Combining the Blue and Yellow Landscape

I have worked on my blue and yellow landscapes again.  This time I used soy wax to protect some of the yellow fabric and then scraped dark blue dye paste pretty much everywhere and I think it has made the 3 pieces a bit more interesting. Here's one of them....

.......and a close up of a section of the fabric. The waxing and over printing has added some additional texture which I like.

I only ever intended to create 1 blue/yellow landscape piece but in my repeated attempt (and failure) to recreate my paper design in fabric, I created 3 hardly distinguishable pieces. So what to do with them? I knew I wouldn't want to stitch all 3 but there in my sketchbook was a design that looked like it was made up of 3 landscapes (if you squint!)

I manipulated and folded the fabric, exploring options to use all 3 pieces of fabric into a single piece of textile. Here I have folded and placed 3 pieces on top of each other to create the 3-in-1 landscape. I was surprised to find that I quite liked this. Maybe the horizontal lines are a bit too straight though?

I also folded the fabric vertically and I must say that I preferred the horizontal marks that this created. I like the folds but I don't want it to look like curtains! If I cut it into strips and stitched back together, would it become bitty?

The next question is could I combine the two ideas? This time I made horizontal folds
.

I like the random marks created by folding the fabric but I  think I prefer the marks made by the vertical folds. Could I create a piece combining vertical strips and three horizon lines? I think I'll give it a go!

HUE Exhibition - Letchworth Arts Centre - 2nd - 29th April

On Wednesday 2nd April our exhibition opens at the Letchworth Arts Centre, with the private view being held on Thursday 3rd April, all welcome.

There will be over 50 pieces of textile art on display and it will be well worth a visit. I have 4 pieces in the exhibition and there will be lots of variety of wall hung art as well as 3D pieces. Hope to see you there!

Printing on Paper

I'm used to printing on fabric but today I have been printing on paper. The last two Saturdays I have been on Kim Major-George's 'Stitch into Print' course, which was run by my EG branch. The plan was that we would spend the first Saturday creating stitched printing plates and the second printing from them. Call me indecisive/thoughtful/ careful/slow but by the end of the first Saturday I barely had anything to print from but I came away with lots of inspiration and ideas. So I spent a large part of the next day creating print plates.

I was particularly keen to use a design that I am working with at the moment, to see if  the printing would develop the design and here is the plate I created....

and the print I created from it:

I also enlarged one of the sections and created an individual plate....

....and then printed from it.

 

I think I could have used plates to print with all day but I had other ideas that I was dieing to try. The next plate was based on a simple design I did a few years ago. The strip of 'trees' was made by stitching sari waste silk together onto dissolvable fabric.

Again, I could have printed and refined this print.

 

but I was also keen to print with the scrim that I had prepared before the end of the day.

 

I was disappointed with this print but I know how I would do it differently next time and the technique definitely has potential.

 

Out of all of my prints, this is the technique that I would like to develop further. My only disappointment was with the colour that I used.....I really wished I had used a darker colour rather than the green.

Unfortunately, this was the last print of the day. I really enjoyed the workshop and I was starting to find my way when it was time to come home and without a press, it's not something that's easy to continue at home. What did I get when I got home? 'Did you do that all today? They've turned out better than I thought they would'.  Was that a complement? Well, I'm going to take it as one!

The Proud Owner of New Textile Art

I'm used to buying fabrics, threads and and the paraphernalia that goes with it but last weekend I bought two lovely finished textile pieces. The pieces were beautifully stitched by Melanie Forrester and were shown in our Taking Textiles Further Exhibition in November last year ....and I've had my eye on them ever since.

 

The stitched part of these pieces is around 4 1/2 inches square and there's not a millimetre of unstitched fabric to be seen. You can see the beads and chains from the jewellery that the designs were based on.

As you can see the stitching is beautifully done and I love the raised chains that sit on top of the other stitches and as for those french knots......

 

Besides the fact they are beautifully stitched another reason I think i like them is because they are so different to my own work. I'm very pleased with them - thank you Melanie.

Klee and Artist Textiles Exhibitions

I have enjoyed two exhibitions recently, firstly the Klee Exhibition at the Tate Modern.

 

The Klee exhibition could inspire a whole series of textiles work. I always think of his work  as a patchwork (!) of colour but I really liked his use of colour in a lot of his other work too, for example the backgrounds that he mono printed onto. Some of his paintings were created onto burlap - surely that makes him a textile artist too

He meticulously catalogued his work and I thought this might be a useful thing for me to do too. Not that I'm putting myself up there with Klee but in a few years time it could be helpful to look back and know when a piece of work was created, perhaps it's inspiration, any exhibitions it had been in etc.

The other exhibition I enjoyed was the Artist Textile exhibition at Fashion and Textile Museum.

It was good to see how well known artists had their designs printed on fabric and also made into clothing. I have made one blouse from my digital design and made one blouse from fabric I had printed but I came away from this exhibition wanting to do more. The problem is I have more ideas than I have time at the moment, so first things first, I need to concentrate on finishing things for the Hue exhibition in April.

Maybe I could aim smaller and create some scarves? This one used a sketch by Henry Moore:

This one created from an image created by Salvador Dali:

 

The artist's work is easily recognisable in the scarves. I think both these exhibitions are worth a visit and if you go with a friend to London by train, remember to pick up a 2 for 1 leaflet at your station or visit the days out website, then you can both get into these exhibitions for the price of 1. Can't be bad. The Klee exhibition ends on 9th March, so you'll have to be quick to see that one.