remnants, remains and fossils

remnants 

A small remaining quantity of something. A piece of cloth or carpeting left when the greater part has been used or sold.

Synonyms:

remains 1. all that is left after other parts have been taken away, used up, or destroyed 2. a corpse 3. the unpublished writings of a deceased author 4. ancient ruins or fossils picture courtesy from: http://www.geosociety.org/graphics/gv/PikesPeak/03fossilWasp.htm fossils The remains or impression of a prehistoric organism preserved in petrified form or as a mold or cast in rock: ‘sites rich in fossils’. derogatory. An antiquated or stubbornly unchanging person or thing: ‘he can be a cantankerous old fossil at times’. I’ve discovered some amazing inspirational fossil pictures on the internet and this idea may lead to my remnants quilt! Nicolette

True Blue...

Well, we all survived our latest challenge 

(thanks Beverly)

despite the many trials and tribulations 

some of us encountered along the way!

But we will go into the wide blue yonder for a bit

until Brigette announces our next challenge!

it’s a blue nightfall, now I weep

I had so much inspiration, that it was difficult to choose one subject. I started with the idea of making a Blue Jeans Boro quilt. I was so intrigued by pieces I had seen on the Internet, but it didn’t work for me in the 16" x 16" size.

Another idea was to make a Flower Power Blue Jeans, a quilt from denim covered with blue appliqued flowers. I remember I had a Blue Jeans in the Seventies with flowers all over it.

it’s a blue nightfall, now I weep
mixed media - 16" square

Blue Nightfall is the name of CD and a song by Jimmy Lafave and the inspiration for my final BLUE piece. When I listen to this song, it gives me the blues.

‘It’s a blue nightfall, now I weep’ is made of hand dyed fabrics, pieces of batik, angel wire (that’s what it says on the package), gilding flakes, fabric paint and some hand dyed threads for the hand stitching. It’s machine quilted in straight lines.

I took pictures of the process. All about that is on my blog.

Thanks to Beverly for a theme that held so many options in it and kept us busy!

Nicolette

feeling blue

new fabrics for another BLUE idea

Changing ideas at the last minute. I don’t feel artsy at all right now. There’s so much going on in my head that I’m having a hard time to focuss. Yesterday was BLUE Monday ( the third Monday in January) and today it feels like BLUE Tuesday to me! Keeping my fingers crossed that my new idea will work out.

I manipulated the picture of the new lay-out in Photoshop

I would not mind to show a picture of my real process, but I’m not sure if you would like me to give away what I’m working on.

Edited:
The above pictures are manipulated in Photoshop. The real lay-out is very minimal and straight forward.

Happy Blue Stitches!

Nicolette

all the ingredients are here

Blue jeans, Japanese (woven) fabrics, washed and worn pieces of old shirts and Sashiko threads

After the change of computers, life seems to be so much easier and faster, I can finally clear my head and hopefully get some work done on the BLUE quilt!

Nicolette

how one thing leads to another

While searching the internet for more information about the Indigo dyed blue jeans, I found lots of pictures and information on Japanese Indigo dyed fabrics. I have collected these fabrics for some years and never made anything out of them really.

The Ultimate Sashiko Sourcebook by Susan Briscoe

My google search also lead me to the Sashiko technique. In Susan Briscoe’s book she explains that Sashiko stitching was not only a way to decorate fabric but was also used on Indigo dyed workmens’ clothes to make the fabric more sturdy at places that were likely to be worn sooner.

David Sorgato’s book about Boro

Susan also referred to Boro, Japanese (rag) textiles and then I discovered this website.
Boro was made in the 19th century by recycling remnants of indigo dyed cotton and joining them together. I had seen some beautiful pieces of new made Boro by Victoria of the SillyBooDilly. Victoria’s work is always an inspiration.

Blue jeans (the word jeans comes from Genoa, Italy - more about that later...!) was also used as workmens’ clothes. They discovered archeological ‘jeans’ pieces in the gold mines in California, likely to be about a 150 years old, which look really worn and weathered. These old jeans as well as the old Boro textiles have become collector’s items now.

I may have found the ingredients for my Blue quilt!

Nicolette

Blue jeans

jeans quilt at the National Quilt Guild exhibition in Leiden in 2011

In one of my comments on previous posts I talked about blue jeans. I did some research and I already discovered some fun facts. To my surprise I saw an item on TV about an exhibition that’s called Blue Jeans which was opened at one of our museums last week.

This is the link to the Centraal Museum in Utrecht and the exhibition. Needless to say that I hope to go there for some more inspiration.

However, I do have other ideas brewing as well.

