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I had already printed the background in various shades and values of blue (with two different thermofax screens), overprinted it in orange/gold using soy wax as a resist and then discharged some of it.  I then decided to take a (VERY) rough sketch of the streets around where my Nan grew up in Longton, altering the two main ones to vaguely echo the shape of the old bottle kilns that pervaded the city and gave it its unique character.  I used masking tape as a resist and overprinted the ‘buildings’ using the larger scale thermofax screen in black ink to make it look like the old street maps from the 19th century.

When I looked at it, I then saw that the two main ‘streets’ didn’t look so much like a bottle kiln as a pregnant woman, so I decided to call it ‘Birth of a City’, thinking of the haphhazard, unplanned way the city grew up as hordes of people flocked into it from the countryside to work in the potbanks, leading to overcrowding, poverty and rampant disease.  People lived crammed into houses too small for them; houses sprang up next to factories.

Here is a detail of the hanging:

I wanted to emphasize the rough and ready, homespun nature of the theme, so I decided just to hand quilt it with horizontal running stitches to an old blanket, patched and worn and ragged in places. I left the raw edges of the fabric and just had the original blanket stitches as binding.

Due to the Easter holidays and the fact that my two teenage sons are in the throes of revising for GCSEs and A levels, I am late completing the latest challenge for the International Quilt Challenge, which is Time.   Rather ironic really, due to lack of time…  But I thought I’d put down my thoughts for it so far.

The way I wanted to approach this theme was something around the idea of ‘the past is another country’.  I tried to brainstorm this and wrote down what came into my head….

… time past … we think it will be familiar going back, but actually we have changed and moved on, so what we were, who we were, the old familiar landmarks, look strange to us… strange and foreign…

We have forgotten …

We have a kind of nostalgia but we can never go back, we can only revisit old haunts, some of which will have remained the same, some will have changed forever;

we look at them differently, through different eyes; we are probably taller: things there look smaller, older; strangely familiar yet also foreign to the self that is our present.

And if we could go back to our grandparents’ childhood, into an old photograph, we would experience total culture shock

- the sights

- the sounds

- the smells

- the familiar-yet-unfamiliar ; kin yet unknown people

Anyway, that is as far as I got, and it was taking too long and I got stuck with how to move from there to fabric.  I thought I’d put my thoughts down here in case I use them for another project; but then I got another idea for the theme.

Last night I decided to update my Dreaming Spirals Facebook Page – I had not changed it since the new timeline was adopted and it needed a new photograph as the header.  I decided to make a collage in Picasa of my five Reeds wallhangings.  This is the result:

Today I was thinking about the theme of the challenge again and I decided to change tack completely.  I thought of the various seasons the reeds go through in the course of a year (recorded in this blog in 2010) when I visited them each month for a year to see how they change, and I thought of those timelapse videos where a camera is set to take photos at regular intervals of, say, a plant growing, and then they are put together into a video as if the plant was moving.  All my reeds pieces record a different season of the year so I thought I would try and blend them together using scraps from these pieces as a starting point to show the movement of time.  (If you would like to see the reeds photos again, here is a collage of them that I made at the end of that year).

So that is my plan at the moment!  Watch this space…. Meanwhile, do go and explore my Facebook Page – it looks quite different now.

I can’t quite remember what I did for this but I think I squeezed thin red dye solution from a squeezy bottle and then sprayed the yellow thin dye solution before  the red had chance to dry.

For this I squeezed lines of thick black dye paint on to white fabric and then sprayed yellow and red dye solution over it while it was still wet so it blended a bit around the edges of the black but not quite as much as the previous fabric.

This is another of my black scraped fabric.  I think it looks like rock formations.

The rest of the fabric on this page was dyed a couple of months ago.  In January we had the only cold spell of the winter and for a couple of nights, the temperatures went down to about minus 10.  There are several buckets sitting on our patio and they had filled with water from the copious rain we had had, and these had forced nice thick ice circles!  I decided to take these upstairs to my studio and play around with them and a load of dye.  Well, I did come to regret it – despite putting plenty of plastic in and around the area the ice melted faster than I expected and I had various coloured leaks to deal with… But some of the effects were definitely worth it such as the one above.  I did end up dyeing a lot more fabric than expected, mainly to mop up the drips, and these were in a good varied value range.  Below is one of them – on my last visit to the Knitting and Stitching Show I bought some mixed white Egyptian cotton fabric bundles from Empress Mills, mostly in long thin strips (some even thinner than this one) so most of these came in handy.

A couple more detail shots of the ice effects:

Hope you enjoy the varied spectrum of colours on this post!!

I can see this fabric being useful for landscape backgrounds and suchlike.

This very interesting piece of cloth is actually the fabric I used to wipe the dye from the plastic used for one of my experiments!  I think the black was thickened dye paint and the greeny colour unthickened but it turned out quite dramatic!

I started by using a credit card to scrape dye paint on to fabric.  I was using dye that had been thickened with sodium alginate.

For this piece, I put the thickened dye into an old washing up liquid bottle and squeezed it out.  Where the blue and red lines are, I left the squidgy line for a few minutes for the dye to strike more strongly in that area, and then scraped it with the credit card.

The result was a bit pale because I was actually using some dye that I had dissolved in water (I used it to do some ice-dyeing, but that’s the subject of another post).  So I decided to turn the fabric over and scrape another design on the back.

Incidentally, the fabric I used was from some old cotton pillow cases that I bought for 50p each at the local charity shop.  Lovely fabric and I didn’t even have to scour it first!    Perfect for experimentation…

This was another scraped piece I did at the same time:

I made the blue lines this time by dipping a laminated bookmark into the thickened dye and printing with it after scraping the red and yellow background.

For this next piece, I scraped black dye but the marks didn’t show very strongly on the top:

But the reverse of the fabric is much more interesting: