2024 Classes

I'm a textile artist based in Wellington New Zealand and I teach a range of dyeing, printing, quilting and bookmaking classes. The first classes for the year are usually the indigo dyeing classes as they are much more fun if we can hold them outside!

This is a list of my current bookings

Indigo Dyeing and shibori - Tawa College, Tawa, Wellington. There are still spaces in this class.

Saturday 9th March 10-4pm.

Karori Art and Craft Rooms, Karori, Wellington.

Printing on Fabric - 24th February 10-4pm

 This class can be booked online here.

Inspired by Boro (quilts/patches) - 25th May

Crazy Piecing - 30th June

Sashiko - 27th July

Quilt As You Go bags/placemats/table runners. - 10th November

Hutt Art Society Rooms, Lower Hutt

Indigo Dyeing and Shibori - 3rd March 10-4 (Class Full - waiting list available)

Komebukuro Bag - 2 classes - 7th April 1-4pm, 12th May 1-4pm.

Inspired by Boro (jacket). 4 sessions - 16th June 10-4pm,  (Class Full, waiting list available)

21 July, 4 august, 25 August, 1-4pm.

New Zealand Quilt Symposium

I have been invited to teach at the New Zealand Quilt Symposium 2024. This is to be held in Cambridge in the North Island of New Zealand. 

The classes are not confirmed yet but I hope to be able to tell people soon.

Textile Commissions, earthquakes and travel

Its about 4 weeks since I got back to New Zealand from India. Its taken me a while to process everything and also to catch up on various projects which I couldn't work on while I was away.

Since I got back we have had a large earthquake. Our house has suffered a few cracks which weren't there before, and my husband has been working from home as his office is closed until they find new premises. The day after the earthquake we had heavy rain which followed a few weeks of steady rain. the ground was waterlogged and that meant we had water leaking through the back wall of our garage so we spent several hours sweeping water out of the garage and trying to get things dry. A lot of horrible fabric was thrown away that day. It was all stuff which should have been sorted and thrown away years ago.

It was lucky that we don't live near the coast of New Zealand. In what the newspapers called 'the perfect storm' we had a strong earthquake followed by heavy rain at the time of the Supermoon. There was a tsunami then high spring tides because of the supermoon and the heavy rain. No wonder the roads were flooded especially around the coasts and there were land slides, and fallen trees. Its taken a while to get back to normal, although there are still a lot of government and private buildings in Wellington closed due to earthquake damage. One of our friends has been evacuated from their apartment in central wellington and has been unable to get anything out of their home for nearly 2 weeks.

Bitter Harvest 3. This is a wallhanging currently hanging at Pataka. Water has been running down the front  from the cups to make the dye in the blue patches run. It looks quite blurry now.

This small quilt is travelling with the OzQuilt exhibition in Australia.

This life-size model of a weta (a New Zealand grasshopper)has been at the Knitting and Stitching Shows in London, Dublin and Harrogate this year with the BugLife exhibition curated by Ann Kelly.

Its not easy to make money as a textile artist in New Zealand. I am usually working on a lot of different things at once. As well as making quilts I also make their costumes, tech quilt making and surface design, do commissions and complete projects for people.
Before leaving for India I was making costumes for the show The Merry Widow almost up till the day I left. I still have a lot of the costumes in my garage , I brought them home to wash, and I haven't been able to take them back to the costume store because no one knows whether the building is safe. Luckily the costumes were up on a table or they would also be wet.

Most of the time I work from home and it can get a bit lonely. So I also do 'finishing' for a shop. People bring in their completed tapestries and I make them up into cushions. Sometimes I get to make up beautiful needle cases or quilt shop samples.  I get to have some social time with customers and staff at the shop and the bonus is that I get paid.

I have been working on several collage litter bins for a commission and I recently completed a Grandmothers Flower Garden quilt for an elderly lady who is in her 90's.
No sooner had I handed over the first quilt than I got another half finished hexagon quilt which is almost identical to the first one.

