Reeds in the Mist

Recently, I've had my head down finishing my Geo landscape pieces and any thoughts of progressing new work had to be put aside. I've got a number of ideas 'brewing' but they all need developing before I can put dye to cloth and so I have gone back to some work that I had to put on hold. 

This piece was inspired by a photograph I saw in an exhibition. When I created the reeds they were too dark and too samey, so I decided to discharge them to add variety to the colours and add some texture.

I obviously wasn't expecting the discharging to give me the results that I wanted because I started another piece in parallel but I did like the effect of the discharging and so repeated the process on the second piece. Once I was happy with the reeds I used soy wax to protect/mask the reeds whilst I developed the backgrounds.

Strangely, I've only just realised the number of similiarities of these pieces to my Barge in the Mist piece. Similiar in that it's a view of mist over water and with the focal point on the horizon but there is one key important difference; the 'Barge in the Mist' was inspired by my own photograph and the 'Reeds in the Mist' was not. I have become increasingly aware that I enjoy making work which is inspired by own experiences. I think I will be using my own photographs from now on. 

This week the Knitting and Stitch Show opens in Harrogate and I will there to Steward in the Hue gallery on Friday afternoon, Saturday and Sunday. I'm hoping to get a little bit of free time to buy some threads to start stitching. Now which one will I choose to stitch? I know I won't be doing both.

Back to Texting

I'm back! I've been doing little bits and pieces of textiling but nothing too precious and certainly nothing needed to be finished by a specific date, which has made a nice change after recent deadlines. 

This weekend was the first weekend of  'Taking Textiles Further' course with Janet Edmonds and as luck would have it, this year's theme is 'text'. This should give me the opportunity to develop the ideas I came away with from the Denise Lach course I enjoyed in the summer.

Firstly we made our tools, well not the handles but all the brushes and nibs and strangely my favourite was the cola pen on right, the very tool I didn't take to on Denise's course.

I tried them out and quickly put most of them aside but it was good to think about different ways of making marks and to consider which type of mark was most suited to my current work.

Things started to look a little more interesting when I wrote on previously printed pages.

I had also painted pages of an old book with gesso, leaving some colours showing through and then added to text.

I used a photograph of reeds to inspire this piece and it was going OK until I added a wash of colour...it was a quick way of finding which inks were permanent and which ones were not.

For this piece, I wrote text on a previously printed paper, cut it in half of it and covered it with muslin.  The other half I machined stitched over, wet it and rubbed it to distress it. For some reason the camera has made the muslin more dominant than it really is.

Although, I like the texture created by stitching and wetting the paper I think that this is the technique that is more likely to persue. I have cut out shapes that have been suggested by the letters themselves. 

No great works of art yet but I've got the momentum and inspiration to develop the ideas and to incorporate them into my landscape theme.