Workshop: Contemporary Quilting – Abstraction, Paint and Stitch

This weekend I went to the above 2 day workshop. The tutor was the very talented Pamela Priday. Her work is astounding and uses many processes in each piece. I was especially interested in this workshop because I know Pamela fairly well and she has the appearance of being quite an organised and well planned artist so I wanted to see the work process she uses to create her unique and free flowing images.

I wasn’t sure what to expect as the materials list was quite large, very varied and sewing machines were required – which almost certainly pointed to free motion embroidery. We started off by collaging various layers onto a medium weight Vilene. My collage has always been done with glue but we were introduced to the glue effects that can be achieved with textile medium. We started by using a glue stick to temporarily adhere items to the fusible Vilene, we then ironed it to activate the glue dots and used textile medium to build layers and meld different materials together.

Gesso over collaged base

We used light coloured fabrics, trims, tissue paper, hessian or whatever we wanted and then free machine stitched over it before painting the whole surface with Gesso. This had a unifying effect and stopped it looking like just a mish-mash of items glued anywhere. I learned how to thread my machine with much thicker thread than I had tried before and also how to do long jump stitches which produced lines across the work.

Painted and corded base

After drying we turned to our paints and started building up colour. I’m not a huge fan of blue but wanted to give it a go so I went the teal blue/green route with highlights of lime green and burgundy red.

Using sequin waste I was able to make marks in the lime down one edge in anticipation of some later stitching. I used gold metallic wax lightly over the long lines on the left and then glued my machine and hand made cords down. I recently made machine cords for one of my OCA projects and they didn’t work terribly well but now I’ve learned the correct way to do them so it was quicker and much more successful.

: Painted base with stitching

I finally got to some hand stitched embellishment. We then applied Mod Podge as a sealer over the whole thing. I have more to do on it as it’s still pretty flat looking and I’ll be beading and adding more stitching and a focal point over the next few weeks. I’ll post the results eventually.

We also tried out Liquid Pencil which I’ve never seen before. What a fascinating product.

: Liquid Pencil

I have no idea what it is actually supposed to be for but we applied it very wet to some paper and crumpled cling film over it, put a weight on top and left it to dry. We got very marbled effects.

As the workshop was concentrating specifically on the element of line and also covering composition we did another couple of samples during the weekend.