Progress has been made…

on the PCs/PMS, though I’m not really sure what constitutes either. At the moment I’m working on the assumption that if it’s 2D – or 2.5D. like a book mock up – it goes in the sketchbook, and if it’s 3D and/or textile/stitch, it’s a personal cloth – or a sample for a personal cloth. I have come to the conclusion that I should just make stuff for the PCs, and whether it is a PC or a sample will ultimately depend on how much stuff I manage to make [The target is 10-15.]

So if I make 16 – 1 or more of them will be samples. Between 10 and 15, they'll all be PCs. Simple.

On that calculation – these may or may not be PCs, but they are definitely not for the sketch book:

Daisy because she’s a textile, and lumpy

 

 

 

 

 

 

and Cadel, Andy and Frank because they’re 3D [and look as if they are on a podium]

I’ve noticed that a major constituent of litter is fast food detritus, so I decided to have a go at making my own ‘disposable’ cups using papier mache and photographs of the things which litter despoils. These will eventually be photographed in situ, but they are still a bit sticky. The rims need a bit of thought, but in general I’m pleased with them – especially Cadel.

I don’t like Daisy as much as her brother Tommy, the blue litter beast, so she may end up as a sample, if I manage to make enough pieces. Mind you, the quality of workmanship wasn’t improved by working on her while watching the TDF time trial – not normally my favourite part, but this one was almost as exciting as the Alpine stages. And now the right man has won [sorry Schleckies], all I’ve got to worry about is Mark Cavendish falling off in the Champs Elysees. [Does that really mean Elysian fields? I’ve never really thought about it before.]

I’m so productive, I’ve even done a bit of drawing. Sian Martin has been running a summer sketchbook project on her blog. As I already had a collaged, stained sketchbook like she suggests, I decided to join in.

I’m a bit behind, but at least I’ve started, and I hope to do more tomorrow. Not the organic forms Sian recommends, but more potential litter, which makes it a contribution to the PMS, and kills two birds with one stone.

Speaking of birds, there are either more pigeons this year or they are all following me around. Paranoid? Moi?

A bit of book making…

and a bit of drawing took place today – as well as rather more photography.

The drawing was 2 minute continuous line sketching – I am doing more of this, and blind contour drawing, in an attempt to loosen up.

The books were quick, ad hoc things – after a morning with Babybel, good as she is, I didn’t have the energy for much else!

This, as you can see, is recycled yoghurt packaging. [Love those toffee ones]. One of my problems with getting interested in litter is that most litter seems to be things like cigarette and crisp packets, sweet wrappings and drinks cans and bottles – none of which we have around – and I can’t bring myself to pick them up…

This is much more salubrious – an off cut of hand made paper turned into an accordion book, I thought the flowers were interesting, but it needs something to bring out the patterns I cut in the inner layer.

By tomorrow I should be up to date with the photography challenge – if I can manage another two. Today’s are ‘someone you love’ and ‘a childhood memory’. I used PSE and PFAEC for both but I’m not completely enamoured with the results, and I’ve resorted to Picasa and Picnik to finish them off.

This is Babybel in the ‘echo tunnel’ on our Thursday walk. It’s an attempt at a ‘Fauve scene’ from PFAEC, but I was too heavy handed with the black lines, I think. I added some glow with Picasa which has improved it a bit.

 

 

 

and this sad gentleman is my childhood memory – my one legged, earless Ted, pop-arted a la PFAEC. I managed to work out how to add the text in PSE, but not how to get it into a speech bubble – and adding a frame was  completely beyond me, so that was done in Picnik.

I’m feeling a bit like Ted at the moment, as yesterday my GP confirmed what I have suspected for a while – that I have arthritis of the hip – and possibly back and neck as well. So it is time for X-rays, [just like Wensleydale], and probably physio [just like Wensleydale], and hydrotherapy [just like Wensleydale]. But if that lot does for me what it’s done for him, I’ll be a new woman <g>.

