Our November Studio Hours was bittersweet. It was the last time the Digits & Threads Studio Members would gather with a guest speaker. Our presenter, though, inspired us with great new material coming from our publisher, Nine Ten Publications. We had an informative and entertaining visit with quilter and author Andrea Tsang Jackson.
Andrea is the author of Quilting: A Modern Creative Journey Through an Age-Old Craft, which will be published by Nine Ten Publications early in 2025. (You can pre-order Quilting for less than the list price here .)
Her Studio Hours visit gave us a behind-the-scenes look at one of the projects in her book and allowed us the opportunity to ask questions about details that aren’t in the publication.
Andrea is a Halifax-based textile artist and quilt designer, and she has a background in architecture and museum studies. With her creative practice, she pushes limits of both scale and dimension and brings the domestic into the public realm. She introduced herself and then jumped into talking about her inspiring book.
Quilting has two main sections. The first is a series of essays about creative practice, on themes like creating order in a chaotic world, our responsibility to self, and collective power. The second section contains five projects which explore quilts she wanted to make and the journey she took to get there. Each project is broken into exercises, whereby the maker can try a “thumbnail”-sized part of the technique or work all the way through the project.
View the library of Studio Hours recordings here.
The project Still Life was inspired by techniques used by two painters. Helen Wells, a UK-based artist and teacher, shared a video in her sketchbook course which showed a technique of painting with blocks of colour, which, once dried, were overlain with large blocks of cream paint, leaving negative shapes that allow the underpainting to show through. Andrea was intrigued and wondered how this could be translated to fabric. She then saw the work of Katie Strauss and the somewhat simple shapes in her still life series and, with permission from Katie, worked to merge Helen’s technique and Katie’s plant design into a quilt.
Still Life uses the reverse appliqué technique over a quilted underpainting. In developing her project, Andrea started with some “improv slabs” created from piecing favoured fabric scraps to create a base fabric, a geometric patchwork of orange, blue and cream. She then overlaid a piece of white jersey from a t-shirt, stitched some plant-like shapes, and then cut out the inside of the stitched shapes to reveal the pieced fabric underneath. She also made thumbnail underpainting trials, by gluing fabric scraps to index cards to play with colour and scale.
The final project was constrained by the size of the commercial canvas that she would use to mount the work. She grounded the composition with rectangles above and below the plant shape. After making the pieced underpainting, she sandwiched it between the white jersey on top and the white cotton backing fabric. She then traced the shapes onto the jersey and basted the three layers together with safety pins. A friend took on the work of hand stitching all the shapes, which can be a bit challenging as you are stitching blind, not knowing where the thicker hemmed areas are. Andrea shared a video of the process of cutting the shapes and revealing the colour below.
The quilt was then finished with a binding fabric. Andrea favours a striped binding and has designed fabrics in many colours and made them available on Spoonflower.
The final step was to mount the piece onto canvas for display on a wall, a technique she learned from quilter Kelly Spell. A member inquired how the quilt was affixed to the canvas. Andrea has, so far, simply used staples.
Another member commented that the techniques used in Still Life seem applicable to hand stitching—she doesn’t like working with a sewing machine and feels that a smaller-scale project could easily be completed by hand.
Kim pointed out that fashion designer Alabama Chanin uses this reverse appliqué technique, and she has pattern books which apply this type of surface design to clothing and hand stitching.
We loved the detailed look at the Still Life project and complimented Andrea on her excellent photography and documentation of each step of her process. We look forward to seeing the rest of the projects in the book early next year.
Show and Tell
A member showed us her recently knitted Baby Vertebrae cardigan (Ravelry link), modelled by her nine-month-old son, and recommended the pattern.
Lia shared the beginnings of her new embroidery of her iliac vein. She shared her trial of the honeycomb filling stitch which sits on top of the fabric and is secured only at the edges. She’ll use this technique to depict the stent in her iliac vein.
Another member shared her blanket woven on a rigid heddle loom which she worked from the Large Blanket, Small Loom pattern in Digits & Threads. She commended the pattern instructions and loves her “light as air” wool blanket. She used Alberta milled and grown yarn, Heritage Fingering by Ancient Arts, a blend of Gotland, Finn, and Rambouillet wool.
And finally, a member shared a work-in-progress, a rather intimidating-looking intarsia baby blanket in bright yellow, red, black, and white. She is designing and making the blanket for the first Canadian baby of some Ugandan refugees she knows and working with Ugandan colours and motifs. While intarsia seemed a suitable technique at first, and the resulting blanket won’t have any floats to catch on baby fingers, the 201 bobbins are proving to be quite a test of patience!
Featured photo courtesy of Andrea Tsang Jackson
