniversary and it is the best thing possible for an afternoon nap. So, count me as a fan.

I have been going and collecting offcuts which they sell by weight or in prepacked bags for years and I have quite a collection. I have been steadily adding them to make blankets for some time.

I have also made embroidered bags with them:

I love doing wool embroidery as the needle slides through so much more easily and the wool feels lovely in the hand.

All this leads on to a group of embroidered egg panels which I did while in Pembrokeshire. I took threads and some beads from home, but I also came across a bead shop in Narberth, Begelly Beads. It’s a tiny bit out of the town so you have to look for it, but it is worth a visit. Some really nice £1 selection bags to be had in various colours, as well as bargains. I often find that the beads that no-one wants for jewellery are perfect for embroidery. Take these unlovely brown rose beads:

I can quite see why you wouldn’t want brown plastic roses round your neck, but they really do look like piped chocolate flowers and they worked very well on this egg. I sewed them onto the edge with blanket stitch and then dotted some on the tweed, following the pattern. I am pretty sure that Fabergé would have loved the skill and delicate palette of the weaving. I am not sure what he would have made of the beads.

I also experimented with different sizes of egg using the same fairly bold pattern:

I reversed the fabric so that the top one has the darker background. Then I used the spot design as a basis for embellishment.

The top, smaller egg gave me a few problems:

The metallic silver glass beads refused to stay put in a graceful sweeping curve. Incidentally, the beads around the edge are glass cubes with orange pigment of some description around the threading hole. They are lovely to work with: chunky and well-finished so they don’t fray the thread. I was introduced to these cube beads by Linda Kemshall who sometimes finishes off her magnificent art pieces with them. That was roughly twenty years ago, and at that time the beads were ruinously expensive. They were imported from Japan and hard to get hold of. Now you can get them widely and they have really come down in price. They are a brilliant way to get a really neat edge and they give weight to a wall piece. Again, you put them on with a blanket stitch the width of the bead.

The final egg for this post is this one where I decided to concentrate on the background rather than decorating the egg. It’s a ‘What if?’ technique for those of you interested in creativity:

I used a variegated thread for the stitching. I was going to put beads on as well, but the simplicity of the design, and the seeding which is a very basic stitch, seemed to make sparkly bits rather too much for once. These are all very small pieces, roughly A5 and so useful for using up scraps.

Just to finish, here is Affie, the colour reference pom:

12th September 2017/0 Comments/by Ann Rippin

Applique, Beads, Embellishment, Embroidery, Fabergé, Fabric, work in progress

This egg panel is very simple. I wanted to use the orange rose print just because I think it is so pretty. I tacked the fabric over a stiff card egg template, stitched almost all the way round it and then pulled the card through the gap. I find this is a good way to handle curves. Then, to give it some interest, I used variegated thread to go round it in beaded fly stitch:

I used very cheap glass beads from Tiger. Sometimes having cheap elements is good because it is easier to be generous with them. The fabric came from a cheap bargain bin at a quilt show. I suppose that lilac and tangerine isn’t everyone’s choice, but I really liked the exuberant full-blown roses which lent themselves to fancy-cutting here.

I don’t have much else to say about this one. It was quick and easy and has a bit of a sparkle but not enough to look flashy.

2nd September 2017/1 Comment/by Ann Rippin

Uncategorised

Some news

Example of reduced pixel size rose

As lots of you who either know me in person, know me via Facebook or read this blog regularly will know, I am starting a small studio at home. As part of this I am working with a wonderful woman called Hannah to build a really smart website. Hannah is great because she gives me lots of excellent training and tips about social media. One thing we have been talking about is doing things to improve my blog and the ease with which people can find it. I am experimenting with three things which I would like to have feedback on:

I am condensing the size of my photos so it will make this much quicker to load, particularly on a smart phone.
I am putting in more headings which increases the likelihood of google searches finding the blog, apparently.
I am including more links to other websites where I can as this also helps google find me.

I would be really interested to know what you think. In the meantime, thanks for your support and I will give you the website address as soon as it goes live.

24th July 2017/0 Comments/by Ann Rippin

Mistakes, Patchwork, Quilting heroines

Squaring up quilts

Badly hanging quilt

This is another quick post. You may remember that I was horrified by just how badly this quilt hung at the Bristol Quilters’s recent exhibition. Well, in the comments I received there was a practical suggestion from lovely and knowledgeable Judith Barker:

The best aid to having straight edges and square corners on a quilt is a tiled floor! I pinched this idea from Carol Bryer Fallert, who has a HUGE studio with 12 inch square black and white tiles. My small workroom has vinyl flooring like fake wood blocks, all straight lines. My kitchen has square slates. You tape the quilt to the floor, and slide a cutting mat under the edge to trim. Really helpful.
Judith B.

The quilt that goes on giving

I’ve never been tremendously fond of the saying that you can eat all the pig except the squeak, but I do like to use as much of a quilt’s basic materials as I can before I begin throwing away, so here’s a mouse made out of the trimmings of this badly-squared quilt:

23rd July 2017/0 Comments/by Ann Rippin

Beads

A word to the wise

Another very quick post to say that these fantastic big sequins are back in stock in branches of Tiger. I bought five packs because I was so upset when they went out of stock last time.

