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.

Me & my Dad

On Thursday, my Dad passed away. He had bravely fought illness without complaint and was cheerful until the end. He always encouraged me to be creative and if ever I had any tools, equipment or materials on my Christmas/birthday list you could bet he would buy it for me. I am very proud of him and will miss him very much.


Me & Dad on Father's Day earlier this year 

I know he would have enjoyed being at the opening of our TTF exhibition today and had seen all bar one of my pieces in the exhibition.

The exhibition runs until the end of November at Art Van Go and includes around 50 pieces of textile art. Why not visit if you are in the area?

Reelin I and II revisited

In a previous post I showed the two cotton reel pieces that I stitched. A friend of mine suggested, in the nicest possible way, that they needed to some more stitching to indicate shading and as is often the case, it all seemed so obvious when it was pointed out.

After that I was never going to be happy with them until I had added some shading to both pieces but little did I know just how much additional work this would be. It may not look like it but it took hours of additional stitching but I do think they look better for it. I hope you agree.

 

They are only about 4 inches square and they are mounted on a 6 inch square canvas. It was a really dark wet day when I wanted to photograph them and so I decided that I would photograph them in the light tent that I bought earlier in the year.

 

As you can see the light tent is quite large! I think it did help a little and certainly helped cut out some of the distractions that might otherwise have been in the background. Maybe it was lacking some side light? Perhaps I'll try that next time. 

 

I am planning on exhibiting them in our Taking Textiles Further Exhibition, which is going to be held at Art Van go from 2nd-30th November. See the flyer at on the top left of this post for more info.