13 January 2024
Doreen was a very entertaining speaker as well as a gifted quilter. Doreen has been quilting for decades and started Guildford Quilters’ some 40 years ago! She brought many, many quilts with her, demonstrating the use of her method of colour washing fabric.
She had been fortunate to acquire a lot of Liberty small print fabrics a long time ago for a great price. So, the beginnings of her stash were formed.
She then developed a method for taking a Liberty print and bleaching out the colour at different levels, so for each print she has three or even four slightly different colour graduations of it. This she achieves by adding bleach to the fabric and then removing it from the bleach at different time periods and using a chemical ‘stopper’ to prevent the bleach continuing to work (bisulphite/metabisulphite).
Doreen has the most wonderful boxes full of square samples of each colour in hundreds of different shades. We were all in awe!
Her quilts are dramatic. Often on a large scale, she pieces together these small squares to get a detail colour graduation across the whole quilt. The colours move from subtle shades of blue to green, to yellow, etc. We were very impressed.
In the afternoon, Sue Norgrove-Moore launched our next CQ Surrey Challenge, entitled ‘Influenced by an Artist’. The brief is to produce a quilt up to 50cm on either side, undertaken after researching an artist. Ideally, not a textile artist, but a painter or sculptor etc. The idea is not to reproduce one of their artworks, but to take inspiration from their use of colour, or the way they design, or their life. The end date is to show and tell at our May 2024 meeting. Hopefully we can show these at an exhibition at Lullingstone Quilt Show in July (along with last year’s Challenge pieces).
Sue also gave a presentation on getting inspiration for designing a contemporary quilt. She gave lots of examples of apps and websites that can help with the process including some updates on quite how sophisticated (and scary?) AI has become!