Of Menopause and Quilts

At the risk of raising this old nugget again, we know that God is not a woman, right?  How?  Well we only need look at the menopause.  The male menopause is really quite laughable.  They get sports cars, younger women and okay, maybe a bit of testicular droop, but wouldn't you swap that for the raging hot flushes, night sweats, mood swings, dry skin, sagging bits and facial hair that we have ended up with?  Where is my Porsche and where oh where is my young hottie???

Well this was all on my mind over the last week as I neared my 6-monthly gynaecologist appointment.  I am in what is called the peri-menopause.  Well, that is a lot better than what I was in, according to Singaporeans.  When I went, in my mid(ish) forties as the symptoms started to appear, I was given a book by my gynaecologist called 'Your Golden Years'.  Sorry but NO WAY am I going to tell people that I am suffering from my Golden Years.  

Well, whatever you call it, for me it has not been an easy road.  Like most of the women I know on this well trodden path, we are kept sane by a mixture of HRT and laughter.  I thank the good Lord for sending me a supportive bunch of friends, a great gynaecologist and the most fantastic husband, who has been nothing if not supportive and caring about this time, stage or whatever you want to call it.  Only once did he falter and shout after me as I ripped into him, 'did you forget to take your hormones, dear?', and given the provocation, it was justified!  Well, as it happens I have been taking my hormones, and feel a lot better than I did this time last year.

Okay, where is this going you are now asking yourselves, or maybe that's you I can hear snoring in the background.  Stay with me now, I'm getting to the point.

My friend Shirl and I have been discussing different art techniques.  She posted on her blog a scan of her face, yes as in stuck her head under the scanner lid (her head is small, I mean really really tiny, almost the size of a large pinhead really).   This led me to trying that out too.  Suddenly an idea was born.  I merged this subject with my menopause musings, and made a small quilt, which explored my thoughts about the menopause.  Yeah!  I got to the point in the end!!!

This is my scanned image, along with some of my 'keeping me a sane woman drugs'.

I took the scanned image and played with the image in Adobe.  I printed it out onto specially treated photo fabric.

I brainstormed words or phrases connected to my feelings about the menopause.  I stitched these free motion and free hand (ie feed dogs down and no tracing) onto the quilt sandwich.  I was quite pleased with the results, having never written on a quilt this way before.  I choose pink as the traditional colour for women, and red to signify the coming loss of menstruation.  The white lines in the middle of the quilt, are basting marks, to show me where the photo will sit.

This is the finished quilt.   17½" x 19".  I am not sure how I ended up with such odd dimensions, I didn't measure a thing, except the photo placement.

 The centre has been lightly quilted.

The photo has a grey, second image around it.  This represents my feeling of being someone other than who I once was, a duality.  The face has been quilted to show how my face has changed and aged.  I put a crystal by the eye, for the many tears I have cried during this time in my life.  The medication is what I take, to get me through my personal nightmare - the way I viewed this time in my life.

Seen from afar, the face on the quilt looks somewhat different I think.  Maybe because you don't realise until you are close, what the quilt is about.

It was difficult to quilt the face.  I ended up standing away from it to decide where I wanted to quilt, then drawing in rough guidelines.

Close up to the face, you can see the shadow effect.  I bet I couldn't duplicate that if I tried!  It was very hard to keep myself from adding more quilting, in this case, less was more I think.

 A close up of some of the words and phrases on the quilt.

   I have played around with the contrast etc in these photos, to try and get the different elements to stand out.  The quilt fabric is a dark grey, with matching binding.

 I deliberately left threads hanging from the photo, to show how I felt my life was unravelling.

 The body of the quilt, is as usual, free motion quilted to death.  I quilted in some flowers, a bit of a girly element in some ways.  I then just doodle quilted, doing whatever I wanted.

The back of the quilt has some fabric I purchased in Japan, of origami cranes, to signify hope.

This section to the right, is immediately behind the photo.

Below you can see how the rest of the quilt is quilted.

 Alan was somewhat upset by this quilt.  He said it made him feel sad.  I said it made me feel liberated.  I have found a way to express some dark feelings.  I don't really expect anyone to love it.  I am going to put it up by my desk.  A reminder that life can sometimes be tough, and that sometimes, all we can do is endure and strive to come out on the other side.  Life isn't all roses.



I have a few other quilts that I have made using photos printed onto fabric.
ANT MAN

This quilt is based on a photograph I took of Alan, in the Chinese cemetery, on a hill in Malacca, Malaysia.  He picked up the stick because there was a pack of dogs running around.  Not long after the picture was taken, some fire ants that were on the stick bit him, causing his hand to swell enormously.

I have slowly warmed to using photos printed onto fabric.  I find the fabric has a slightly stiff hand, which can sometimes make the quilting look as though it is floating on the picture.  I do like to use it when making quilt labels, something I often don't get around to doing.

Because of that floating effect, I quilted around just the main elements.  I have found that different photo fabric, gives different results.  I suppose you just try until you find a brand you like.

The quilting lines were continued out into the border fabrics.

To continue the look of the path, I coloured in the fabric, using soft pastel artist colouring pencils

I did the sane thing with the boulder to the front and the semi-circular gravesite behind Alan.

When using photo fabric, colouring pencils, wax crayons, fabric paint etc, you have to heat set them with an iron.  I don't know to what extent the pencil will be colourfast if the quilt were to be washed.

Photo fabric is relatively sensitive, so it is not advisable to put these quilts in direct sunshine.

I managed to find two fabrics that worked well with the photo landscape.  I was especially pleased with the batik fabric at the top, which I felt really carried a sense of continuing the grass and trees.

This section of the quilt, shows one of my favourite quilt stitches, a creeping tree branch.  I use it on a lot of my quilts, though I think this was the first time.  Adapted it can look like veins on a leaf for example.  I often use it as a general filler stitch, especially when the thread or fabric play up.  The disadvantage, is that you sew every line twice, which means twice the amount of time and twice the thread.






Royal Palace Quilts

This quilt is the first photo quilt that I worked on, which was started in a class I attended at Houston.  I made another version of this quilt , which you can see below.

The idea was to extend the size of the original photo.  It was printed onto A4, adhesive backed photo sensitive fabric and cut into 16 blocks.

Using a ruler for accuracy, each block was lined up on green batik fabric.  The blue batik border was then added.

The problem with this quilt came when I attempted to free motion quilt it.  The adhesive backing hated free motion quilting.  I couldn't unpick the stippling because this sort of fabric retain the stitch holes.  It was a very long drawn out process of quilting, thread fraying and jumbling.  I then had to sew into the holes that I had unpicked the jumbled thread from.  Needless to say I never used this fabric for free motion again.  Tiny though this quilt is, I really like it.  It has always been my intention to make a larger version of this some day.

In this version of the quilt, which I have to say, I don't like.  The same picture undergoes a similar treatment, just cut differently, and has a slightly different batik border..  Because of the problems I encountered with this photo fabric, the photo section is quilted with a simple diagonal wavy line.  This helped with the problem of the thread getting stuck.  The down side is that I don't like the look of that 'organised' quilting.

Well, that's enough about quilts for today.  This will probably be my last post for three weeks as I am off to France, where I will have much better things to do!