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.