The Grandmothers Flower garden quilt top when it arrived

The quilt after I moved some of the rosettes around and turned it into a single bed sized quilt

Lastly, some pictures from India

Gorgeous step well near Jaipur

Woodblock printing at Anokhi Woodblock museum

Elephant near Jaipur

Traffic on the way back to Delhi

View from the hotel window in Delhi. Cows, ice-cream vendors, cars and chaos

Beautiful architecture in the Lodi Gardens, Delhi

Coloured chalk for making rangoli patterns for Diwali

India was inspiring as well as confronting. 2 days after I left, Delhi had some of the worst pollution days ever, caused by Diwali fireworks and farmers burning off stubble in the fields. Then the large bank notes 1000, and 500 rupee notes were withdrawn suddenly over night making it very hard for tourists and locals alike. At the end of my holiday I would have loved to have stayed in India for longer but now I am very glad I left when I did. Maybe I will get a chance to go again when things have settled down.

Textile Commissions, earthquakes and travel

Its about 4 weeks since I got back to New Zealand from India. Its taken me a while to process everything and also to catch up on various projects which I couldn't work on while I was away.

Since I got back we have had a large earthquake. Our house has suffered a few cracks which weren't there before, and my husband has been working from home as his office is closed until they find new premises. The day after the earthquake we had heavy rain which followed a few weeks of steady rain. the ground was waterlogged and that meant we had water leaking through the back wall of our garage so we spent several hours sweeping water out of the garage and trying to get things dry. A lot of horrible fabric was thrown away that day. It was all stuff which should have been sorted and thrown away years ago.

It was lucky that we don't live near the coast of New Zealand. In what the newspapers called 'the perfect storm' we had a strong earthquake followed by heavy rain at the time of the Supermoon. There was a tsunami then high spring tides because of the superman and the heavy rain. No wonder the roads were flooded especially around the coasts and there were land slides, and fallen trees. Its taken a while to get back to normal, although there are still a lot of government and private buildings in Wellington closed due to earthquake damage. One of our friends has been evacuated from their apartment in central wellington and has been unable to get anything out of their home for nearly 2 weeks.

Bitter Harvest 3. This is a wallhanging currently hanging at Pataka. Water has been running down the front  from the cups to make the dye in the blue patches run. It looks quite blurry now.

This small quilt is travelling with the OzQuilt exhibition in Australia.

This life-size model of a weta (a New Zealand grasshopper)has been at the Knitting and Stitching Shows in London, Dublin and Harrogate this year with the BugLife exhibition curated by Ann Kelly.

Its not easy to make money as a textile artist in New Zealand. I am usually working on a lot of different things at once. As well as making quilts I also make their costumes, tech quilt making and surface design, do commissions and complete projects for people.
Before leaving for India I was making costumes for the show The Merry Widow almost up till the day I left. I still have a lot of the costumes in my garage , I brought them home to wash, and I haven't been able to take them back to the costume store because no one knows whether the building is safe. Luckily the costumes were up on a table or they would also be wet.

Most of the time I work from home and it can get a bit lonely. So I also do 'finishing' for a shop. People bring in their completed tapestries and I make them up into cushions. Sometimes I get to make up beautiful needle cases or quilt shop samples.  I get to have some social time with customers and staff at the shop and the bonus is that I get paid.

I have been working on several collage litter bins for a commission and I recently completed a Grandmothers Flower Garden quilt for an elderly lady who is in her 90's.
No sooner had I handed over the first quilt than I got another half finished hexagon quilt which is almost identical to the first one.

The Grandmothers Flower garden quilt top when it arrived

The quilt after I moved some of the rosettes around and turned it into a single bed sized quilt

Lastly, some pictures from India

Gorgeous step well near Jaipur

Woodblock printing at Anokhi Woodblock museum

Elephant near Jaipur

Traffic on the way back to Delhi

View from the hotel window in Delhi. Cows, ice-cream vendors, cars and chaos

Beautiful architecture in the Lodi Gardens, Delhi

Coloured chalk for making rangoli patterns for Diwali

India was inspiring as well as confronting. 2 days after I left, Delhi had some of the worst pollution days ever, caused by Diwali fireworks and farmers burning off stubble in the fields. Then the large bank notes 1000, and 500 rupee notes were withdrawn suddenly over night making it very hard for tourists and locals alike. At the end of my holiday I would have loved to have stayed in India for longer but now I am very glad I left when I did. Maybe I will get a chance to go again when things have settled down.

