The Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (DIMIA) wanted to make a quilt to celebrate Australian citizenship, they asked people to make an 8″ block depicting what being an Australian means to them…My friend Lynne H knew exactly what she wanted, she wanted her convict ancestors convict details written in brown on a cream background, she tea dyed the fabric to get an old parchment colour….and in the foreground she wanted a mast and sails with a bit of a ships deck and rail with her great, great grandmother looking towards her new home….So she knew clearly what she wanted but didn’t know how to acheive it which is where I come in, as her personnel technical adviser (LOL)….She came over one morning and we spent a lovely day discussing techniques that she could use….a flat applique would have worked quite nicely but not near so well as the stumpwork that we did use….I showed her how to make little rolled sails and she took it home to prepare the background and applique the mast and sails….In the meantime I thought about how to construct a her great, great grandmother…Lynne had chosen a burgandy silk for the skirt (an offcut from my bridesmaids dress) which we crinkled by twisting wet fabric and leaving it twisted untill it was dry, for the shawl we had tried several different fabrics none of them seemed right, then we realized that it was probably because the where all to fancy for a convict girl and a piece of plain green silk fringed at the edges made a perfect shawl….The Hair was the tricky bit, Lynne liked the way I had used my hair to stitch my self portrait on my Stumpwork Sampler and she had some long locks of hair from her son…But allas she could not find them…Could we use her hair??? its a bit short, 2″ lengths are to short to thread into a needle and stitch….but what if…Lynne, beautiful, crazy lady that she is, didn’t mind having a gap in her hair for the sake of art, so I was able to cut of a few locks and experiment, I made a tiny stumpwork head and shoulders, tied the locks of hair into bundles, stitched the locks to one side and reinforced them with glue so that they couldn’t pull out….at this stage of construction it looked like our little lady was haveing a bad hair day.
But it turned out to be more manageable than what I had thought, a little more glue on the back of her head to hold the hair securly and a few stiches with a strand of my my long hair was enough to hold them all in place….
Lynne added the stars in the form of the southern cross to symbalize australia…
….Lynne’s block was selected for the citizenship quilt and last wed I went over to DIMIA with a group of Canberra Quilters to help tie the blocks together…great chance to get a good close up look at all the blocks WOW…they will all be put onto a website which I will link to when its ready….
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