Child Doll Show at the Johannesburg Art Gallery

This weekend my husband and I visited the Johannesburg Art Gallery. The Gallery is located in downtown Johannesburg, an area I have never visited until now.  Downtown streets and sidewalks in the area are packed with sidewalk vendors, taxi stands and people making it quite hard to drive down the road.  It is a contrast to the areas of South Africa I usually visit and I got to see why this country is called overcrowded.  The Gallery is located in Jobert Park.  As my husband and I strolled through the park to the museum we passed crowds of  people picnicing and lounging in the grass watching Manchester verses Liverpool on a large flat screen TV.  
In the gallery, the exibits were interesting but surprisingly few items were on display. The website says that the Gallery has only 10% of its collected works on display and I wonder, with all of the empty space why more of their inventory was not on show.  I enjoyed looking at the exhibit on the first two black South African women to have their own shows, one in the 1940's and the other in the 1960's.  The Dutch master paintings and prints were interesting as well.  The exhibit that intriqued me the most, however, since I am a doll maker, was Play, Ritual and Inspiration: the Phansi Museum Collection of Southern African Child Figures. (The Phansi Museum is a Southern African crafts museum in Durban.) 
The picture above is reprentative of some of the Southern African 'Child' dolls.  She is from the Ndebele tribe, created in the early 1900's, made of glass beads, sinew, wood.  This photo was found on the Jacaranda Tribal blog, an African fine arts dealer.
Child dolls are found in many styles from the various tribes through out Southern Africa.  The dolls were created by women.  In some tribes the dolls were given to a man the woman was interested in as a part of courtship.  A man might keep several dolls until he made his decision of which woman to marry.  In other tribes girls were given the dolls to care for until she had a child of her own.  Dolls were also used in fertility rituals.  A terrific selection of dolls of the various tribes with photographs of girls and women in traditional dress can be found Gallery Ezakwantu.

Dolls today:  The child doll is no longer used in the tradional ways, the styles of doll seen in the Gallery Ezakwantu links created today are largely sold to the tourist market.  If you are interested in ways dolls are used today there is a great doll project called the Uthando Project.  The project aims to assist with healing of children who have lost one or both parents from AIDS.  The website has a free pattern that you can use to make dolls to donate.

An Owl, A Goddess and Fashion Things...February ATCs

February's ATCs so far...the upper left is my Fashion ATC, upper right is the Hera card and at the bottom is the front and inside of my Brown Owl ATC. 

For the Fashion ATC, I choose to be influenced by the Saque gowns Watteau made famous in his paintings in the early 1700's.  The Saque (sometimes called Sack) is a loose dress flowing from the shoulders.  This style of dress has been occilating in and out of fashion since the 1960's. 

The Hera card was fun to do.  I felt that I had no depth of knowledge on her story so I spent a little time researching her.  In preparing the card I discovered that items associated with Hera are the peacock for pride, the cow for her beautiful large, cow-like eyes, and the pomegranate, symbolic of life's blood and death.  We all know the stories of Zeus cheating on her and that she was very vengeful.  If her story were told in modern times, she would be a more sympathetic, less shrewish character than she comes across in the ancient stories.  She would also be kicking Zeus to the curb.

Finally, the Brown Owl card is made from a stamp I hand carved.  I also tried something I have always wanted to do, I made a 'door' in the card.  The quote from Carl Jung reads 'Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart.'

White Tara Speaks to My Soul

A friend of mine is quite ill and needs some TLC from his friends while he remains in hospice.  His wife has asked many of his friends to send Valentines day cards to him. White Tara is a Buddist manifestation of compassion and healing.  Birds have been a symbol for the soul for a very long time.  I hope he enjoys the card.  The inside says, You are Loved.

And Now For a Magic Trick: The Disappearing Nine Patch

Now that I have mastered a simple quilt style  I have decided to move on to something more complicated, the Disappearing Nine Patch.  (Thanks to my friend Beth for mentioning this pattern to me)  A very good tutorial for this quilt style is found here.
This is a small quilt (54 x 54 in) for my little daughter.  I have selected from my stash of Asian fabrics and picked out some Kawaii inspired animal prints from Spoonflower designers and, of course, added one of my designs.  Like Allison mentions in her tutorial, I eyeballed the middle cuts for the nine patch.  I really recommend measuring it---if you look, you can see where some of my seams are off.  I actually quilted this one since it was so small but will hiring someone with a longarm machine when I sew larger blankets.
Spoonflower designs in my quilt:

A. Protea Petals Pink by bloomingwyldeiris
B. Cute Creatures by indescribble
C. Cherry Blossom Bambi Pink Aqua by zesti
D. Super Cute Kawaii by marcelinesmith
E.  Run Bumbi Run by killer_tomato

The next quilt top will likely be for Margaret for all of her help cutting out squares.  I will begin cutting my younger son's material as well.  He is going for a watery theme.

