And now for something completely different…

I’ve discovered a new [to me] program – PostworkShop. The basic program is free, although I’ve been having such fun with it that I'm thinking of upgrading to the ‘Artist Edition’, which gives you access to a lot more ‘styles’ [effects/filters in my terms].

So far, all I’ve done with it is explore the different styles. The helpful ‘Help’ section [not all Help sections are helpful, as I’m sure you know] suggests that you start by uploading a photo and then click on the die at the bottom of the screen which lets you try random effects.

So I started with this image of Bournemouth, and began to play.

 

 

 

 

This is ‘Dark Chalk and Pencil’

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Fauvism’

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Abstract’

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Dreamworld’

 

 

 

 

 

 

and ‘In the Dark’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I also played with this picture of Babybel from last summer.

I’m a member of the group blog ‘Ideas of Inspiration’, where the current prompt is the letter ‘N’. Well, I went through all my photos – and the only N word I could come up with was ‘nappy’. [Sorry!]

You can see the version I chose to post over on the other blog, but these are some of the rejects -

 

 

‘Andy’s Pop’

 

 

 

 

‘Expressionist’ – I really like this one -

 

 

 

 

 

 

and one called, appropriately,  ‘Grandparent’s Photo’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can adjust some of the styles but not all of them – for some reason the one called ‘Caravaggio’ just produces an unalterable image in shades of brown [not what I associate with Caravaggio]. You can, apparently, combine styles, but I haven't got that far yet. I could also have done with an ‘Undo all’ button – although there may be one which I haven’t found.

You can’t ‘paint’ over the images as you can in Painter Essentials, but if you just want to play around with photos, it’s worth trying out the Basic program.

When I wasn’t playing with PostworkShop [well, there was nout on telly last night], I carried on tackling the UFOs in the work room. 

This is something I started when we were doing the 3D samples, but for some reason didn’t finish. It is one of my first pieces of Cas Holmes fabric, with added hand and machine embroidery, on an armature made of old CDs and a rolled up magazine page – although you can’t see those.

The pattern wasn’t quite right, despite my careful measuring – too short, too wide at the bottom and too narrow at the top – and the head and neck need work – but I’m quite pleased with her. [She is not an angel, despite what Wensleydale says. I don’t do angels.]

Oh – and I did remember to make the soup – Jamie’s tomato bean and pasta soup, in the electric pressure cooker we gave ourselves for Christmas. [You may think an electric pressure cooker is an unnecessary extravagance, but it wasn’t much more expensive than a non-electric one. It has the great advantage that it brings itself to pressure, turns itself down, and in due course turns itself off – and it is a lot quieter than my old pressure cooker.]

And to Carole who laughed at yesterday’s tale of forgetfulness – good! I try to cultivate my ‘talent to amuse’.

Just Googled that – and it is amazing how many people have recorded it  - it’s from Noel Coward’s ‘If love were all’, in case you are wondering.

Finished!

Well, nearly.

We were going to go to Salisbury yesterday to see this, but it was windy and Wensleydale wanted to get on with his plumbing, so we stayed at home.

I decided it was time to stop farting about and finish my journal/evaluation. I'd half written it, so it would only take a morning, right?

Wrong.

It took all day, and I only finished it today – because I wanted to add  a photo of the chest on mum’s mat, and first I had to wash and iron it – and even starch it - the mat, not the chest. Obviously.

But the journal and evaluation is now written, checked by my trusty editor, and printed, despite the printer having a hiccup and printing the first two pages twice, and clipped into a folder.

Flushed with success, I added beads to my red balls, and put them in the string drawer – though you may not be able to see them… I have few more notes to add to the workbook, and then I really will be finished!

To make sure we got our weekly dose of culture, we went to this, today, as it’s a bit nearer home. [YouTube versions here, from other installations]

We  found it incredibly moving. You can sit in the middle and listen to the music move round the individual voices, like sitting in the sea with waves breaking round you. Alternatively you can move round the speakers and hear the individual voices.

The only other sound installation I've experienced is Susan Phillipsz Turner Prize entry – and  I much prefer Janet Cardiff’s work. To be fair, Spem in Alium is probably my favourite piece of music ever – and the ambience and acoustic of the Great Hall did the Cardiff piece much greater service than Tate Britain did Phillipsz. It also made you appreciate how brilliant Tallis was, to be able to write a piece of music which works so superbly in a stone walled building, and utilises the echoes so brilliantly.

We will be going back before it closes at the end of March.

