Winter quilt

June, and it's really winter now.

 After walking through the park on a dark and frosty morning, I'm thinking of sewing a dark winter quilt with icy glints.
(click on these photos - they will look better)

This image I took of the park made me think of a woven textile, a tapestry.  I got excited and found some fabrics to make a quilt of the same  mood.

with some frosty glitter.

Maybe oak leaf quilting

A quilt with lots of reds and browns and greys and shadowy blues.

I have five quilts just about finished, three more cut and partly pieced, two that are tempting piles of material - what is one more in the queue?

Gathering bits

It's lovely walking now in the cold freshness of midwinter. I took the dogs for a slow circuit of Victoria Park.

Soft walking on the dirt tracks and puddles to look into or splash through.

We enjoyed every puddle.

Loreto College was all misty through the trees. What a pleasure to be too old to have to go to school. How lucky to be able to wander through the park instead.

I gathered lichens for dyeing cloths, a whole bagfull of branches and twigs broken off and tossed through the park by the squalls of wind over the last few days.

Now I just have to find a glass saucepan or two.

The dogs were so grateful to get home they curled up at once and have slept through the day.

Unstitching kimono

I have just had the best couple of hours, sitting by the sunny front window and unstitching an old silk kimono.

peacefully starting the transformation of an old garment into a quilt.

Loving the the silk sheen in the changing light as clouds pass by

Heaping up folds of rich silk

Thinking about how to use the different textures and colours

Undoing carefully the careful stitches set by my predecessor in the fragile lining silk

Admiring the stitches before I pull them out

Silk rustles in a quiet room

The stiff and the fluid silks let go of each other

and float to the floor

A pastoral

Still looking through my boxes and baskets.

Where I found a pastoral from Beijing.

Bits and pieces

 After I saw the indigo embroideries I went through some of the bits and pieces I've collected.

 I found I was lingering over the fragments

rescued from torn and damaged fabrics

embroideries with ghostly missing stitches

enjoying the the wrong side of the cloth

I was going to iron and neaten them but I rather liked them crumpled.

Indigo images

I went to see the exhibition of indigo embroidered household textiles from Szechuan in the 1900s. The Gold Museum in Ballarat was given the collection of Robina and George Arnott-Rogers, missionary doctor and engineer respectively. George was born in Bacchus Marsh, apprenticed in Ballarat and worshipped at the little wooden Jubilee Hall beside Lake Wendouree.

These textiles, the exquisite household work of the women of Szechuan (yes, I'm using the 19th century spelling), are now very rare. Ballarat may have the largest collection outside China - and the work may have vanished there also.

This is the second showing of the textiles, I went five times before they went on a national tour, and this was my farewell visit as they are going back into protective storage.
I forgot to take a camera so I've had to use images from the exhibition catalogue. Unfortunately they are deceptive, giving no proper idea of the scale of the work or the complex and grand designs on the larger pieces.  Some of the embroideries are bed-size valances and very dramatic.
The work is sophisticated and rich in pattern but they use a small stock of stitches; mostly cross stitch, stem stitch, and stitching similar to European blackwork. The colours are indigo and white, the thread and fabric are cotton.

The catalogue is only $4.00 and is available still as is a $6 folder of embroidery patterns taken from the textiles. They are well worth buying, even if you missed the exhibition.

These embroideries touch a common heritage - since the Chinoiseries of eighteenth century Europe the images of China have become part of our imaginative life too.

And we find images sewn in remote Szechuan over a hundred years ago on our own tables now.