Mind the gap …

between two semesters, that is. Although it is hard to believe, the first semester of my degree course has finished. This means that for the first time for nearly 18 months, I’ve got nothing to do, until after the university exam board meets next week. Then, assuming I haven’t been thrown out for insubordination or [perhaps more likely] being useless, we start a new theme – ‘past, present and future’.

I can’t settle on anything to do in the mean time. I start one thing – dryads, books, bit of purple embroidery – drop it, and start another – knitting, playing with computer programs. Today I was all set to make a basket, until Wensleydale declared it was a day for going to Hobbycraft. [A man who likes to go to Hobbycraft!!! Or maybe it’s the coffee and cake at Haskins afterwards…]

Of course, it is half term, and the place was full of half term offers – so in addition to some boring things for me [PVA, black dye to restore some faded T shirts] – I ended up with several rather more interesting arty things for Babybel.

Part of my not settling to anything was due to a crisis of confidence – I’m half way through but I’m not convinced I’m any further on than I was when I started this degree. Yes, I’ve learnt stuff – but am I actually doing anything constructive with it?

Why can’t I decide on an approach or a style changing my mind all the time? [Did you see the programme about the sculptor David Nash last week? I want to attack wood with a chain saw! I want to set fire to things!]

I know I need to draw more, so why can’t I make myself do it?

But after a conversation with the ever-supportive Wensleydale, I came to the conclusion that all this fiddling around with computer programs is sort-of-drawing, and that, as I feel more willing to do that than pick up a pencil – I should stick with it. And do more with the graphics pad which Cheese Major and his partner so kindly gave me for Christmas.

So here are my first efforts – with a little help from Sumopaint. Don’t laugh.

Snowy trees

 

 

 

- circles [OK, I didn’t draw the circles free hand, just the lines and dots!]

 

 

 

 

- and the ravening bugblatter beast of Traal.

I’ve been reading about automatic drawing, so that’s what this is – although the sources I’ve read are a bit vague about how you actually do it.

 

I liked the circles best, so I played around with them in PostworkShop.

As you can see, some of the filters change the original image beyond all recognition.

Cheating? Maybe, but I do like some of the results.

Now i need to decide what to do with all these ‘drawings’.

If in doubt – make a book.

I had planned on doing some more on my India/Cas Holmes inspired piece – print on some more fabric, glue things together, that sort of thing – but I have to be in the right mood to slosh paint and glue about – and I wasn’t.

So, I made a book, inspired by this, on Jim Escalante’s site, [where I also found the instructions for this].

You may have noticed that the accordion book is made of hand made paper, laminated together, while still wet, with ribbon hinges.

I didn’t have any pulp, and I didn’t feel like making any – paper making being up there with painting and glueing in the list of things I didn’t feel like doing.

I did have Colour Catchers.  [Surprised?] And Bondaweb, and knitting ribbon. So this is my version.

Looking again at Escalante’s site I realise that Jean Funcke, who made the original, had 4 ribbons, but no ties. My ties don’t work terribly well, but I like look and feel of the result. It just needs a bit of embroidery…

 

After that I decided to do a bit of colouring in – though I definitely went over the lines

Copying - being inspired by A., I joined Carla Sonheim’s on-line class ‘The Art of Silliness’. After all that stress over ‘what is a drawing?’ I felt the need of a bit of silliness.

The test piece was this, to which we had to add a story.

A’s story was about cooking,  mine about mental illness. Does that say something about each of us?

‘But it looks like paint’, I hear you cry. Well – it was water-soluble crayon – and I did take a wet paintbrush to it, at the end. So maybe I felt like painting after all.

We had some visitors today.

Not Babybel and her entourage, this time – but these two beauties. Sorry about the quality of the photo - it was hastily snatched before they went away. They were having an enjoyable time chasing each other, rolling in the snow, and even leaping over each other. I suspect from what I've Googled since that this was a courtship routine.