I find it always helps…

to read the Module Handbook. Preferably at the beginning of the module. Then you realise in good time that you need to ‘maintain a journal detailing evidence of design ideas … stitch thoughts’ [not much stitch!] and ‘ongoing evaluation’.

A journal has been maintained, patchily, but it certainly has little of the above. Just samples, and a few odd notes – oh, and ‘evidence of historical and contemporary contextualisation’. [Sigh of relief.] [I.e. pictures of other people’s work. And some stumpwork caskets.]

So guess what I’ve been doing over the last few days? Sitting in the corner with the laptop, grunting and swearing, and trying to remember why I decided to do what I decided to do.

I do now have most of it written down, apart from the evaluation  - oh, and I have to ‘select an appropriate way of presenting the artefact’ and evaluate that too.

It’s a scruffy looking box. What's the best way to present a scruffy looking box? I’m tempted to fish out one of mum’s lace trimmed mats [not often used in this house, you have to wash them if you do, and iron them properly], and present it on that – although if they ask me why, the answer will be ‘it seemed like a good idea at the time’…

Anyone got any bright ideas on how best to present a dirty cardboard box?

So while I thought, I went in to the work room with the intention of tidying up the aftermath of two months of creative endeavour, and Wensleydale’s blind erection – er, perhaps I’d better rephrase that, -Wensleydale putting up the blind.

But the first thing I came across was the boring book I made earlier in the week, which needed sewing, because the staples failed.

It’s only a single section book, which normally I would use pamphlet stitch for, but this time I looked at Keith Smith’s ‘1 2 & 3 Section Sewings’, and found lots of suggestions which are far more interesting.

I chose the one on the left, which Smith likens to a machine stitch, but which I would describe as couching.

And then decided to whip it.

 

Still a fairly boring book, but a bit more interesting.

Knotting the thread ends on the outside is my idea, you mustn’t blame Smith for the tatty tassels.

 

 

 

Then  I came across the beads I bought at Walford Mill last Friday – and realised that the little spherical ones I’d bought at one end of the room at the Pick’n’Mix stall, went with the sort-of-Oriental ones I'd bought later at the other end of the room.

And they all sort-of-went with the sort-of-fish from the same stall.

So I made some jewellery.

 

And then, because it was getting late and Wensleydale had gone out, I did something I had intended to do when he went out. No pictures of what I made, it’s a secret, but it is red and white and involves hearts.

College tomorrow, Babybel on Thursday [Monday and Thursday mornings are the new Tuesdays], probably a trip on Friday – so I may get back to the tidying on Saturday. Procrastinate, moi?

No mention of any work on the tatty box itself, you’ll notice. It is pretty well finished, apart from the continuing question of the string drawer, which I hope to tackle in college tomorrow – although I keep saying that and somehow it doesn’t happen … Procrastinate, moi?

Slow progress this weekend …

caused by a combination of the after-effects of insomnia – and Wensleydale re-arranging my room so that he could get to the window, to replace the old curtains with a much more practical roller blind. My room being in the state it is, this involved quite a lot of rearranging – but as a result I no longer have window coverings which dangle in the paint.

This meant that yesterday I couldn’t get at my machine to finish off the last drawer lining – and as the blind-erecting turned into an overnight job [as in, ‘Oh, b****r, I've put it up back to front, let’s have a drink and I’ll start again tomorrow’] – I made a sketch book.

I had already made some layered backgrounds, as suggested in Gwen Hedley’s new book, so I used those for some of the pages. My covers seem to get more vestigial as I go on – in this case I just took off the address label, removed half of the internal flap and stapled the other half to make a pocket, ‘ strengthened’  [maybe] the spine and added the pages. As I’ve got a bit bored with using elastic to try to hold my sketchbooks shut – this one has a rather glitzy red ribbon.

The rather odd internal stitch patterns are one of Keith smith’s 3 section sewings, which he calls Beethoven’s Fifth – I think because it makes zigzags on the spine, which I forgot to photograph.

I had to cut down the paper to make the pages fit the mailer – which meant I had some left-overs. So what can you do with left-over paper?

Make a book of course. This is a rather more elaborate cover, made from a scrap of the drawer linings – but a much less elaborate binding.

 

 

Today, when I could access the sewing machine again, I finished the last drawer – the rubber band drawer.I hope you can see the specially made dust bunnies.

The whole piece isn’t quite finished. I am still pottering around with the contents of the string drawer – I know it needs something more but I can’t work out what.

Then I decided I’d better tackle the paperwork – or ‘gathering together all the widely distributed stitch samples and putting them in the workbook’ work.