Four Mediums For Merbabies

A couple of posts ago I mentioned hosting a ATC exchange on Swap-bot.  Here are the results of my work.  From the many ideas I initially sketched, I decided to create my cards experimenting with different materials.  The first card completed was the colored pencil and ink drawing of the merbaby playing with his tail on the lower left.  The second one is the merbaby hiding behind her mommy (upper left.)  This is done in oil pastel and I like the pastel's watery effect.  The third, in the lower right corner) is a cut paper and ink merbaby playing with a starfish.  I was going for a Charlie Harper feel, reminiscent of his piece, Otter Delight.  (Browse this commercial site for more of his work)  The forth, upper right, is an ink and watercolor drawing inspired by Disney's Silly Symphonies-cartoon shorts created between 1929 and 1939.  Check out the cute video.

Binding, the First Time

Woohoo, the quilt is finished at last (OK, with the exception of a few threads to clip and the embroidered dedication)!  I have layed it out on my bed because my son's is too hard to photograph.  The most intimidating part of this process for me was the binding.  I have placed some kind of 'binding' around my art quilts before, however, I invented my technique up as I went along.  I did not want to ruin my son's quilt after sooo much work, so I decided to sew an official binding and so looked into a couple techniques. 

The first one I explored I sewed on this practice quilt my little girl's doll.  (This doll belonged to my sister when she was a little girl.) I tried to follow the Missouri Quilt Company's binding instructions, changing 1/4 inch seam to 1/2 inch, but frankly I was too impatient to hand sew the back and figured there was no way I would hand sew my son's giant quilt.  And look at those corner--sheesh.  I'm not too happy with how it turned out but at least it is just a doll quilt--not too much at stake here.

I ended up using a suggestion from Inge, the woman who's longarm quilted my son's quilt together.  The binding is made from 3 inch strips of my chosen border materials (two different fabrics.)  I ironed the material in half length wise, then opened it up and folded the sides toward the middle leaving a small gap.  I then ironed the folds down, I closed the folds and ironed the fabric down the middle again.  I then capped that folded fabric over the edge of the quilt and could sew both sides of the binding on in one go.  The other piece of valuable advice I received from Inge was to sew the binding beginning along the side rather than at one of the corners.  That certainly made piecing the binding tails together easier.  I used Missouri Quilt Company's corner technique. 
I have promised each of my children a quilt.  An have begun working on my daughter's already.  I am sewing them in order who's birthday is coming next.

First Quilt Top Complete!

My oldest son has an ancient blanket that he has had since he was a toddler.  This blanket is now threadbear and the binding is coming off.  I spoke with him and he agreed to replace the blanket with a new quilt.  This a big step for him since he doesn't like to get rid of anything.  It is also a big step for me since have never made a traditional quilt.  I decided to do a simple color block design.  I made a 7 1/2 inch square cardboard template and calculated how many squares I would need for a quilt top.  My son went through my fabric stash and picked out his favorite fabrics.  I also let him select 5 fabrics from Spoonflower (who is having a sale this week-2 fat quarters for the price of one!) and added 2 of my own design.  He choose a zoo/safari theme.

Our Spoonflower fabrics are labeled on the picture : A. Jungle Love by Amel24   B.  Animalia by Woo C. Wild Animals by Oksansia D. Ferocious Jungle 2 by Emrick123  E.  Big 5 Dots by Wyldeiris F. Cute Creatures by Indescribble  G.  Big 5 Babies on the Clothesline by Wyldeiris

When I measured the top, bottom and middle of the finished squares to calculate my border, I was very pleased that there was less than an 1/2 inch difference from top to bottom.  I plan on sending the layers out to get quilted--I don't think I am ready for that step yet.

I had big help from my housekeeper, Margaret, who washed and ironed fabric and traced out some of the squares.  I found the videos by Missouri Star Quilt Co very helpful for a beginner like myself.