Brrrr!

This is what a combination of sub-zero temperatures and a leaking overflow pipe will give you – roof to ground icicles.

I suppose it is a good thing really, as the water had obviously been trickling down behind the rampant ivy and we wouldn’t have noticed it otherwise.

 

 

 

The weather meant it was a good day to stay in and be creative. Here’s something I knocked up on the back of an old envelope or two. These were stamps I made in my Tamsin Van Essen phase, plus a blue ink pad and some blue patterned security envelopes, in the still life sketchbook. Love those envelopes – wonder how well they take stitch?

 

And while I was at it – grey security envelopes in the landscape sketchbook – sorry about the camera flare.

 

 

I was about to write ‘definitely better than paperwork’ - when it dawned on me that it is paperwork…

I didn’t start this course to do paperwork…

but I should have realised that it would involve some.

I have spent most of the afternoon:

1. ‘writing’ an essay plan for the personal research study and
2. researching artists for the contextualisation [if there is such a word] of the 3D samples.

‘Writing’ is in quotes because, being me, I made a mind map. You should practice what you preach – I used to teach students how to use mindmaps for essay planning – so I’m quite pleased to find that it works! Well, I think it does, as obviously I haven’t written the essay yet – but I have a clear idea of what I'm going to write.

Also, being me, I did the mindmap on the computer, not by hand. I spent ages tweaking it and adding images, so the result looks prettier, but it would have been much quicker to do with a pencil and paper.

When I was working I used to use Inspiration, and very good it was, but I can’t afford to buy my own copy, so I've fossicked around on the web and at the moment I’m trying VUE. So far, so steepish learning curve, but it was designed for academic use, and it does what I want it to do, unlike some of the other freebies I’ve tried. [The map on the website does it no justice – yes, you can make maps like that if you want to, but you can make comprehensible ones as well…]

At least, I think mine is comprehensible, but I know there are people who would swim the channel rather than try to make sense of one -  – as we have to hand the essay plan in, I just hope the tutors aren’t in that group.

My only problem was that we also have to do a presentation on our chosen artist, and part way through, I realised I was planning the presentation, not the essay. It was far too anecdotal. I think I’ve sorted that but I’ll have another look in the morning. Of course the presentation means wrestling with PowerPoint – the thing I spent years at work avoiding learning about …

Researching artists was more fun, but my eyes are tired from peering at this screen and I’ve used masses of ink printing out lots of images. I did make some exciting discoveries though, like Naomi Grossman, who does wonderful things with wire. I especially like the way she includes words in her figures.

Other new names to me [though perhaps they shouldn’t be] are Jan Miller [lots of little treasures added to embroidery] and Catherine Slater [interesting felt, especially the figures].

The research was more pleasurable than writing essay plans but tomorrow I hope to do something a bit more creative!

Slaving over a hot computer.

We are coming to the end of module 6, which is preparation for Module 7, the real 3D piece. [Yes. all that messing around was preparatory work.]

So I had a look at the assessment criteria for Module 6.

Whoops.

‘Show evidence of contemporary contextualisation appropriate to the project.’

‘Demonstrate the ability to evaluate this project.’

[Pause while i rescue the world’s dimmest and clumsiest cat, Quality Control, who just fell off the printer. And judging by the way she’s looking at me, it was my fault. For some reason she likes to sleep on the printer, and she has trodden on the switches so often that now she’s the only person pusson who can turn it on or off.]

But I digress. I decided I’d better find some contemporaries in order to contextualise. [Evaluation can come later.]

I need to identify people whose work bears some relationship to  what I’ve been doing, but not the people we talked about in class, because that would be too obvious.

Well, you know what it is like on the internet. You Google one person [in this case Jean Draper, because I love her work, some of which inspired the bottom bit of this]. One thing leads to another and several hours later you have a list of names, but the ones you think are most interesting are the hardest to find out anything about, and  And you end up with lots of names for the approaches you are most interested in, but not many for others.

 

So I’ve ended up with several people who include tiny, constructed or found objects in their work [Penny Burnfield, Gwen Hedley], but I am finding it more difficult to find someone who makes stuffies, [not necessarily like Rambo!], whose work I like, [i.e. definitely not twee]  and who we didn’t discuss in class.

 

 

For this Wednesday’s work there is really only one person to use to contextualise – unless you know anyone else who works in corrugated cardboard?

Of course, Jackie Langfeld’s work is much more impressive than my efforts, though to be fair to myself we were working to a brief which did not inspire anyone's best work – to make an environment using only torn card and staples. to hold the little stone we’d been given.

We all ended up much more attached to our stones than we were to the creations.

It was fun, but I don’t think I'll be taking it any further…

Festina lente

Or how not to tackle your homework, in 20 easy stages.