The problem with putting 3D samples in a work book is that they are 3D. I can make a workbook lumpy with 2D samples, so you can imagine what this one looks like.

But just in case you can’t, here are pictures.

That’s a rejected string sample trying, but failing, to keep it all under control. Now I need to add some words of explanation [‘I’m nuts’?] and the all-important evaluation, decide on what I’m going to do with the string drawer, do it - and it’s all finished. [I am feeling a bit pressurised because I can’t make the hand–in session and I have promised to get the 3D piece and my essay in early. Fool.]

Then I used the last of the left-over paper to make another book. Really vestigial, this one, as I experimented with staples to hold the pages in.

Unfortunately they have failed, so I will have to stitch it after all…

No wonder I feel knackered.

 

As does someone else, after a hard day – er - sleeping.

‘Cats sleep anywhere’.

You may have had…

the teensiest suspicion that in all this chatter about not being able to do hand embroidery except in the evenings, so having to do other things, there was a tiny amount of procrastination going on.

You may well have been right.

But this afternoon I screwed up my courage and tackled the electrified drawer. which meant completing the drawer lining, fiddling with the drawer lining to get it to fit, fiddling to get the fabric with the circuit on it into the bottom of the lining, sewing in the switch, couching down the wires to the switch so they don’t cross, checking it works, putting it all in the box, checking it works, adding the diffuser, cutting the paper tubes down because they are now too big,  putting in the paper tubes, checking it works, taking everything out again because it had stopped working, tightening the connections so it did work, replacing everything [with it switched on this time just to be sure], stopping for tea and biscuits, resuming, making some more tubes because there weren’t enough and finishing with it still working.

Then I wrote some instructions on how to turn it on, so the tutors can get the full effect. Wouldn’t want to put in all that swearing work for nothing.

Unless, of course, it’s stopped working when they mark it.

It is difficult to take a photograph of a dimly glowing box – this is the best I could do!

Babybel tomorrow, college on Wednesday, so drawer 4 will have to wait…

For some odd reason …

I have a fixation that hand embroidery can only be done in the evening, in the living room – the days are for the work room, and machine embroidery, or other things not done in the living room. I think this dates back to BR [Before Retirement] when I had to make the best use I could of the weekends, which were the only times I could get to the work room and do stuff.

At the moment I need to finish off the hand embroidery on the drawer linings, and then sew them up on the machine – but I can’t bring myself to do the hand embroidery during the day. And it wasn’t possible last night because of the need to read subtitles on another of BBC4’s excellent Scandinavian police series – Danish, this time. Beautifully shot, beautifully paced and scripted, and the effect on the family of the murdered girl treated in far more depth than I have ever seen in a fictional piece. Try watching the scene where the murdered girl's parents tell her younger brothers about her death without crying – I couldn’t.

Interesting that a country with a population smaller than London, with  a language spoken by few outside its shores, can make such excellent television – and what do we make? Midsomer Murders.

But I digress.

As I didn’t have much machining to do, I had to find other, non-college related things to do during the day.

Like making bowls – the usual Lois Walpole design, with selected strips of sari ‘silk’ for the weaving. [I am addicted to sari silk, I can’t stop buying it.] It needs shearing, but I am pleased with it. I’m thinking of experimenting with using craft Vilene for the ‘warp’ as:

1. I have too much Vilene and
2. no more of the right sort of cardboard. Lots of cardboard, it’s just all too thick.

I did get two drawers finished, though -

the button drawer

 

 

 

 

 

and the string drawer 

although the contents of the latter are short of three red balls - I've decided they need either tiny tassels or beads, not sure which.

I got the results for Module 6, the 3D samples back on Saturday [always posted, so we can’t argue on the spot <g>]. 75%, which I'm perfectly happy with. Reading between the lines, I lost marks because my experimetnal samples weren't experimental enough.

There was a suggestion that I should think about combining the knitted vessels, like this one

 

 

 

with the woven pieces like, I assume, this

or this - which has me stumped!

The mean, moody black and white photos are because we had to submit them in b&w.

Grruuuump…

Just started another cold – less than a month after the previous one. The kind donor was Babybel, always generous to her granny.

The cold may be part of the reason I spent all yesterday afternoon [came home early from college] and a significant part of today trying to couch down about half a metre of thread.

Sounds easy? Well, it would have been, if I hadn’t been trying to attach some of these to the thread – and make them work.

For some reason i cannot now remember and have some cause to regret, I decided it would be interesting to put lights at the bottom of this.