Classes

Wellington Quilters Guild has asked me to teach a Sashiko class and a machine quilting class at their winter solstice quilting weekend in June. I am ashamed to say that my website is now so out of date that those classes aren't even on it. My husband constructed my website so long ago that we have long forgotten how to change anything and it wasn't ever at all easy. I was one of the first quilters in New Zealand to get a website but now I'm one of the people with the most out of date website in New Zealand.

Here is the information for the Wellington Quilt Guild classes.

One day classes

Quilt-doodling and colouring-in for machine quilters

Spend a day honing your machine quilting skills by doodling using the sewing machine then  colour in your patterns using fabric markers. Colouring-in is optional! 

Black thread on white fabric

Sashiko

Sashiko is a traditional Japanese way of patching and strengthening old fabrics using running stitch in decorative patterns.  In this class students will look at photographic examples of Japanese boro (patched) textiles as well as examples of more modern styles of sashiko stitching. Students will then learn how to mark out a grid on fabric and then stitch Japanese Sashiko patterns either by hand or by machine. 

Sashiko is traditionally done using cream or white thread on a navy (indigo) background but students are encouraged to try different colour combinations or create their own stitching patterns for a different look. 

Machine stitched sashiko patterns on a bag

2 placemats.  Left -  sashiko by machine. Right - sashiko by hand

Sashiko stitching over recycled indigo fabrics to make a placemat

My new studio!

I have a new sewing room/studio in my house. Its really nice to have the extra space as a lot of my 'stuff' has been left stored in the little room I had previously. Hopefully both sons won't want to come home to live at the same time as we now only have one spare room.

Anyway, to celebrate the new room I have started teaching private beginners patchwork, collage/ appliqué and machine quilting classes. I also hope to run some very small classes during the week and some play days for small groups who want to try out different techniques. I'm also happy for people to do 'studio visits' (just ring first) or can arrange a short private class for overseas visitors who want to make a memento of New Zealand. Just get in touch to let me know what you would like.

The first small group play day is Indigo dyeing and shibori.

If anyone is interested in indigo dyeing while the weather is warm ( indigo likes warm weather) . Possible dates are
Saturday 20th February
Friday 18th March
Saturday 19th March (nearly full)

Email me at smith_c*actrix.co.nz for further details or reply to this post.

Note to Chyfly who commented on my previous blog post, I'm sorry I don't seem to be able to answer your comment so I left a message in the previous post! Thanks for letting me know about the tatters in relation to the barge-man's clothes, that was very interesting and I'd love to know more but couldn't find anything on Google.

My new studio

I've been working in a long thin room which has become so full of 'stuff' that I have found it harder and harder to find a space to work in. Recently I have been working in a 50cm square spot on a 4 metre long bench because of a lack of storage space and an inability to organise my stuff. 

We have just done major renovations across the whole house. These were long overdue as the kitchen was a 1970s brown horror. It was so authentically awful that it was used as the set for the movie 'Via Satellite' when we rented out the house while we were overseas back in 1997. It has taken until 2015 for us to brave the disturbance of kitchen renovations. Anyway after months of painting walls, waiting for tradespeople, moving furniture around so we could recarpet etcetc, we moved to the downstairs part of the house and my husband kindly vacated his office ( he moved into one of the kids bedrooms as they have left home) so I could  have a bigger studio at the front of the house. I will have a space to teach a few students or have a few friends over for crafty 'play dates'. I should have enough space to make voluminous theatre costumes in there too.

I have painted the walls and ceiling, ripped up the old disintegrating carpet and had 9 new lights put in. Yesterday I had new Lino installed, tomorrow Lisa Call is going to help me put up a large design wall, and I should get the bookcases and cutting table set up by next weekend. I'm really looking forward to putting my books in place. The books have been moved 4 times already, as each room was cleared for recarpet game or painting. I am so over moving books.

