One holiday task nearly finished…

only another three to go.

My trusty editor is, at this moment, reading my essay. Of course I realised as I gave it to him that I had left the date of the draft in the footer – so I shall have to reprint the whole lot whatever he says. Sometimes I'm really impressed by my ability to make work for myself.

For example – at the weekend I decided that I wasn't going to be making books for my final pieces after all, so I could give up making book models and do something else.

Then I came across some photographs in this book, showing a sculptural book made by soaking a Japanese bound book in water. [Googling that book led me to the author, Faith Shannon’s website – very inspirational!]

So I had to try, didn’t I? Although in my case I soaked them in coffee.

Unfortunately without much distortion. Maybe because they are too small, or the paper [printer] isn't suitable.

So some more experiments are currently drying, for want of a better word, in the conservatory – cartridge paper, brown paper [naturally] and, in a tribute to Dieter Roth, newspaper. [Drying very slowly because after all, it did rain on St Swithun’s day, and our local saint, good as his word, has sent us rain every day since.

Apart from that. I’ve played around with some litter photos

 

 

 

 

 

and done some blind contour drawings of litter [white pastel on white paper is definitely hard to see] which I then dribbled/painted with something anonymous in a bottle [old Brusho, I think].

Not brilliant, but given my totally clueless state at the moment, I decided it was better to do something than wait in vain for inspiration to strike.

Is there a name for forward slippage?

Apart from forward slippage? All because I had an unexpected morning off.

We’ve been having problems with our phone line – intermittent broadband and a very crackly line – so when BT wanted to come this morning to fix it I thought for a very long time before agreeing to cancel my gym appointment and wait in. Fridays are Wensleydale’s hydrotherapy days, so I very nobly volunteered to be the one who stayed at home – and yes, it’s better now. So far. [This is the second time we’ve needed a repair since we’ve had Infinity, which is twice more than we ever needed it in the 20 years previously.]

So having an unexpected free day, I decide to face up to a looming cloud on my horizon, and tackle the essay – which, you may remember, was on the timetable for this weekend.

I think because I’d written a fairly complete draft, I really wasn’t looking forward to revisiting it – boring, boring, boring. However I’d had a couple of ideas for  improving the beginning and ending, so I got down to it this morning.

In the end, it wasn’t too bad. I tweaked the bits I wanted to tweak, pruned some other bits [its still too long but I won’t tell anyone] spellchecked it and saved it. I'll look at it again tomorrow, give it to my trusty editor for approval, and do the final draft on Sunday. One weight off my mind, only another three to go.

Unfortunately, there has been backward slippage on SAM. We had a busier week than expected, and I've been too tired in the evenings to do much mark making. I’m a long way short of 50 marks, but I will do what I can this weekend and start PMS’ing and PC’ing on Monday.

We are going to have more time on our hands for the next few months anyway: Babybel’s mummy starts her maternity leave today, so no Babybel sitting for a while. We had a lovely few days with her this week, and we are going to miss the little monkey [though not getting up at silly o’clock].

A decision has been made.

This week will be devoted to SAM, next weekend to the essay [probably with some slippage] – and after that it’s PCs and PMS till September. [With a bit of room tidying if I feel the need to procrastinate get the urge.]

Will I stick to this? Who knows? Now I’ve told you and Wensleydale, it is more likely to happen.

As next week is going to be busy, I’ve been making backgrounds for SAM, so I have stuff prepared for a little bit of mark making in front of the telly. [The only problem with the Tour de France is that I actually have to watch it, rather than merely listening. I can knit and watch young men on bikes at the same time, but not embroider.]

Yesterday was machine embroidery, today was embellishing – with a bit of heat gunning thrown in at the end, which is why some of these look a bit burnt.

The embellishing allowed the recycling of some old failures pieces whose time had not yet come – and the creation of one or two more.

The black smudges are not the result of an inadvertent conflagration, but some of the marks I made at the beginning of the course, printed onto an OHT. Mark? Definitely, Stitch? Maybe not, yet.

I have also managed a bit of mark making in the book. The top one is pretty mundane – sort of Kantha plus appliqué – but I like the way it shows through the hole in the next page – and then through the embroidery on net which started all this.

Is appliqué ‘stitch as mark’? I’m working on the principle that a smudge of paint is a mark, and the simplest way to make smudges in stitch is with appliqué.

 

Some of my other marks are a lot more vestigial – otherwise I'd never finish.

 

 

 

 

And I’ve Photoshopped some of my litter pictures - can you spot the interloper? Found only a hundred yards from the ring pull and the screwed up bit of paper.

These were done with a variety of filters and a bit of additional work – don’t want to make it too simple…

 

Amazing what you can achieve with a couple of freeish days and a bit of motivation.

[We won’t talk about the failed loaf of bread – I’m sure the ducks will enjoy it…]

My first personal cloth.

 

I’m so proud. 

You may think it looks like a collection of rubbish – and you’d be right.

You would also be right if you thought it looked nothing like the photos of litter that I have been collecting for my PCs.