18th July 2017/0 Comments/by Ann Rippin

The stash

Wise words

Teeny, tiny post today. I was discussing the perennial scrap quilts leave you with more scraps than you started with problem last week and was delighted to hear the following acronym: STABLE = Stash beyond life expectancy. Which just about covers it.

17th July 2017/0 Comments/by Ann Rippin

Making, Quilting, Workshops

I recently went on a really great workshop organised by Selvedge magazine. It was called a ‘Craft Spa Day’ and was held in Bloomsbury. Selvedge, by the way is a fantastic magazine. It has the most glorious photos which I virtually want to eat, plus it has introductions to wonderful craftspersons and the story of all sorts of textiles and techniques. It is a real treat. The only problem is that it makes me want to get up and start doing something every time I read it, so I seldom finish reading it. You can get it in WH Smith and arty bookshops, or you can subscribe. If you don’t want to do that you can just look at the website which has glorious graphics.

Okay, so, the day was divided into two parts. The first had two talks on sewing/craft and therapy. Ruth Battersby Tooke gave a brilliant talk on Lorina Bulwer’s extraordinary textile letters:

Bulwer was put in the Great Yarmouth workhouse by her family because she was, as we would now say, suffering from some sort of mental illness. As Ruth pointed out, this sounds awful but it may have been an act of kindness. She led an independent life and was not put in an asylum and it seems that her brother visited her regularly. As part of her condition she wrote the most astounding letters to local dignitaries complaining about her lot and about her sister-in-law, whom she despised. All the text is couched, and occasionally another panel comes to light. It is now in two massive pieces: one twelve feet long and the other fourteen. Ruth used the pieces to talk about reading history through textiles, and also about the embroideries themselves.

The next speaker, Marie O’Mahoney, was talking about whizzy hightech textiles which was fine, but I sort of thought I’d heard it all before a bit. Textiles to monitor our health, textiles to interact with our environment, that sort of thing. The third speaker was due to be Betsan Corkhill, who had a family emergency and so could not attend. She is the woman who has written about knitting as therapy. I bought a copy of her book:

I found it a bit terribly jolly, but it makes some very pertinent points about the therapeutic benefits of knitting and craft in general. I presume there are also scholarly articles that she has written, but this would give you a good overview of the main arguments for knitting. We should all knit for ten minutes a day, by the way.

In the afternoon we got to choose from a series of workshops on spinning, weaving, basketry and quilting. I chose the quilting I had a lovely calm afternoon stitching as the tutor, Abigail Booth, had already marked the cloth, all of which was dyed with tree-based dyes. I finished my piece on the day which I think is important in a workshop, and because Abigail, who was really lovely, showed me a new way of finishing the edges which I adapted a tiny bit to give a frame. My only problem was that I chose a pale turquoise thread to contrast with the nicely browned pastry colour of the cloth:

Fine close up, but when I stood back it looked like I’d used one of the water soluble marking pens and hadn’t washed it out. Hubris, of course, always gets its comeuppance.

6th July 2017/4 Comments/by Ann Rippin

Applique, Colour, Great quilting heroines/heroes, Quilt shows

Wreath Wraith

I have been very busy recently and have let my blog slip. I can only apologise. There are plenty of posts coming up which I hope will go some way to make up for this.

I am starting with the pieces that I entered into the Bristol Quilters Exhibition earlier this month. The first of these is Wreath Wraith. I have no idea why I chose the word ‘wraith’, here; it should have been Wreath Wright, as in someone who makes wreaths. But I think that I might have done so much of this that it made me feel like a wraith or a ghost. My idea was to show how you could make Baltimore style wreaths part of a contemporary quilt.

The appliqué here is all by hand, but the construction of the pieced elements is done on my IKEA sewing machine to show that you don’t need a fancy one to piece. I had to fall back on the Bernina for the machine quilting, though.

I have blogged about making this piece before: (https://annjrippin.wordpress.com/2017/04/17/further-adventures-in-wreath-making/, )and so I thought I would say something about seeing the quilt in the show.

The first thing was my horror in seeing it hanging. About as straight as a dog’s hind leg, as my mother would say. The right-hand-side of this ripples gently and is probably about three inches shorter than the left. Now, I put this down to rushing to finish it, and not hanging it up myself. What a nightmare. Note to self, try the measuring and using a set square the way they tell you to in quilting manuals.

The second thing was my ‘delight’ about being hung next to the totally glorious and perfect appliqué piece by the international championship winning quilter, Sandie Lush.

Just stop for a minute and consider just how perfect this is. Here is a detail:

Not only is the appliqué of a standard to make you weep, but the hand quilting is perfection too. Then look at mine:

Just above entry level. But Sandie is a lovely, gracious and kind woman. She came up to me at the show and said, ‘I love your appliqué. It’s really vibrant and lovely. Mine looks dull and lifeless.’ It didn’t, of course, but very kind of her to say so.

Sandie has a great web page detailing her quilts and her activities. When you see that, you will realise why I was so crimson of mien being placed next to her, and why she is such an inspiration to so many. Her website is here http://www.sandielush.co.uk/

20th June 2017/6 Comments/by Ann Rippin