Manipulated fabric

The topic at last week's C&G class was manipulated fabric. We made some samples in class - in my case adding wire to fabric and trying fairly unsuccessfully to do free motion embroidery on velvet - but I had forgotten some of the stuff I needed and was feeling uninspired anyway.

It was only when I got home that I realised I didn't really understand what we were supposed to be doing! I decided to make lots of small samples of anything I consider manipulated fabric - and as my Embellisher was out I started with that. These are the more successful samples. A couple are due to meet my heat gun later - which is always unpredictable. If I get time today I shall add some stitch.

The darker sample is a 'textured surface' which was the previous week's lesson.[Actually it is 'one I made earlier' and found when I pulled out my turquoise fabric for the manipulated samples.] I missed the lesson because I was ill and felt even less sure what I was doing, but thanks to the members of the Yahoo C&G group I now have lots of ideas.

I was going to post a picture of a crocus, taken on a lovely sunny day in Southsea yesterday, to prove to myself that Spring really is on its way. but the photo didn't come out and today is dreadful - cold and foggy.

We went to Southsea to see the Overlord embroidery. Another requirement of C&G is that we study the history of British embroidery [I wonder if overseas students have to do the same thing?] We had a very enjoyable college trip to Normandy about a year ago to see the Bayeux Tapestry - which isn't a tapestry and was probably made in England - so I decided it was time to see the 20th century equivalent.

I saw Overlord before some years ago but with teenage boys in tow I didn't get much of a chance to look at it. Fortunately their father [whom I ought to call Wensleydale] is much more interested in textiles and was very happy to spend an hour or so looking at the piece - it is over 80 metres long. [Half a dozen embroiderers can take even longer looking at the Bayeux tapestry, which is shorter...]

It is much better than I remembered - beautifully made of course, as you would expect an RSN piece to be, but the design is very clever, and it is quite moving to look at. Doesn't pull its punches. It doesn't have the humour that the Bayeux does, but that is not surprising.

It is well worth seeing. If you do go, though, don't be fooled by the claim on the website that they have a cafe - they don't, and even the coffee machine was out of order!

Joggles class Part 2

This is the second piece I have made for Sue’s class. Sue suggested we used pages from a book as one of the layers but I cannot bring myself to do anything to books except read them! So although I had bought a book specially in a charity shop I ended up using a supplement from a newspaper. It was on magic, which is why you can just see the beginning of ‘Houdini’. There are other words just visible under the paint.

I also didn’t have all the supplies needed, so instead of flower petals I used sequins and bits of sequin waste. I was worried they would shrivel up under the iron, but fortunately they didn’t. The ribbon is, as you might have guessed, left over from Christmas. I thought the stars went well with the magic theme.

If you are interested in Sue's work, visit

www.suebleiweiss.com or www.fibreandstitch.com

Joggles class

I am taking Sue Bleiweiss’s ‘Mixed Media Surfaces’ class at Joggles,

http://www.joggles.com/

and this is my first effort. The scan doesn’t really do it justice – it’s quite subtle [especially for me]. I used gold and pale turquoise tissue paper, and then some sparkly watercolour paints from the Works – a knock off of sparkling H2Os, I think.

Curiously, when it dried, it looked more silver than gold so I have added silver acrylic and silver glitter glue.

There are another three parts to this lesson, and I hope to get another started this afternoon. This is one of those courses that makes you use all the supplies you bought on impulse and then didn’t quite know what to do with …

More Danglies

I just found this on Flickr

http://www.flickr.com/photos/65793165@N00/2204796125/

which makes my danglies look pretty pathetic.

Japanese, of course.

Alice Kettle

Whenever I talk to quilters about making a metre long piece they laugh at me because, of course, they make much bigger pieces all the time. But last night we went to a talk by Alice Kettle about this:

http://www3.hants.gov.uk/wdc/alice-kettle.htm

which is at 16 metres by 3 is tad bigger than most quilts!


Alice is a local professional machine embroiderer who was commissioned to produce the hanging for the Winchester 'Discovery Centre' [a.k.a. the library]. She and her small team worked on it all last year in Winchester Guildhall, in public - not something I would fancy.


Last night she talked about her sources of inspiration generally, and specifically for this piece, which is full of local references.


She is a diffident but good speaker - she avoids 'artspeak' - and, as always, when someone talks about their work, you look at it with new eyes.


Alice is a real artist. I am ambivalent about the use of the word 'artist' when applied to artisans. I think it is often misused these days, especially applied to what a friend of mine calls 'crap crafts'. The misuse devalues both 'artist' and 'artisan'.


I am proud to call myself an artisan - but Alice is a real artist. She happens to have chosen to work with textiles because of the unique qualities they bring to her work. Her embroidery could have been a painting - it would probably have been much easier for her to produce a canvas that size if she hadn't had to wrestle it through a sewing machine - but all the surface qualities of a heavily embroidered textile would have been missing. It gleams, it has texture, it is tactile in a way no painting I have ever seen is.


Worth a visit if you can get there - and it is right next to the coffee shop ...

Why should an embroiderer make books?

For each piece we make for C&G we have to write an action plan, keep a diary, show the design process and write an evaluation. Of course I could just shove all that in plastic pockets in a ring binder but where's the fun in that?

Some people work directly into a sketch book but I can't draw and my writing is illegible - so I have developed the habit of making my own books to put everything in.

This is the book for the Kandinsky wall hanging. The cover is yet another left-over [I dyed a lot more fabric and thread than I needed]. I spray mounted it to pelmet Vilene and then machine embroidered and lined it. I have used card in the past but you can't sew into it, so you have to lace the fabric over the covers which is lumpier and more work.

I inserted the pages and bound them all together with a sort of Japanese stab stitch in embroidery thread [more left overs].

This is a page from the book, showing some of my design ideas for the different pieces of the wall hanging and a section from the diary.

Wall hanging

Thank you to the kind person who suggested I installed a counter - I am gobsmacked that so many people have been to look at my blog. They can't all have been family [I bet none of them were family, they get enough of my wittering face to face!]

I thought I would put up a picture of my last C&G piece, the wall hanging. For those not familiar with C&G, you are required to make 4 finished pieces, and for Part 2 they are a wall hanging, a gold work piece, a metre long piece and a 3D piece - I think, I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong.

So this is my wall hanging. It was inspired by a Kandinsky painting called 'Colour Study in Squares'. To give you an idea of scale, the larger discs are junk CDs and the smaller ones minidiscs. The minidiscs were kindly donated by my friend Anne, as that is one of many examples of modern technology that has passed me by.

Some of the left overs from the wall hanging were used for the danglies, but I still have a lot left. Perhaps a few more danglies are called for?