1. Try coral stitch on the hillside.
2. Decide coral stitch doesn’t work and unpick it.
3. Decide the hand-dyed habotai silk [HDHS – or HADES as Livewriter’s spell check would have it] you used for the hillside is now a mess because of all the unpicking.
4. Remove viaduct and hillside.
5. Look for more HDHS and find the turquoise dupion silk you had originally intended to use for the hillside but couldn’t find at the time.
6. Swither about which to use.
7. Decide on dupion.
8. Replace habotai with dupion. 
9. Find some turquoise embroidery floss in your stash, and add the blue-violet you bought specially for the HDHS to the stash that you are trying to reduce.
10. Try horizontal bands of running stitch in a sort of Morse code pattern [dot-dash–dot-dot-dot dash etc.] and decide you like it.
11. Try it on the hillside but on the diagonal and decide you don’t like it.
12. Put it all on one side and go off to finish your sari silk bowl [SSB] – which is not homework.
13. Decide that because you decided to restrict the colour scheme on the SSB you will need more SS and make emergency trip to the Hillier Gardens.
14. Find it difficult to find another hank in the colours you need but buy the closest – and another hank because it’s pretty – at considerable expense.
15. Have tea and cake at Hillier Gardens – at rather less expense.
16. Come home, work on bowl and decide that you would have had enough from the original hank.
17. Finish bowl, with the addition of a junk CD
18. Go on line and discover that you can get sari silk a lot cheaper – but obviously you don’t get to choose your hank.
19. Drink glass of white wine too quickly.
20. Return to viaduct embroidery – maybe…

You may have wondered…

what I was going to do with the hank of sari silk [although some of it feels like sari polyester] I bought earlier in the week.

You and me both.

However, today it told me it wanted to be a Lois Walpole bowl,  in these muted colours, so I had to go through the hank removing the brighter ones.

I have another piece of this corrugated card, so I hope there will be enough of the other colours to make a second bowl.

I also did a proper landscape drawing [sort of], on some paper which had been washed with inks. I picked out some of the foliagey shapes with Inktenses, and deepened some of the colours in the ‘water’ and ‘grass’. I’m quite pleased with it, and may have another go.

This was all this afternoon – in the morning we went to a small exhibition by students from Winchester School of Art, in the Theatre Royal. I was particularly impressed by Amy Madron’s projected images and Melanie Evans’ layered sheers with screen printing [?] and a tiny amount of stitch. Worth visiting if you are passing, although it finishes on Monday so you’ll have to hurry.

You will probably have guessed that I’m avoiding talking about the landscape I started on Wednesday. I spent an hour or so last night, while listening to a rerun Rebus [don’t get me started on what a waste of Ken Stott/Ian Rankin that series is] putting running stitches in the hills, and half an hour this afternoon taking them out again. Too heavy [I’ll have to go down to a single thread of floss or hand stitch with machine embroidery thread] and I need to think very carefully about stitch direction.

While I was unpicking I pondered on why I don’t want to machine embroider it, although everyone who's commented on it obviously thinks I’m mad not to. Partly it’s because I’m not a very competent or confident machine embroiderer – and yes, I know I'd get better if I practiced, but I don’t particularly want to. Embroidery for me is a slow, contemplative process - and machining isn’t. I also find machine stitch quite restrictive – basically all you can produce is a line. It may wiggle, it may have blobs, it may have loops of the bobbin thread showing – but it is still a line. And usually an unbroken line is not what I want – although in this case it might be...

I did take a good look at the piece and to try to decide how I might machine embroider it – and it didn’t actually solve the problem of the orientation of the stitching. It would just be quicker to sew and  slower to unpick.

So sorry machine embroiderers –  I admire what you do, but I don’t want to do it myself.

Just like half-marathon running – ‘Go Mrs Cheese Minor’ who will be hitting the streets of Gosport/Lee on the Solent tomorrow while the rest of the family cheer her on.

Not much to show

for a day with no outside commitments. apart from going shopping, which always seems to take much longer than it ought.

I did manage to put the viaduct into an embroidery frame. [Not only am I odd enough to prefer hand stitch, I like to do it in a good big frame.]

I had another look at my threads in daylight and changed half of them. Still haven’t got a perfect blue but I'm going to try what I’ve got for now and get something different if I have to – I’m trying to reduce my stash after all.

This afternoon we went out to the Hillier Gardens, both for a walk between the showers,  and to visit their current exhibition, ‘A Material World’. We saw some interesting stuff.

 

I resisted the temptation to buy some of the wonderful hand-dyed/hand spun knitting yarn or the bags of roving, but I did fall for some recycled sari silk [stash reduction? maybe not…] and a felt brooch for my new coat.

Trouble is I now need a red scarf to go with it, as i think it might clash with the cerise one I’ve been wearing. Of course I will knit it myself but I don’t think I’ve got any suitable wool…

Here’s one for the railway buffs…

if there are any out there.

This week’s topic in Drawing Studies was ‘Landscape’ – we were asked to bring an image of a landscape which was important to us and make sketches from it, preparatory to producing a stitched piece. ‘Sketches’ could include computer images – so I pottered around with Picasa and GIMP and some of my photographs.

I quite liked this one,

 

 

 

 

and these,

 

 

 

but in the end I went for this one – the version middle right. [How long have I been using Picasa without realising that you can move the pictures around in ‘Picture Pile’?]

The original is top left,  and for those who aren’t married to men with an [always denied] interest in railways, it is the Ribblehead viaduct on the Settle – Carlisle line. I don’t think it is ‘important’ to me, I just liked the mucked-about image, and the one thing I didn’t want to do was a conventional landscape.

I took some painted papers to college with me and made a torn paper mock up. The squiggly lines were an attempt to represent the texture/stitch – it looked better without.

Then I made several attempts to do the same thing in fabric, brought it all home and started again.

This is where it is at the moment. It has some machine stitch holding the viaduct down as well as machine tacking. But I didn’t get round to selecting threads before it got dark, so I have a selection of red, yellow and blue embroidery floss waiting to be matched in daylight – although the dark blue is going to be problematic as it is almost violet and I don’t have anything like it. [I’m using floss because I want to use finer thread in the background, getting heavier as it moves forward.]

I also have to decide on stitch – I was going to use free cross stitch/herringbone, but I'm veering towards running stitch [again], or possibly fly. Anyone got any bright ideas?