We had an extra inch of snow overnight, so I bottled out of going to college, even though it was open. As someone said, ‘Even if you’ve got 4WD, someone else can still slide into you’ – and I knew the side streets round college would not have been cleared. Of course I felt very guilty about it – I rarely let the boys get away with not going to school because of the weather, as they will tell you at length if you mention the words ‘Hurricane of 1987’ …

Unfortunately I haven’t achieved much during my prolonged holiday. I did manage another drawing from the ‘Historia Ecclesiastica’. [Original here.] I did this one in pen – so no rubbing out – and once again i couldn’t fit all of it in. Perhaps I need to find a bigger sketchbook? Or draw a bit smaller, although I find that harder than you might expect.

Mind you, I do wonder if the scribe also had problems fitting it all in – there is such a layering and overlapping of letters. All those little animal heads biting the letters remind me of the Muppets, for some reason. Do you think Jim Henson was influenced by 9th century manuscripts?

A bit of this, and a bit of that.

‘This’ being – er – this. Which I think is seriously cute - so cute I may make another one, subject to confirmation from Babybel and her mum.

Free pattern here if you like it as much as I do.

‘That’ is more drawing – some very disciplined and some less so. This is another image from the booklet about the Staffordshire hoard – although it isn’t part of the hoard, rather an example of decoration from a book of the period. Wish I knew what it says.

As you can see I didn’t space it correctly, so the twiddly bits underneath are some of the details I didn’t have room for.

I love its exuberance – the way the letters intertwine and the little faces added wherever the scribe fancied. It made me think of graffiti – the scribe could make his mark by adding his own little flourishes and decorations, just as a graffiti artist has his own tag. It was great fun to do.

This was also fun. I remembered  the exercise we had done in Contemporary Textiles, drawing with three pens rubber banded together. So this is my teasel drawn with a big fat pen, a very fine one, and a calligraphy pen. It was quite difficult to keep them all touching the paper at the same time, but I am very pleased with the final effect.

 

I am trying to keep in mind that the purpose of my drawing is to inspire embroidery – and therefore I should be thinking about making the sort of marks which translate into stitch.  The drawings which I like best, I realise, are those, like the teasel and the ‘kimono’, which I can visualize as stitch.

 

 

 

Looks like three inches to me …

which is less than most people have had, but is quite enough, thank you.

[I would like to point out that I thought of this measuring technique quite independently of Mr Cheddar, who has posted a similar image on Facebook. Although a snazzy red ruler -  and more snow.]

As I haven’t posted a picture of the cherry tree for a while – here it is this morning. That is a colour photo, believe it or not.

 

 

 

 

 

As is this – our little lane.

 

 

 

 

 

Despite the quantities of snow available, I didn’t get round to snow dyeing - but I think there will still be some tomorrow. I have put the fabric into a soda soak, and this time I remembered the threads. I had assistance in winding the threads into hanks – Quality Control has only been going out when she absolutely has to, and so has some surplus energy, best used up by assisting with thread and yarn related activities.

I’m not sure why I didn’t get round to the dyeing, as I don’t seem to have achieved much in my day off-  apart from taking a few photos. O.K., 80+ photos.

I did draw this, described in the British Museum pamphlet as a ‘plate’. Those are, apparently, one-legged beasts biting each other’s necks.

 

And I pondered on this, which is the printed silk inspired by the fractured goldfish.  As you can see I added some couching. What you may not be able to see is that I then added some seeding, running stitch and free cross stitch in a failed attempt to make the jar opener shape stand out. And it’s all a bit blah.

I think I may have found a solution – we will see.

 

While I was out with the camera I took some photos of my favourite apple tree. The one that appeared in my C&G sketchbook.

