All About You
The Webmaster tracked down Sue Butterfield and grilled her over a coffee (or three) in Fleet recently.Sue has recently finished the City & Guilds Certificate course at Odiham with Hazel and Terry. She especially enjoyed the design section of the course. It was also good to go through the craft aspects of Patchwork and Quilting. Sue feels that learning the basics of how to do things properly makes life much easier when working on a project, for example construction of 3-D items.
Like many of her generation, Sue learned to sew from her mother. Unlike the children of today, Sue remembers sewing lessons at school. The first thing she recalls making was a winceyette nightie that reached down to her toes, with a collar, buttons and long sleeves!
It was about thirty years ago that she made her first patchwork item. A friend was getting married, and was making a hexagon quilt. Sue thought it looked like a fun technique and decided to have a go. She made herself a waistcoat, and a smaller version for her two-year-old daughter. Although this type of item is no longer the height of fashion that it was then, Sue still has them both.
These days, Sue's favourite technique is crazy patchwork, into which she incorporates the stitch and flip technique, as well as appliqué, to create a type of fabric collage. She then embellishes this with a variety of embroidery stitches. She likes using glittery and pretty fabrics, as well as variegated threads. Her favourite colours to work with are the same as the ones she enjoys wearing; purple and pink.
When piecing fabrics, Sue prefers machine stitching, but is equally happy with hand stitch. It just depends how much time she has and exactly what she is doing. Whatever technique she uses for piecing, She finds it especially satisfying to use hand embroidery to enrich the look of the finished piece.
Her current sewing machine (and her favourite item of equipment) is a Janome 6600, which she really loves for the variety of stitches it will do. Because she loves it so much and doesn't want to damage it by hauling it back and forth to class, Sue recently bought a Janome Jem, which is very light and portable.
When she lived in a bigger house Sue had her own sewing room, but now her machine is set up in the 'Family Room', although she's hoping to have a more dedicated space eventually.
For some time Sue has lusted after an embellisher. She must have been a very good girl last year, because Santa granted her wish at Christmas. She hasn't had the chance to play with it yet, but will keep us posted on how she gets on with it.
Sue doesn't have a preference for a particular type of thread, and will use anything she fancies, being ruled more by the colour choice. As for wadding, she mainly uses 80/20 or 100% cotton. She tried a sample pack of small squares of wadding during her C&G course, but hasn't yet worked with things like bamboo etc.
Since Sue Luff opened Natures Threads in Fleet, Sue tends to go to her for most of her supplies. She likes to support a local person, but also thinks that the fabrics available there are really lovely. She finds Sue very helpful as well as handy. Like most of us, Sue also does a lot of shopping at shows, such as the NEC.
Asked if she had any advice for beginners, Sue said she thinks it's helpful to join a group or class. If someone is starting out, she says it's a good idea once you have decided that you enjoy patchwork and quilting, to buy the best equipment you can afford. In the long run, it makes life easier and helps to get a satisfyingly good result if you aren't trying to 'make do'.
Her 'top tip' would be to buy three sewing spotlights: the first for when you are using your sewing machine; the second for when you are hand sewing in front of the TV; and the third for when you go to workshops and classes. Sue says that if, like her, your eyes are going a 'bit dim', the more light you have the better!
Sue belonged to a P&Q group when she lived in Scotland, and ran a craft group in Devon. She has tried all sorts of crafts and enjoyed papermaking amongst others too many to mention! At the moment the only group she belongs to is Village Green Quilters, although she and the other students who have just finished C&G together are hoping to start some sort of group between them.
At the end of her C&G course, Sue was especially proud of her crazy patchwork lampshades. She had lots of challenges to meet when making them, mainly because she had never done anything like that before. She had to work out how to prevent the seams from showing up when the light was on, how to proof the fabric against fire and heat, how to join together the shape once she'd made the fabric, etc. This was one of the times when the course work on developing a design and then working out how to produce the finished item really helped her.
Some of the techniques learnt during the C&G course have intrigued Sue, and she plans to follow up and do more of some of them. She likes the surprises you can get with discharge dyeing, where it depends on the cloth and the dye used in manufacture what effects and colours you get when you take some of the colour back out of the cloth. She also very much enjoyed rust transfer dyeing, again for the unexpected results. A workshop using the sun resist dyeing technique also produced some lovely effects. She'd like to try snow resist dyeing, which she thinks sounds fascinating. She missed the snow we had, as she was in Devon, but rang her husband and got him to put a block of snow in the freezer for her!
Once she has developed a stash of fantastically dyed fabrics using all these techniques, Sue plans to use them to produce non-traditional pieces in the Art Quilt style. She wants to make a blind for the room where her grandchildren sleep when they come to stay, and a snuggle quilt for her grandson. She'd like to make these items relevant to the children, perhaps incorporating their pictures and things they like to do. At the moment though, she says she's busy 'trying to catch up with herself' after C&G!
Sue's main source of inspiration is the world around her. She likes the shapes and colours of nature and has recently bought a book full of pictures of the Earth from space, which she hopes will fire her creativity. She loves to find out the stories attached to works of art, and to discover how things came to be. A day out at a sculpture park would be a treat for Sue, where art and nature combine to stimulate the senses.
Having just completed two years of work for C&G, Sue is drawing breath before setting herself her next target in life. She thinks it would be great to be able to get commissions for items so that she can apply what she has recently learnt by taking an idea though from initial conception to finished creation.
Life for Sue has changed completely in recent years, mainly with the advent of grandchildren. Whatever direction it takes, it's clear that Sue will be working her way down her stash well into the foreseeable future!