GCSE Art - My Early Adventures in Quilting

My parents finally decided to switch around the layout of the bedrooms in their house making my old bedroom the master since it's the biggest and has an en suite bathroom. This meant redecorating, rearranging furniture and archeological digs through the kind of things that get put at the back of deep closets by a 6-18 year old girl. While I was home I spent a few days digging through this stuff, throwing the majority out and making a small pile of things to keep for that indeterminate time in the future where I'll have space to take it.

A large portion of both piles was made up of my GCSE Art projects. I got an A in Art way back in 1999, specializing in fabric and textiles. It was a humorous and painful exercise to go through everything. I found a lot the the way Art was taught and the way work had to be done incredibly frustrating and still, 15 years later am slightly annoyed by it. A HUGE part of the "process" was showing development of ideas, creating sketchbooks of trial runs. I don't know about anyone else, but that it not how my ideas come to me. Yes I can see the point for developing new skills and what not, but my ideas tend to come to me fully formed or I experiment along the way within one piece. This meant that I spent a lot of time back-filling these "holes" in my "process" rather than actually making and doing, which in the end felt contrived and awkward to me. Looking at the work now, it still does. Still there are some things I do still like which I think show the fledgling quilter in me trying to break out.

I clearly remember the day that I drew my first still life of a pepper in pencil crayon. It was the day I decided I could draw. It was the day I decided to keep art as one of the 9 subjects I took at GCSE level, sacrificing Geography in favor if paint and glue and all kinds of creative things. For this project I believe we had to design a repeating pattern then transfer it to fabric (wax resist). I then quilted it using hand embroidery and embellished with little seed beads. I had not yet learned the importance of backing fabric. I might one day back and bind this to turn it into a proper wall hanging.

Whatever this was inspired by it was made in the same way as the pepper quilt above. This I did not keep because it's just so... ugly?

A marriage of two passions - Art and Science! This is still one of my favorite final pieces (yes, done before the two process predecessors) based on my own pseudo-coloring of microscopic images of plant cells. Given the folders of histological images I have sitting on my computer from my PhD, this might be an idea I could return to for future experimentation.

I've got more photographs of weaving, embroidery, some machine sewing experimentation on paper, but I'll save those for another post, hopefully when I'm over my jet lag...