Detail, full image below.

You may remember a small quilt (well small for me) that I made last year in response to the Contemporary Quilt Group challenge ‘Uncharted’ called Taming The Wilderness. It’s the long skinny one that is part of my Cadence series. The organisers will be showing all 77 entrants in different groupings at different events over the next 12-18 months. I am absolutely delighted that my quilt has been chosen to be one of the 35 quilts that will be shown at this summers Festival of Quilts (18th to 21st August). It will then travel to Exeter, Glasgow, Birmingham and London between September 2022 and April 2023 as part of the ICHF shows.

But before then the quilt is getting its’ first showing at QuiltFest at the Llangollen Museum in Wales. QuiltFest is a little smaller than normal due to Covid restrictions but will still be worth a visit if you live nearby. Llangollen is a lovely town surrounded by stunning countryside. Sadly I won’t make it this year but have enjoyed the show in the past.

Taming The Wilderness was inspired by the artwork on an album called The Wilderness by Explosions in the Sky. The artist is Jacob van Loon and you can find the piece 8th & Main here. His work is amazing and I can see it inspiring more pieces in the future. So, in all its glory, here is Taming The Wilderness -

Sample made for my new Artefact series

My art goals for 2022 are simple. Make more. Submit more. The need to earn a living and to care for my family are what they are and mean that making art has to fit around them. One of the reasons I left industry and started teaching in my studio was to get a much better balance between these three parts of my life and it was, despite the disruption caused by the pandemic, the best decision I’ve ever made. I now have periods of time, mostly in the winter, when I can work on my art full time and without interruption. This is great for developing new ideas and starting on new series. But if I am going to make more art this year I need to figure out how to always have a piece or pieces part made that I can work on when I only have a few hours or a few days free.

I love making big art but the composition / construction stage really needs space (my big print bench and my design wall as a minimum, yes I’m spoilt) and time because I really don’t want to be unpinning hundreds of bits of fabric from my design wall each time I need it for a workshop. Whereas the quilting stage just needs room to get my sewing machine out. And a bit of clean space to fold / roll the quilt so that I can get it through the tiny throat on my machine. So, before my teaching schedule really kicks in in March I need to prepare several ‘backgrounds’ to use in Artefact and Cadence pieces. I can then spend the spring and summer quilting these backgrounds and adding the foreground details. Unfortunately I don’t completely ‘design’ my pieces early on in the process. My ideas evolve as I stitch. I don’t 100% decide on foreground details until I have finished the construction, and sometimes the quilting of the background. Inevitably some of the backgrounds that I prepare over the coming weeks will need to be cropped as I add those foreground details. Which feels wasteful but I’m hoping allows me to make more art this year.

My other goal is to submit more. I used to be good at keeping a list of upcoming calls for entry to curated shows and submitting proposals for gallery space but got out of the habit in 2020 when I lost touch with my art practise. I started submitting pieces again last year and have had some success with Cadence pieces but I need to build on this. I need a steady flow of new work to make this possible. And I need to become OK with rejection again. Because rejection is part of making art and cannot be a reason to hit the gin bottle and avoid the studio!

So my art goals are simple. Make more. Submit more.

Self Portrait by Pippa Wardman

I love seeing the fabrics that my students print and dye during workshops - their work is so varied and inspirational. But I don’t often get to see what happens next - how they use their fabrics. I suspect that many pieces are put away in cupboards, but I hope that, at the very least, they get pulled out every so often and stroked lovingly. However earlier this autumn I asked my students to send me photos of work made using fabrics created here at Urban Studio North. And wow! The variety of work is amazing and I’m grateful for their help. I have put together a gallery of their work which can be accessed via the workshop page on my website. Have a look!

(And, whilst I’m here, a quick reminder that the last date you can place orders for delivery in the UK before Christmas is this Wednesday, the 15th.)

Stitched sample by Hilary Kimber using the selvedges from breakdown printed fabrics.

Although the last posting date is later I’m setting Wednesday 15th December as a cut off for pre-Christmas orders as I plan on taking a long break over Christmas and the New Year. Orders placed later than this will be posted at the start of January. (Unless I get a bit bored and fancy a trip to the Post Office!). I thought you might also like to know that I’ve added a few more new Wonky Print Inspiration Packs to my online shop.

I have now finished teaching for this year. The bad weather this week meant postponing the last two days teaching but other than that I’m happy, and relieved, to have been able to teach so many workshops this year. Despite the worries about the new variant we are much better place compared to this time last year. The rollout of vaccines has been amazing but I’m very grateful for the great attitude of all my students this year. We’ve worn masks, washed and sanitised hands, taken lateral flow tests and made sure that the studio has been a safe environment for all of us. Thank you to each and every one of year!

