On this, National Quilting Day, I thought I’d share two videos from the magazine Uppercase, which recently published work from Bari J. (The above picture is from the magazine’s website.) They apparently are having a Spring Sale on subscriptions, if you want to be inspired monthly by their magazine.
Why do I mention this? Inspiration for our quilts can strike anywhere and everywhere, and why not a gorgeously produced publication to give us a little inspiration? I’ve been ripping out magazine pages for years, and clipping interesting photos from the newspaper for my files. That Old Time Method parallels my Pinterest pinning, as well as the file of digital images from quilt shows, blogs and screenshots from Instagram. I say, grab your inspiration where you can find it.
Here’s a vimeo about 10 surface design tips.
And here’s a little bit of what their magazine is about–fun for us to look at–a little eye candy!
Lastly, another source of inspiration for me has been other blogs.
That’s where I found out about this (now-deceased) quilt artist Edrica Huws. (Address of the blog is in the picture.) Apparently nearly 51 years old when she began her mosaic-like patchworks, she sometimes took a year to create just one. Here is an excerpt from an article in the Guardian newspaper:
“Edrica Huws, born in 1907, spent two years at the Chelsea School of Art, gained a diploma from the Royal College of Art, and worked as an artist until she married the Welsh sculptor Richard Huws in 1931. Five children later, and living in rural Anglesey with neither electricity nor running water, she turned her hand to poetry and began collecting fabrics for her patchwork. She was 51 when she began her first patchwork picture of a greenhouse. It took her a year. The challenge was in getting the assemblage of differently figured pieces to look like a representation of her subject, but not too like it. The scraps had to be treated like scraps, not like paint, or mosaic. Edrica said herself in a lecture in 1982 that to her ‘the essence of an aesthetic experience’ was ‘the control just winning’.”
Back to the blog:
I did a search on her name, and while I never found a way to purchase her book, I did find many photos of her quilts, apparently from an exhibition she had (and mentioned in the Guardian article).
And in a comment on the Guardian article, someone wrote: “Quoting from the book Edrica Huws Patchworks she says: ‘It was pleasant to have some recognition, but even without it, I would have carried on… When I had reached a time when I could have started painting again – I had more money, more time and more space, the three things that I lacked earlier – I no longer had the inclination. In a strange way, it seemed too easy.’ ”
OccasionalPiece--Quilt! 