But, inspired by some rag rugs I saw while we were on holiday, I’ve been reading up rug making, and getting quite interested. This led to some ideas:

1. rag rugs go under your feet, like litter, and
2. rag rugs were traditionally made from recycled materials, so
3. try recycling rubbish into rugs – well, rugettes, really, this one is about 15x18 cm.

It is made from shrink wrapping from the post – this little piece took 5 wrappers and isn’t finished so I am not about to make any big ones.

No idea if this will turn into anything, but I feel I’ve got started on the PCs.

Tomorrow – plastic bags?

P.S. Shame about Bradley Wiggins… Go Cav!

If I gave the impression…

that my 50 ‘stitches as marks’ were all going to be made on that piece of hand dye I showed you – I misspoke.

Admittedly that was my intention – but in the big sort-out I came across a little book I made in my ‘splosh ink all over a big piece of white paper, chop it up, make it into a book and cut holes in the pages’ period.

It also had black and brown paper pages, and, as an experiment, starched poly sheer pages. And a couple of bits of embroidery I’d clearly put in there for safe keeping and forgotten about.

Ready made marks.

so for the past couple of days, when not watching men in Lycra zooming around the French countryside on bikes, I’ve been mark making in or for the book.

I am particularly fond of the sloppy black stitches on a sheer page in the top two images.

The cloth has not been entirely neglected – although as all these marks overlap I cannot decide how many marks it actually comprises. I am very reluctant to admit accept that it is only one, as far too much effort went into it!

A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

I mentioned yesterday that I was overdyeing some nasty pieces of hand dye, in an attempt to make them less nasty. All of them, together, at the same time. You may not believe this when you see how they came out.

I used some Dylon ‘Jeans Blue’ machine dye because:

1. I have a theory that you can overdye any colour with blue and
2. it was all I had…

My theory was that anything which was mostly white would end up blue – and that’s what happened.

These were white with purple or blue splotches on them – so now I've got blue with darker purple and blue splotches. Not brilliant, but better than they were – they are actually a bit darker than in the photo.

The second group date from my Kandinsky period, when I was dyeing saturated multi-colour pieces to make my version of this for City and Guilds. I had a lot of fabric left over and while it looked OK in small pieces, overall it was a bit too bright. Not to mention clashing.

The one on the right is silk velvet which I didn't want to bin if I could help it, which is why I decided to try the overdyeing.

This photo is reasonably accurate,unlike the others. Reasonably accurate apart from the one in the middle which does not have a big dark blob on it. [It is supposedly silk, from a charity shop blouse – but given how little dye it’s taken, I suspect there’s more than a little polyester in there as well.]

The silk velvet is much more interesting than it looks here – a deep green with undertones of other colours. Yes, green. No, it wasn’t mostly yellow before.

The final group were either:

1. ‘last batch of the day’ pieces, odd bits of fabric bunged in a bucket with the remnants of dye poured over – for some reason these almost always end up reddy-orange.
2. some underwhelming snow dyeing which was light green and pink.

My assumption, based on colour theory, was that if I overdyed orangey red or red with blue, I'd get purple – or at the worst, brown.

Definitely not green. [They are a lot darker and greener than in the photo.]

The one in the middle is about right, the others are completely misleading – like a cross between how they really look now and how they looked before I dyed them.

But I’d rather have green than brown, so I’m not unhappy, just perplexed – about the failure of colour theory - presumably this particular dye blend has a lot of green in it - and why my camera wants to take pictures of something that doesn’t exist.

Spooky.

The plan for this weekend was

1. Saturday: take down exhibition, relax.
2. Sunday: a little drawing, some SAM, some photoshopping, perhaps a bit of Tour-de-France watching - relax.

The second part of number 1 was scuppered by a welcome but unexpected visit from Babybel, on her way home from Peppa Pig World. I think she was quite tired after all the excitement, but she hasn’t grasped the concept of relaxation, and after a drink and a spell brushing her toy dog, it was back to garden running, football kicking, drawing, being read to [‘Again!’], and, of course, non-stop talking. Fun, but not quite what we’d planned.

This morning, I went to look for a scrap of Aida because I had the idea of adding a cross stitch monogram to the mark cloth.

Could I find my embroidery fabric? Course not.

So I started at the bottom of the stash cupboard, pulling out boxes, bags and baskets, vaccing the floor when I found it, looking through everything.

Before long it had turned into a full-scale sort out. I had been telling myself [and Wensleydale] that I was going to sort out the workroom this summer, but it was more of an aspiration than a commitment. I certainly didn’t intend to do any of it quite yet.

But – the dustbin has been filled, two boxes are empty, things have been put away that have been un-put away for months, the nastiest bits of hand-dye are in the washing machine getting a blue overdye in the hope that will make them less nasty -and I feel very virtuous.

Plus I found the Aida. In fact I remembered where it was before I finished sorting what was on the floor [on the top shelf in a bag], but decided to carry on and finish the job.

Of course the Aida needs ironing, and that is a task too far, so I’ll have to find a different mark to make tonight.

I have come to the conclusion that I do have  a very great deal of – far too much fabric. Does anyone have any good ideas about how to use up a lot of fabric you once thought would come in useful but it hasn't? Apart from giving it away, which I can’t yet bring myself to do.