With no teaching scheduled until the end of January I can now turn all of my attention to making art. I’ve removed the plastic screens and re-arranged the benches to make the studio feel more ‘mine’. I’ve pinned all my ‘work in progress’ up on the design wall. And hidden the stock of chocolate biscuits so my beloved family can’t help themselves. Chocolate, and lots of strong coffee are an essential part of my creative process! The next quilt in the Cadence series is ready to quilt and I’ve got a completely new series in the development stage. So plenty to keep me busy!

Leah x

A very big thank you to Rosie James for teaching in my studio this week! I love her work and it was great to see her processes. The students loved it!

Here are just a few images of students work. In order: Jan, Janet, Ali, Tracey (x2), Sam, Kate and Sarah

…. is the working title of the quilt I’ve been working on over the last week or so. It is a new piece in my Cadence series and will probably be titled Cadence 8 once it is finished. It is a piece inspired by those days when my carefully constructed oasis of calm, steady creativity is disrupted by unexpected but often petty interruptions (must remember to lock the studio door from the inside / turn off my phones), by stuff not working properly (I swear that my beloved sewing machine knows when to irritate me!) and by life just getting in the way. The type of day when I might say something a bit stronger than flamin’ nora.

I’m guessing you know what I mean …..

And so this quilt. It has the same main elements as Cadence 7 but instead of a calm, narrow band of colour running along the centre it is interrupted by a spiky band of colour that is the focal point of the quilt. It is a long way from finished but I thought that I’d share a few work in progress photos.

Although I’ve been enjoying some gaps between workshops this month my October and November are crazy busy. Which means that it will be December before I can finish the quilt. Which is frustrating as ideas for Cadence 9 are already forming in my head. But that’s life!

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)

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 ……..

Being an artist is more than just making art. At least it is for me as I believe showing work to others is an important part of calling myself an artist with a capital A. In a perfect world exhibition organisers, curators and galleries would somehow know that I had just finished a piece of fantastic art and would be beating down my door to get at it …..

Unfortunately it doesn’t work like that and so a significant part of most artists life is self-promotion, filling out calls for entry, submitting exhibition proposals and, if successful, shipping pieces across the world (which is increasingly difficult and worthy of a post in itself). As you may have noticed I’m pretty active on the self promotion front but I have to admit that I’ve let some things drift whilst I have focussed on teaching and writing.

Before I got distracted I kept a file of potential ‘calls for entry’ that looked at least 18 months ahead so that I could identify ‘targets’ and work to have suitable quilts ready for specific dates. I work in series and have found trying to respond to other peoples themes rather disappointing. I discard many opportunities to exhibit because of that and only keep a list of those that don’t have specific themes or have themes, such as ‘Structures’ that might fit with my work. Or I did. Having a few scraps of paper in a random pile does not count as a proper list. I have put that right and now have a well organised file of ‘calls for entry’. Most are in the quilt world but I’ve also decided that now is the time to venture out in the bigger textile world. Having a list doesn’t mean success. The more you submit work, the more rejections you get. But, as the saying goes, you have to be in it to win it’!

The other thing I used to be very disciplined about was submitting proposals for exhibition, either on my own or with others. Curators are often working one or two years ahead. Some artists prepare a collection of work and then submit proposals but most, myself included, submit proposals when they only have ‘work in progress’ and maybe one or two finished pieces. I haven’t done that for a long time and I could kick myself as there is almost certainly a back log due to Covid. And the success rate is even lower than ‘calls for entry’. I don’t have anything in the pipeline and realistically can’t expect to having a solo exhibition for at least two or three years. Ho hum!!

The good news though is that I am now feeling very happy with the work that I’m creating. To the extent that I’ve submitted a couple of pieces to a couple of calls for entry. I can’t share images of the full quilts but have included a photo of the detail in one piece above. And, more importantly, I know that I have a new series. By that I mean that I have an inspiration / set of ideas that has enough breadth and has engaged me so deeply that I know I can produce more pieces of art exploring the same theme. I am calling this new series Cadence as its inspiration has come from the regular and repeated process of making breakdown screens, printing fabric, washing fabric, cutting fabric, arranging and piecing fabric, layering and stitching. And because I think it is a lovely word.

Feeling connected to my process again is wonderful and means that I have the confidence to write new proposals for exhibition. To look further ahead on days when the present is so dark. So watch this space!