Blog Hop - Lisa Repsevicius

More Blog Hop fun!
Today's post is by Lisa Repsevicius of Perth WA.  Enjoy following along with her as she shows you her process for making "Untitled".


 

I love working with recycled/repurposed fabrics (amongst others of course) and find a lot of my treasures in local Op Shops. What to make for the 2013 SAQA Benefit Auction? Well, I have a plentiful stash of unpicked parts of old jeans – the waistbands are my favourite! Once unpicked and pressed totally flat, this re-purposed denim provides some wonderful, serendipitous indigo patterning - usually in some linear form - and anyone who knows my work knows that I love my straight lines!

With the denim so variable, I wanted to keep the construction and colour simple. I decided to contrast the denim’s inky blues with a citrus yellow plain wool felt, which I used for the backing as well as incorporating some snippets within the quilt top. I like to link the back to the front and vice versa.
 

This was my process:

First, I cut a rough square from some yellow felt offcuts I had. This is the backing piece.

I then raided my denim laden shelves for exciting bits and pieces with lots of colour nuance.

I used spray starch and a steam iron to press the pieces very flat – unpicked, well-worn jeans have seam memory hammered into them and I wanted to erase that.

Off to the sewing machine, I randomly stitched denims of approximately the same width together, to a length needed to cover the width of the yellow backing piece. I'm calling this raw-edge piecing.

I then raw-edge pieced the strips together into a rough square, incorporating some strategically placed bits of yellow felt amongst the rows. Part of the fun (yep!) at my sewing machine is collecting stray bits and pieces and thread trimmings. I'll build up a little collection of bits whilst working on a project – it is evidence of the creative process and I just like the way it looks all mashed together (call me strange!). I have a yellow thing going on at the moment - I keep a large yellow soup mug next to my machine for my textile swarf. Love that word swarf! My husband once explained to me that those springy little spirals that emanate from a busy drill bit are called swarf – who knew? Now I have swarf too! (and he knows it…)

After sandwiching backing and top together, I chose red thread for the quilting and began fairly randomly quilting parallel lines over the quilt sandwich. Why red? To me, denim’s partner in crime is red, so red it has to be!

Back view showing lots of ends to tie off, not unusual when I quilt with stop-start geometrics.

My bright yellow cup full of trimmings.

I glued a label into one back corner of the quilt, right to the edges, then, in keeping with the raw-edge piecing, I left the edges of the quilt raw, stabilising with a couple of rows of stitching about 1/8” in from the edge, through the label. The rest of the label was hand-stitched to secure it.

I attached a denim sleeve to the top back of the quilt in the same manner as the label.

The reveal on my design wall!

I left the quilt Untitled as I didn’t really have a story to tell with this one (I usually do!).

I enjoy being a member of SAQA and the opportunities it provides – we are a disparate bunch of artists here in Oceania, united by our love of textiles and quilts. I’m loving being a part of this exhibition alongside my wonderfully talented colleagues and most importantly supporting the auction!

Here are some more posts to enjoy!
18 July                  Caroline Sharkey             textileartworkshopsonline.com
20 July                  Lisa Walton                     fibreinspirations.blogspot.com

24 July                  Averil Stuart-Head          avesrave.blogspot.com
26 July                  Mel Forrest                     mixedmediabymelforrest.com