Nicolette

Aaaaand... the bell rings!!!

 Ding! 

Round one is officially over!!!

 We have had eight (yes, 8!!!) challenges!!!

  

This last challenge featured a really eclectic mix of art work!

 Stay tuned to see what happens next at Tangled Textiles!!!

where to begin...

It took me some time to start the Beginnings quilt. I selected my first drawings which my Mother had saved for me, my first handwritings and mathematics, but couldn’t think of a way to put these into a quilt.

I thought of sprouts of the cotton plant, peeking just above the ground and maybe I should have sticked to that colourful idea, but somehow I was drawn to the natural undyed fabrics and materials from my childhood, my first steps in the world of fabrics, needles and threads. 

top and batting are quilted, backing needs to be attached

The Nuns in Primary School were my first teachers in sewing and embroidering. It’s a miracle that I developed a love for these crafts, because I was often literally rapped over the knuckles with a wooden ruler when my stitches weren’t straight and equally devided.

I remember the unbleached cotton and cheesecloth we had to work with to make doll’s clothes. I learned to cross stitch with red threads on jute. The red made the stitches really visible and I often had to unpick them and start all over again.

When I was a teenager I learned to sew my own clothes and I remember helping my Grandmother when she was sewing on her Elna Grasshopper sewing machine. She made beautiful damask tablecloths and napkins to decorate the Christmas dinner tables.

The plush reminds me of the softies I made for my little nieces and I worked with silk and satin to make clothes for their little theatre puppets.

where to begin... ? 16" squarish

This little quilt is made from the neutral undyed fabrics of my childhood. Linen, cheesecloth, damask, jute, unbleached cotton, satin, plush, and silk. All fabrics have a neutral beginning, so that’s another beginning added!

The first machine quilting method I learned to use was Quilt-As-You-Go, so I made the top starting with a piece of batting and pieced and quilted fabric after fabric with a neutral coloured thread. Then I added some cross stitches and hand quilted some straight lines in red. The quilt still needed a backing and because the top was all quilted I tied a canvas backing to the top and batting, with... red threads! I’ve never used this technique before, so this was also a beginning.

I still love everything neutrally coloured, but I also developed a strong love for every colour in the rainbow!

Nicolette

Our latestet colloboration...

It is amazing to see all the different interpretations of this theme and I am always amazed at the incredible skill of each of our wonderful members!!! 

We all await anxiously to hear from Vicki for word of our eighth challenge!!!!

a star for Gaudí and Jujol

No houses, buildings, landscape architecture, skylines, or hill-top villages from the Provence. I considered all these ideas to discover that it was very difficult to work on the theme that I suggested myself!

detail of the center of the quilt

One of the meanings of Architecture is Construction. I wanted to try a new quilt construction technique and was inspired by the mosaics in Park Güell (Barcelona), a park designed and built by Antoni Gaudí and partly decorated by his co-worker (fellow architect) Josep Maria Jujol.

There is a lot of confusion and discussion going on on the internet about who actually made the mosaic ceilings of the Hypostyle Room in the park, Gaudí or Jujol. I have an Art History book about Gaudí that says that the ceiling mosaics were made by Josep M. Jujol, so I stick to that.

a star for Gaudí and Jujol

It was my first ever fabric collage/mosaic made of pieces this tiny. For the circle I used templates of fusible web and after I ironed all the little fabric pieces onto this web I cut them out and fused the shapes (center circle, starry points and negative spaces) to the background fabric. The  fabrics around the circle are all glued to the background after I used some basting spray. I chose to quilt it very densely to prevent the little fabric pieces from getting loose. The edge is finished with a blanket stitch.

It was a lot of fun, but I don’t know if I will ever ‘construct’ another collage/mosaic quilt!

Nicolette

are you ready for a new challenge ?

You’ve all done such a wonderful job on Lisa’s Green theme! 

It’s time for a new challenge theme, #7 (is this your lucky number?)

Architecture

ar·chi·tec·ture  [ahr-ki-tek-cher] noun

1. the profession or art of designing buildings, open areas, communities, and other artificial constructions and environments, usually with some regard to aesthetic effect. Architecture often includes design or selection of furnishings and decorations, supervision of construction work, and the examination, restoration, or remodeling of existing buildings.

2. the character or style of building: the architecture of Paris; Romanesque 
architecture.

The Church of the patron saint of Verona, masterpiece of Romanesque architecture

3. the action or process of building; construction.

4. the result or product of architectural work, as a building.

Be inspired by architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, Gaudi, Hundertwasser, Rietveld, 

Berlage and many others.