Nasty brown floor is transformed by instant plank like Lino.

Fabric shopping in Wellington, New Zealand

A few shops have opened and others have closed so I thought it was time to update my list of Wellington fabric shops. Here are suggestions from Coastal Quilters group for shops in the Wellington area.

Arthur Toye - closing, last day 31st january 2014.    General sewing fabrics and cheaper quilting fabrics
The Grand Arcade
16 Willis st
Wellington

Sheherazad - Closing, silks are on sale 50-70% off.   Beautiful silks!
Shop 38-40, Level B1, 
1 Willis Street, Wellington Central, 
Wellington 6011

Wellington Shops

Arthur Toye - closing, last day 31st january 2014.    General sewing fabrics and cheaper quilting fabrics
The Grand Arcade
16 Willis st
Wellington

Sheherazad - Closing, silks are on sale 50-70% off.   Beautiful silks!
Shop 38-40, Level B1, 
1 Willis Street, Wellington Central, 
Wellington 6011

Busy Bee     - quilting fabrics and machine quilting  
14 Kingsford Smith St
Rongotai
04 387 7115

Stitchbird Fabrics - fabric and novelties

Stitchbird
Shop 19 Kilbirnie Plaza
22 Bay Road
Kilbirnie
Wellington

Wellington Sewing Services - sewing machines, fabrics, knitting wool
Shop 3, Kilbirnie Plaza 22 Bay Rd, Kilbirnie
04-387 4505

Piece by Piece Ltd - fabrics

Shop 3, 

149 Karori Rd Wellington

Nancys Embroidery

Spotlight

Fabric Warehouse

 

Kapiti Coast shops

Fabric by Three 

Waikanae at 17 Fleetwood Grove, specialising in hand dyed fabric and open by appointment – 04 293 3794

Fibre Flair in Waikanae.

Bernina in Kapiti,

Hutt Valley

Quiltworks in High Street Lower Hutt

Sawmillers Quiltery


More to be added soon, have to take the cat to the vet right now!


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Where do I start?

I've been a bit busy lately making costumes for several shows here in Wellington.

First there was last minute work for Phantom of the Opera. I had never seen Phantom so it was really confusing working on all sorts of styles of costume, one scene had crinolines, another had bustles. I was really confused and had to rely on a theatrical designer Rachel Hilliar for help knowing what it was all about. I understood about the plays within the play when I went to see the show which was fantastic! Here is a Youtube video that the cast has made and it shows quite a few of the costumes which I worked on with costumiers Helle Rosenberg and Amy Mackaskill.

After Phantom I worked on costumes for 'Gypsy Baron' which is currently showing. Last weekend they played in Palmerston North but the show was cut short by 5 minutes on Sunday when the theatre was evacuated due to an earthquake. The theatre is considered an earthquake risk so no-one was keen to stick around. I missed all the action as I was in Taupo at the quilt symposium.

Taupo Quilt Symposium was last weekend, Ronnie Martin, a textile artist from Nelson, and I did a road trip up to Taupo stopping wherever we wanted. neither of us took part in any classes but we looked around all the exhibitions and did quite a bit of shopping. The weather was lovely considering what it had been like the previous weekend.

I've taken photos of this weird tree before. It is the real 'one tree hill' and you can find it on the back road from National Park to Wanganui.

Lux light festival sculptures, Wellington storm, Textile Fibre Forum article

Today I recieved my copies of the magazine Textile Fibre Forum with my article about the Vertical Dyeing project' from last year. I think the article looks good!

The LUX light sculptures are all around the central city , the exhibition ends tonight. They were meant to be up on Friday but the weather was too bad so the opening was saturday night.

 The moon was very large and very bright, it was too bright for most photos so I took a picture of it separately. It would have looked nice with some tree branches in the foreground or some sort of silhouette.

We had a massive storm on Thursday night and Friday. By saturday the wind was down to the normal Wellington gale force winds but on Friday night the wind was gusting up to 200kms on the top of hills. Here is some of the tree damage at our local park (Willowbank).

There is a house under this tree somewhere.

Here is a video that the city council made of the storm cleanup.