So I bought one of these. Yes – the reduce, re-use, recycle ethos of the 3D piece went completely out of the window.

Of course, when it came – no instructions. And Google, for once, let me down. Lots of instructions for inserting LEDs, but all of them written for electronics experts who can’t sew, rather than sewers with no knowledge of electronics.

So I snagged a passing techie who reassured me that I couldn’t blow it all up if I wired it up the wrong way, drew me a wiring diagram, and promised to come back if I got one of these. Err – I think not.

Couldn’t be easier, I thought. And it was, the first time, except that I’d wired the switch in the wrong place. So I moved the switch and tried again – and again – and again, to get all the lights to light up. Individually yes – altogether at the same time – not on your nelly. [No, it wasn’t because I’d wired them in sequence, I’d been warned that would lead to difficulties. And I kept replacing the thread.]

Finally, as I was about to give up, I decided to try some copper wire I just happened to have lying around.

Easy peasy. The problem had clearly been with the ‘conductive thread’ which I could not get to make a decent connection with the LEDs.

So here they are, all lit up – although you’ll have to take my word for it.

 

 

 

Two tips I did pick up from my Google search:

1. couch the thread down rather than trying to sew with it. Essential if you use wire but also easier with the conductive thread. [Anyone with experience of using metallic thread will be able to guess how it shredded and split and generally behaved very badly indeed.]
2. Use a press stud as a switch – I found it easier than the minute switches in the kit, and of course it looks more appropriate. In fact all you need to do to get the LEDs to light up is get your wires crossed, but for the purposes of getting this thing marked I decided a switch was better.

The next step is to line the drawer, insert the electronics which are sewn to a separate piece of fabric, add this red diffuser cut from a plastic file folder, insert the tubes of paper, and light the blue touch paper – switch on.

When it probably won’t work…

But the external examiner told me to try something I’d never thought I’d do. So I have. And I might even try it again, although I'll pass on the conductive thread.

[The EE also said our work didn’t have to be beautiful, which is a good thing in the circumstances…]

 

 

 

In another pat of the forest chest of drawers, the result of my experimentation with string.

Crochet chains, some with beads, made on the biggest hooks I could find – I knew that 12mm one would come in useful one day.

I did try some binding and wrapping, but decided that the process was too slow, and the results too small, to fill the drawer in the time. I think it needs some red, though.

So, despite my cold, and the frustrating wiring, I’m quite pleased with progress on this piece.

Small steps…

some of them very small.

I decided I needed some fluff in the corners of my drawers – I’m sure none of you have fluff in your drawers, but I do in mine. [No, not that sort of drawers!]

How to make fluff? Felt and an embellisher. I know you can use dryer fluff, but as I don’t have a dryer …

It felt silly just embellishing felt on its own, so I experimented with layering the felt on brown paper, sure the paper would just disintegrate.

But it didn’t – well, not straight away –you can see the beginnings of some disintegration bottom right, but I had to embellish from the paper side to get it to do that.

 

 

I don’t think I’ll be using this technique  for this piece, but the effect is interesting.

Other bigger small steps are:

finishing the itsy bitsy button bags [here in the wrong drawer] -

 

 

 

 

and the layers of rubber bands – now I have to pluck up the courage to fit it to the drawer -

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and adding some handles to the chest – doesn’t it look distressed? -

 

 

 

and turning lots of ‘string’ [or string-like substances such as macramé cord] into machine cord.

I have bitten the bullet, taken out a second mortgage and, as advised by Ruth Lee, bought a cording foot – and it does make making miles of machine cord easier – the cord doesn’t get flattened, but because the feed dogs are up it doesn’t wiggle all over the place.

The next step is to sample various processes for making loops with this – crochet, wrapping and binding, buttonhole rings – or anything else I can think of.

As an alternative, I want to sample ways of filling a drawer with bubble wrap – anyone got any bright ideas apart from ironing it?

And finally, I retrieved this from its perch on top of a radiator – the bowl I made from the left over brown paper pulp. It has dried very hard and crunchy – I wish I’d made it before I handed in the 3D samples, it looks the perfect receptacle for unidentified archaeological artefacts – after a bit of distressing, of course…

When the weather gets warmer I want to experiment with making hand made paper with brown paper, too.

Mmm – is that one step madder than cutting up fabric and sewing it together again – shredding paper and making paper with it?

Now you see them…

now you don’t…

Or, to be truthful, you do, but in a truncated form.

