I apologise for the short break in service …

- here’s a very long post to make up for it.

As you may have guessed we went to the Festival of Quilts – which involved leaving the house even earlier than I did when I was working! How’s that for dedication?

Although I went to the first couple of FOQs, and even exhibited a quilt once, I haven’t been since the Knitting and Stitching Show was first held at NEC. The excitement of going to Birmingham twice a year was just too great, and FOQ was just too – er - quilty. But since the K&S at NEC is no more, and I can’t get to it at Ally Pally this year, and there was a coach going to FOQ – we went. And it wasn’t bad. Still quite quilty, although there seemed to be fewer acres of quilts than there used to be - and more places to sit down. We were lucky enough to arrive before the coffee area filled up so had a very expensive coffee and biccies before plunging in. And we got a rapidly fading pass-out stamp and sloped off to the Crowne Plaza for a lunch with a view of the lake. I can recommend the smoked salmon sandwiches, and A’s steak baguette looked good too.

Enough of food. We looked at exhibits in the morning, and after lunch we shopped.

I like to buy the catalogue of any exhibit I like – so here are the three I bought. One definitely quilty, and two that I’d call embroidery, though I’m not sure what the makers would call them.

To start with the quilty one. Yoshiko Jinzenji. Her website is here, although I can’t find many images of quilts. There are a couple on the Twisted Thread website, but I can’t find any that do her work justice. In some ways they are very traditional quilts – the use of geometric shapes, the simple quilting – but the extensive use of white with the addition of little patches of colour and pattern is not traditional at all and very painterly – except that I can’t remember which painter her work reminds me of. Lovely, restful, fascinating pieces. Wensleydale wandered off into a corner where he could look at three of them one after the other – and had to be prised out …

In contrast, the website of Sarah Welsby and Christina Ellcock gives you a very good idea of their work. Paper lamination, yes – but much more subtle than I’ve ever seen it before.  Also painterly and the sort of work you can look at for a long time and come back and still see more in it. I particularly like ‘urban renewal’ [No. 5 in Welsby’s section], although I remember the colouring as being a little more subtle than it appears in the image.]

Also subtle in colouring, mostly monotones, mostly a bit brighter, is the work of Liz Hewitt. She was only showing hangings at FOQ but looking at her website, I love her vessels too!

I also enjoyed the exhibitions by Chunghie Lee [click on the green shape between two pink ones on her rather too clever website to see what I especially liked] and Denys Short, who paints quilts.  That is – he paints paintings of quilt-like images, he doesn’t, as far as I know, put paint on quilts.

Oh – and I did remember to photograph Wil’s quilt. [Wil is an on-line friend from Holland who couldn’t get to FOQ herself.]

Thanks for all the comments on my mucked-about-with passion flower – I'm glad so many people find it helpful. I’m finding it helpful myself and I’m thinking of printing off some of the images and putting them in a book, with notes as to how I did it – although of course I've recorded it here… Sometimes.

Lesley asked how I did the B&W images from my last couple of posts. Yes, with Picasa. If you click on the image you want to play around with, it comes up bigger on the right of the screen and on the left are three tabs - ‘Basic Fixes’, ‘Tuning’ and ‘Effects’. Click each one  and you get more choices.

This one was done using the B&W filter in the ‘Effects’ section, followed by going to the  ‘Tuning’ section and moving the ‘Highlights’ and ‘Shadows’ sliders as far to the right as they will go.

 

And this one was done the other way round – I started by upping the ‘Highlights’ and ‘Shadows’ and then applied the B&W effect. No doubt a techie could tell me why the results are slightly different – but the explanation would probably include words I never knew existed.

That’s the sort of serendipitous discovery you make when you go back to check exactly what you did do. I have now started noting what I did in the ‘Make a caption’ section under the enlarged image!

Today's images came from a return to another old favourite from Big Huge Labs, home of the Hockneyizer. Among several effects there is one I’m sure used to be called the Warholiser,  but it has become ‘Pop Art Poster’. 

You can choose whether to have 1, 4 or nine images, and shuffle them if you don’t like the first result.

 

I thought these colours were rather drab, and wondered if the supersaturated version of the original would work better. A bit  – and I like the simplified flower shape better anyway.  This could definitely become an embroidery.

 

 

 

Lunapic also offer a Warholizer effect. You only get a choice of 4 or 9 images, you can’t shuffle them, and they come up the same each time, whereas big Huge Labs results seem to be random. But they are  more my sort of colours.

 

Sometimes.