 

 

 

Like this –  a credit card print, layered on a weaving and then tinted – several times …

Am I the only person in the UK …

who is sorry to get an extra day’s holiday tomorrow? I was quite disappointed when someone phoned from College to say it would be closed tomorrow because of the snow.

I am also quite relieved, because it means I don’t have to decide in the morning whether to try to get there and then spend the day either:

1. regretting not going in and wondering what I’m missing – or
2. looking out at the sky every five minutes and worrying about getting home.

And if the snow holds I can do some more snow dyeing.

Just to prove how sad I am – I got very excited when I spotted this in Wensleydale’s tool box. Not the blue and green insulation tape – although that’s quite interesting too – but the green and yellow stripy stuff, which is sleeving for wire.  I’m thinking couching or wrapping  – or beads, as it’s hollow.

Unfortunately he’s only got the one colour – but there is quite a lot of it, which he has nobly agreed to share.

As it was another morning on which we got up early, I got quite a lot done. [Really early, as I had a dental appointment at 9. Network Rail has, in its wisdom, decided to close one of the only two routes into Winchester from the south, so all that traffic is now driving past our front door. Very very slowly. Which meant allowing even longer to drive the few miles to the city centre than we normally do. ]

So after I got back from a cleaning and a telling off, I did  some experimentation with transfer dyes. I made a rubbing of the string stamp with transfer crayons and then covered the whole thing with transfer paint. Purple transfer paint, as you can see. Top right is the paper after I’d got all these prints from it. Anticlockwise from there the fabrics are a poly sheer, some poly cotton, a long thin piece of tapestry canvas, the felt that wouldn’t die –er – dye, and some more canvas.

The patterning is quite faint on some pieces, but they will make good backgrounds - for something yet to be decided. 

I also managed to finish this – which looked better before I coloured it. Turns out I misspoke in saying it came from a shield, the British Museum think it came from a sword – as I’m sure you all knew.

 

 

And I continued my exploration of Saxon relics with this. No idea what it is, the booklet didn’t say. It looks like gold inlaid into something, possibly leather or another metal. But that little blackwork-like decoration is beautifully done – much more precisely than in my drawing … It looks like the corner of a waistcoat, although I’m sure that it isn’t.

Guess what – another C&G tree! [Nearly at the end now]. This was ‘drawn’ with hot glue, then given a water colour wash [after it had cooled down, obviously]. I like drawing with hot glue – told you I was weird.

 

 

 

Speaking of drawing – have a look at Julia Griffiths Jones’ work. I think it is wonderful – I want to rush off to Wales to look at it. After it’s stopped snowing, obviously.

For the first time for months …

we had a Monday Meander.  Wensleydale is still finding walking quite difficult but he is fed up of being indoors, or only going where he can lean on a shopping trolley, so we took ourselves off to the Hillier Gardens.

It has been one of those lovely winter days which, as W.said, ‘we used to have’ – still, sunny, and very very cold. We had a look at the current textile exhibition, ‘Material World’, had a short walk in our favourite part of the gardens, the  winter garden, and then sought refuge in the cafe to warm up.

The exhibition seemed less interesting than it did last year – perhaps because many of the same people are exhibiting, or I’m getting pickier. Terrie the teacher has pieces in it, which are worth a look, and it is great if you want to buy interesting knitting wool – but as I am trying to reduce my wool stash, I passed by the alpaca, mohair, and locally grown and processed wool. [I coveted some bright pink mohair socks but I wasn't convinced they would survive my rather heavy handed washing.]

All this gadding about meant that I didn’t do very much else. I did finish this last night.  I realise it is a bit like a spot the difference competition – the only change from yesterday is the addition of some gold beads. The paler blurry bits in the background are not due to an inadequate scan but the colouring of the Colour Catcher.