My original plan was to use horizontal rolled instruction leaflets, but it became obvious that I didn’t have enough, and when I decided to  develop a theme of circles [or roughly circular forms, anyway], they had to go. End on and shorter, that is.

 

 

My second idea was to use shorter, vertical rolls of brown paper [regular readers will know that I have a lot of brown paper], but brown paper alone looked boring, even with different sized rolls, so I added the instruction leaflets, and some bus tickets as well, just for variety. At the moment they are sitting in a failed drawer with no lining – I shall have to think about the lining, as you can see it through the larger rolls.

I didn’t manage to pluck up enough courage to unpick the needle lace last night, but might manage it tonight, although I have a few more button bags to sew. It looks like 160 will be enough. [For the first time ever, Wensleydale said something which implied that he might have the teeniest tiniest suspicion that, perhaps, maybe, I am possibly a wee bit – well, shall we say bonkers?]

He might be right – although I found making the bags quite meditational, like knitting. And Radio 3 have a new series of World Music on Thursdays which went very well with itsy bitsy button bag manufacture.

So – I have one drawer of rubber bands, one of paper, one of buttons – not sure about the fourth, might be bubble wrap, might be wrapped, crocheted or turned into machine cord string – or something else I haven’t thought of yet. [Stitch? You think I should have more stitch? In the tutorial I was expressly forbidden to get too hung up on stitch!]

While I was feeling destructive I distressed the chest of drawers a bit more, with an ink pad. I have resisted the temptation to attack it with a hammer. So far.

Must add the handles.

And just to prove that insanity making chests runs in the family -

this one was made by my father in the 1950s [it’s tiny, I keep sewing tools and haberdashery in it]

 

 

and this one by my great grandfather, a wheelwright, in [probably] the late 19th century - by the look of it from what he had lying around at the back of the shed. It is a little bit bigger –big enough to hold spare quilts in the top.

Although they probably wouldn’t approve of the rough and ready construction of mine, my forefathers would definitely approve of the recycling, a trait which  runs deep in the family [Dad had it too].

Did I mention great grandfather was a Yorkshireman?

Back to work

On her excellent and inspiring blog Margaret Cooter has written about being ‘energized’ by going back to college. I know what she means – but in my case it is blind panic which has led to an outburst of activity. Panic caused by finally allowing myself to accept that the 3D piece is due in by the end of this semester, i.e. February. [I can feel my blood pressure rising just typing that.]

So I had to make some decisions. The first was that I would line the drawers with some Cas Holmes inspired fabric. Unfortunately the piece I made before is not big enough, so I spent yesterday afternoon making some more, while the rain drummed on the roof of the [unheated] conservatory - the only place suitable for sloshing wallpaper paste around.

Then this morning I moved the fabric inside, otherwise it will never dry. It is now squeezed between the dining table and the window, which is fine provided no-one wants to sit at the table…

Last night I got started with a sample of embroidery to put in the drawers. Yes, embroidery! Not cardboard engineering. Not glued fabric. Stitch!

I want the drawer contents to be those everyday things we all have at the back of drawers, but used in an unusual way. Hence the rubber bands used as the cordonnets for some needle lace. [The blue threads are temporary, holding the cordonnet to the temporary backing.]

Plan A with the real piece was to use blue rubber bands as we have lots of them. Plan B was to use red ones as we have nearly as many and, as Sheila Paine points out, red thread has special significance in a lot of traditional embroidery.

But I like the look of the boring beige ones so much I had to go out this morning and buy some more, because I’ve used all we had in the sample.

This afternoon I found two more book mailers and made two more drawers for the chest, so they are all the right size, if nothing else. So I now have four that aren’t the right size, as well as four that are. I used a dud drawer to see whether sanding them made the surface more interesting- I knew they’d come in useful - and as it did, sanded the real thing.

And finally, I made some crud pulp from brown paper and PVA and tried to fill in the holes and gaps in the chest – which wasn’t as successful as I'm hoped.Still, I figure  I can sand it down again after it has dried.

There was, naturally, a lot of crud left so I lined an old bowl with cling film and made a moulded bowl.

No idea if it will work, and it has no connection with the 3d piece, but I couldn’t bear to throw the crud away. [Yes, I know what it looks like…]

It is sitting on the radiator, otherwise I don’t think it would ever dry out. I would have liked to make paper with the crud but as I normally work outside when I make paper and it has been a wet, windy, January day – I decided not to.

Back to the sample tonight. I hope you realise how brave I am being using needle lace, when the external examiner has written books on it…