Frank Lloys Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, New York City 

Gaudi’s Mosaic in Barcelona

The Hundertwasser House in Vienna

Gerrit Rietveld Huis in Utrecht (Holland)

Berlage’s Gemeentemuseum in The Hague (Holland)

or by photo’s you made from citytrips

Prado Museum, Madrid

New Arc at La Défence, Paris

Sydney Opera House 

or stay close to your home and be inspired by the architecture from the area you live in, or the skyline of your city / cityscape.

5. a style and method of design and construction: Byzantine achitecture

Harbin Architecture & Art Museum-Byzantine style 

6. orderly arrangement of parts, structure: the architecture of the federal bureaucrazy; the architecture of a novel (or a quilt…)

7. Computer science: the overall design or structure of a computer system, including the hardware and the software required to run it, especially the internal structure of the microprocessor.

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16” square again, my friends, reveal date: August 15th, 2012. I love the idea of going back to the 15^th of our reveal months. We will have 2,5 months to work on the quilt. Are you OK with that or do you want a sooner or later reveal date? 

Let‘s have fun!

Nicolette

My little gem and weeping raintrees

Working with green fabrics was an exercise I need to explore more. I can’t say I’m already liking the colour, but I have some favourites in the scala of greens. I was inspired by minerals (gemstones) that my mother collected (jade, emerald, malachite, peridot, calcite, moss agate and serpentine). Gemstones are often composed of flat faced crystals which reflect light to all sides. I sketched some ideas and finally chose for a diamond shape, consisting of four fabrics. All fabric pieces are fused to a background fabric and raw edge appliqued by machine after I basted the little quilt.

My little Gem, 16" square

I used sharply edged quilting in part of the diamonds to illustrate the crystals and finished the quilt with a non-mitred facing.

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But (I hear you think), what happened to the green quilt idea without green fabrics? Well, that one was made very quickly after I heard about the theme.

Living green was on my mind. More and more rainforest is destroyed to meet the demands of the developed world's paper industry. I try to live green in my own little way, but I use colour catchers when I wash my finished quilts. That way I’m also contributing to the (not so necessary) use of paper. Normally I would have thrown the used catchers in the paper wastebin, but I started to collect them with the idea to recycle them one day. 

Raintrees

The used tissues have the most fabulous soft colours and some stay neatly white. I did cut small strips which I stitched together to symbolize the trees of the rainforest that are chopped down. When the top was finished Mr DC said it looked a lot like rain. He didn’t know about my idea behind the quilt, so that was really nice to hear. I quilted straight lines in the middle of all the strips and I loved the simple look and the faded colours and thought that adding anything would ruin that look.

weeping rain trees
made from colourcatchers, 16" square

But the message was not quite clear yet, so I had to add something. I made green water drops with watercolour pencil and Sigma pens. My rain trees are weeping green tears.

It’s always good to try out stuff, but I like the quilt better without the tears. I didn’t finish it with a binding, but just stitched along the edge at 1/8".

I had a lot of fun working from two totally different points of view to make my green quilts. Thanks Lisa, for a fun theme that got me thinking outside the box!

Nicolette

sneak peek of exercise in green

That’s all for now, a little green teaser!
Nicolette

how about this ?

All I need is a grasshopper and a top!

Nicolette

fun is the new green

original photo found here

Electric Drive by Smart, with the slogan ‘fun is the new green’ !

vertigo

I tossed with lots of ideas for the balance quilt, like a poem about two tightrope walkers that I would have loved to translate into an image, but got me really tangled. Then there was this saying: ‘Balance is the visual weight in design’, right down my alley! After I had sketched some designs they all were very colourful and balanced, but I wanted to dig a little deeper into this theme and try some new techniques. Then I tried to work on a feng shue like quilt, I worked out the idea of Audio Balance, a technique to feel balanced again after a burn out, which is all done with a computer programme, but none of the ideas did see the light.

So the pondering and procastination started all over again. Both my husband and I have been diagnosed in the past with vestibular neuritis (caused by a viral infection in the ear) and experienced an extreme balance disorder. So, there it was, my theme for the quilt! Vertigo! *

I painted fabric and lutradur with blue and yellow inks to obtain that (not so nice) green colour, that you get when you have vestibular neuritis. I printed a drawing of the ear and the inner ear (equilibrium) on lutradur, fused it to the fabric and stitched it down after I basted the quilt layers. With red shining paint and a thermofax screen I printed lines on the lutradur. These lines stand for the ‘short circuit’ that takes place in the equilibrium.

I used a variegated thread and elongated the screen print lines with the quilting. I was still missing the dizzy factor, so I quilted circles with another thread (no quilt without circles for me he?)