Not sure why I’m so besotted with working with Colour Catchers – possibly because there are usually several lying around my workroom - which of course is because I don’t throw them away like a normal human being, I take them in there and iron them onto interfacing …

I did start a drawing this morning. It isn’t finished, because I want to colour the garnets red, with Inktense. The gold has been coloured with a metallic water colour pencil but you can be forgiven for not realising. It isn’t a ring, apparently, but some form of shield decoration. I love the wiggly shapes of the gold round the garnets, which were great fun to draw.

More wiggly shapes – repeating patterns made from the section of ‘tree’ on the left. The watercoloured ones fold up – and the explanatory label was added at the tutor's request. Good thing really or I wouldn’t have been able to remember what I’d done …

Don’t get too close to the screen …

I’ve got a cold and I don’t want you to catch it.

 

The cold led to a bad night, so I haven’t had much energy today – although I did manage to finish this, which I’ve been working on, off and on, since before Christmas.

 

More off than on, as

 

• It is cross stitch
• I think the variegated thread nearly works  - but not totally
• I was underwhelmed by it until I added the back stitch outlines.

Of course. after I’d started it I discovered that in ‘real’ Assisi work, you do the back stitch first, and it should be long arm cross stitch.

But hey, I’ve got C&G, I’m allowed to break the rules!

Unfortunately, I think it would look better with long arm cross stitch  – which for some idiosyncratic reason I find more interesting than ordinary cross stitch - or free cross stitch, or blackwork. So I might do another one. Maybe.

I also continued with my exploration of things the jar-opener shape reminds me of. Fortunately we have some poppy heads in a vase of ‘deadery’ [dried flora] so I had a real one to draw. And then I got side tracked into drawing the top – I love the star shape. Looks like a tassel …

Although my drawings aren’t very good I am coming to enjoy the process – and find myself noticing lots of things that I never previously noticed.

Teasels  tomorrow. Probably.

And yet more C&G trees – string stamp on the left, a blurry photograph of winter branches on the right. It would be interesting to draw – which is something I never thought I’d find myself saying …

Not much to show you today …

apart from this.  Can you tell what it is yet?

The jar-opener shape from the collage reminds me of several fruit and vegetables  – like artichokes, or pomegranates, or persimmons.

Unfortunately, we are temporarily out of artichokes, pomegranates and persimmons at Cheese Acres.

So I drew an onion.

I’ve worked out that photos of my drawings don’t work on the net, but scans do – which gave me the opportunity to play around with the scan.

 

Like this.

 

 

And this. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I want to try printing with a cut up onion – but as we don’t have many onions either, it will have to wait until we’ve been to Sainsbury’s – or until I can persuade Wensleydale that a bit of printing ink will add extra flavour to his curry …

From onions to yet more trees. Torn paper on the left, tree-like watercolour paint marks covered with baking parchment and left to dry on the right.

A little drawing, a little embroidery, and a little smearing.

The drawing was part of my Old Year’s Resolution to draw every day – and show some of the results. So this very simple effort is appearing in public. [The cat really did look as if it was about to topple over – honest! It was standing on a box to raise it to eye level.]

 

 

Remember this? Which no-one but me liked?

 

 

 

 

 

Now it looks like this. It has gained some transfer painted Lutradur and some FME’d feathers, which you may be able to see if you peer at the monitor. Even Wensleydale likes it now.

And the smearing? I added some blue rub-on wax to the turquoise and silver effort from yesterday. No point in a photo, it barely shows to the naked eye, but it has calmed it down a bit. I have some ideas for stitch, so may try those this evening before I have to put down hand work to read ‘Wallender’.

This is also one of my drawings [two in one post!] This was part of my Picasso inspired work in my C&G sketchbook.

I collected a lot of images of Picasso portraits – you can just see Picasso’s ear, in a self-portrait on the next page, under her nose. This is the face from one of those portraits – a woman with flowers in her hair.

My drawing was scanned and printed on an acetate, which is why she is see-through. The flowers are stencilled texture gel, then Brusho with cling film crumpled on top while it was still wet – the Brusho, not the texture gel …