Taking Textiles Further - December 2012

It's been a few weeks since I went to the Taking Textiles Further workshop with Janet Edmonds but I have only just got things in any shape to show you. This year Janet's theme is 'collections'. I chose to use a collection of cotton reels as my theme. A couple of other students in the class had also chosen cotton reels but I guess it shouldn't be too much of a surprise in a group of textile artists. It will be interesting to see how the work of the 'cotton reel girls' develop. Here is one of my starting points:

 

When I started to draw the cotton reels, I realised that it was going to be harder than I had bargained for. All those varying ellipses would require some studying and practising! This would take some time and so a plan B was required....tracing. I quickly traced the outlines of the cotton reels in such a manner that may be fooled (if you weren't familiar with my drawing skills!) into thinking that I had drawn them.  I then tried out a number of compositions. Here's a few from my sketch book.



 

We were asked to place our collections on a patterned background and to draw from the image and I used one of my gridy pieces of cloth as the background. I soon realised that a more simple approach was required and I reduced the number of cotton reels.

 



 

I have quite a large (yes you've guessed it!) gridy piece of cloth which is graduated in colour. It was suggested that I could consider incorporating a cotton reel design on top of the grids. I was very sceptical that this would work but some of the reasons I go to the class is to challenge my thinking, stop me getting in a rut and to try out ideas that I wouldn't otherwise try. So with the help of my computer here are some mock-up on paper.

It's been worthwhile trying out the idea/s as I am now far less sceptical and think it could possibly work. 

If you have any thoughts on the start of my design work for my cotton reel collection then I would love to hear from you. There's a few more ideas that I would like to try out prior to our next class in February and I'll keep you posted.