COOTS Exhibition

I may have mentioned previously that I am a member of a group called COOTS (Central Otago Outside The Square), not old coots as my children have called it!! We have 12 members from around the Central Otago district and we get together 4-5 times a year. We have two 3-4 day retreats one in May and one in Sept/Oct each year, the other times we get together are at Christmas and then in February and sometimes during August. One of our retreats is to work on our own projects and one is to have a tutor and educate ourselves further. We have an exhibition every two years around March. The following few posts will be of our last Exhibition in March 2013.

These four pieces are part of a series of mine called 'I am from...' based on a poem of the same name written about where I grew up and incorporates family traits, sayings and traditions.

 'I am From ... I'

I hand dyed the fabrics to get the colours I needed. The yellow is the same colour as road signs here in New Zealand. The letters are all appliqued. These are some of the streets I have lived on. (not all - the quilt would have been huge if I had included all of them).

 I am from ... II

In this quilt I printed out street maps of the area where I lived onto fabric and joined them together and then cut it out in the shape of me as a toddler. The background of this quilt has the words of the poem machine embroidered into the back ground. It took aaaages.

 I am from ... III

I was reading a book by Jill Berry called Personal Geographies about making personal maps and wondering how I could incorporate a map into my series. I was staring at the map of New Zealand and suddenly saw the South Island as a dress, so I had a high resolution image printed onto fabric by Spoonflower  I used text fabric as the flesh and, of course, she has to have sun glasses on (as I always wear sun glasses).

I am from .... IV

This quilt is an abstract street map of the part of town I grew up in. It is made using a technique for 'skinny piecing' I learned in a class with Rosalie Dace