When you have this severe dizziness your eyes move rapidly from the left to the right or in circles and it feels like the world is spinning, so you can’t focus. You might experience problems with speech and sight. I stamped the words balance, giddy, tumble, woozy, speech, fuzzy, nausea and blurry in one of the circles, and stamped them again with a darker colour, to make it all a bit more blurry. Then I stamped little stars in another circle but the effect was almost nill, so I embroidered over the stars.

I wasn’t too happy with the overall result and needed something to lighten up the greenish background colour (green is my least favourite colour you know... ) and made a yellow binding with some red fabric pieces that I had painted with the SG paint.

I allowed myself too short a period of time (5 days) to make this quilt, so I miss my happy colourful self a bit, but well, you win some, you loose some.

Thanks Judy for this interesting theme that should have allowed me to work like I love most, simple and balanced but also challenged me to look further.

Nicolette

*(Vertigo (from the Latin Verto, ‘a whirling or spinning movement’ is a type of dizziness, where there is a feeling of motion when one is stationary. The symptoms are due to a dysfunction of the vestibular system in the inner ear. It is often associated with nausea and vomiting as well as difficulties standing or walking. There are three types of vertigo: objective − subjects are moving around the patient; subjective − patient feels as if moving himself; pseudovertigo − intensive sensation of rotation inside the patient's head. It can be caused by vestibular neuritis which is probably caused by a viral infection of the inner ear.)

looking up to - a tribute to Kandinsky

First I want to thank Janet for the Look Up theme. It was quite a challenge!

I started playing with ideas of looking up in the sky and took pictures of buildings, birds, trees, city elements. This was followed by a very simple idea that I will keep in mind for another challenge (aha, maybe when it’s my turn to come up with a theme...). 

I decided to explore another meaning, i.e. looking up to someone. The light bulb moment came when I was flipping through the pages of an art book and found some pictures of Kandinsky’s work. I have always loved his paintings from the Bauhaus period. They have often inspired me.

What better way to show my admiration and appreciation for Kandinsky’s work than to make a quilt inspired by his work? Kandinsky’s paintings that I love most are all about circles, squares, triangles and strong lines.

I used a linen for the front of the quilt and started with the quilting (kind of working backwards). Then I applied some of my Stewart Gill sparkling paints with a stencil brush with a flat bottom, fused some fabric circles, appliqued them by machine. With the same paints I painted some squares and quilted lines around them. In another pair of lines I made quirky squares which I painted with black acrylic fabric paint. The quilt was made like I would do with a painting, step by step and by intuition. I finished the quilt with a non mitred facing. My first time and I love the look. 

The most difficult part was to stop working on the quilt at the right moment, to keep it interesting to look at. I’m not sure if I have achieved that, but I decided that I can always add some little elements, when I want to. 

I’m happy with the result, because I have found my old simplistic self again.

When you want to see more pictures please visit my private blog.  

When you want to know more about Kandinsky you can visit this website: http://www.wassily-kandinsky.com/ and go here.

When you want to know more about the Bauhaus, please click here.

Nicolette

looking up cute

For some weeks now we are watching a BBC series called The Frozen Planet. It’s unbelievable to see the frozen wildernesses of the Arctic and Antarctic.

I had to think of the series when I came across this picture on the internet. It’s also a very cute way of looking up, don’t you think?

Nicolette

up or upwards

Thanks Vicki for not wanting me to get lost into translation!

The first that came to mind after reading the new theme ‘look up’, was to search in my photo-albums for some pictures I took during vacations. I’ve always loved to potograph buildings, mountains, streets, objects (let’s say scenery) from a low perspective (or do I need to say from a lower point of view...?)
I found some really wonderful graphic images that could be used. Is this one of the right directions to take, is it looking up or upwards?

I found this (looked it up, yeah!) in one of my English dictionaries (much the same as Janet already explained, but I always love those text bits from dictionaries...

look up

1. To search for and find, as in a reference book.

2. To visit: look up an old friend.

3. To become better; improve: Things are at last looking up.

look up to

To admire: looked up to her mother.

look up

vb (adverb)

1. (tr) to discover (something required to be known) by resorting to a work of reference, such as a dictionary

2. (intr) to increase, as in quality or value things are looking up

3. (intr; foll by to) to have respect (for) I've always wanted a girlfriend I could look up to

4. (tr) to visit or make contact with (a person) I'll look you up when I'm in town

Verb1.look up - seek information from; "You should consult the dictionary"; "refer to your notes"

consult, refer

research - attempt to find out in a systematically and scientific manner; "The student researched the history of that word"

 
Would love to hear your thoughts on this. 

Nicolette