Xenotopia at the Knitting & Stitch Show

I'm very pleased that my Atacama Salt Flat pieces will be exhibited in the HUE gallery at the Knitting & Stitch Shows this year. I dyed a lot of fabric in my quest to get the effect that I was looking for and there were many, many times when I thought I wasn't going to get the results I wanted but I'm so glad that I didn't give up. 

This piece is called Xenotopia I and if all goes to plan it will be joined by Xenotopia II and III in the exhibition. Each piece is approximately 1 metre square. You can see some of my original design ideas here.

Across the horizon is a bright red line but the impact is lost somewhat in this photograph. Thinking about the salt in the Atacama, one of my early experiments was to pour strong salt solution on cloth and wait for the water to evaporate, revealing the square-ish shape of the salt crystals. I printed this shape on the fabric and used it to inspire the rocky elements in the foreground. In my other two pieces I have also used square stitches to add rocky elements but more of those in another post. 

Xenotopia I - detail

The work in the HUE exhibition has been made after we all read Robert McFarlane's book 'The Old Ways' and we have all responded to the book very differently. The book is about walks in the landscape which I was pleased about as most of my work is inspired by landscapes. In his book Robert says that we need a word to describe....

'somewhere we feel and think significantly differently......how to describe the lands that are found beyond these frontiers?  ‘Xenotopias’, perhaps meaning ‘foreign places’ or ‘out of place places’, a term to complement the terms utopias and dystopias'.   

Xenotopia seemed to describe my experience of the Salt Flats. It was like nowhere I'd been before and I certainly felt differently when I was there and almost three years on and it is still inspiring me.

For some time I've been thinking about getting fabric printed with an image of my piece and making a top to wear when I was stewarding but have been put off by the cost of digital printing, particularly as there was a risk that I would make a mistake and not align the image to the pattern pieces correctly. Fortunately though I recently came across Fashion Formula who had more favourable prices.

The colours of the top are more olivey than my artwork and more olivey than this picture shows but overall I'm very pleased with it. It's gone from design to coat hanger in less than a week, which is just as well because the exhibition opens next week. Maybe it's just me but I think it will be wearable on other occasions too.

If you're going to the show I hope you enjoy it and if you're on Saturday 14th, you'll know how to spot me!

Surreal Landscape

Quite often I have ideas that I want to pursue but can't for one reason or another.They sit patiently in my mind and my sketchbook waiting for the right time to come along and this was what happened with this idea.

30 X 25 cm

So what caused me to come back to this cotton reels in the landscape design? I was interested in joining in the Capability Brown Festival organised by the Embroiderers' Guild but knew little about him.  Through my research I found that his designs often incorporated undulating landscapes and there was always something along the horizon line and this design came flooding back. Now was the time to dust it off.

Detail

I had my design printed on fabric at Finger Print and I was pleased with the quality of the image although it did come out more orangey than my image. This has given it a warm glow and fortunately I like orange!

Foreground detail

I have really enjoyed stitching it but I left the cotton reels unstitched, leaving the scratched marks to suggest stitch.

As it was 3 years since I came up with this design idea, it was interesting to remind myself how I got from the original image to the finished embroidery which you can see below.

That's one piece finished and now I need to finish my other piece. More of that in a later post.

From paper to digital printing back to printing with dyes

Again, it's been a while since I last posted. I have been progressing some ideas but have been doing a lot of thinking about my work and that of others. I have bought a number of books, been inspired by some and struggled to stay awake reading some of the 'art speak' in others but the time has come (passed?) to just get on and do it.

I have been progressing some of the Van Gogh inspired ideas I posted about here.  I particularly liked the effect created by tearing and layering torn paper and so used the technique to create background texture which could be used  as the basis  for one or more of my salt flat pieces.  

Printing, tearing and layering the papers takes time but I was pleased with the results and so decided to get it digitally printed onto fabric in different sizes so that I could use for a number of samples and also to get previous collages printed onto fabric. I had my images printed by Bags of Love who seem to print everything it's possible to print. It's difficult to see from the photograph but on fabric they looked a dull bluey grey and not the light creams, beiges and browns of my paper collage.

As digital printing wasn't giving me the effect I wanted, I decided to go back to printing with my dyes and to create my own thermofax based on torn pieces of paper. 

To add additional texture and salty crustiness to the pieces I also created this spotty thermofax screen....

And so the printing began. I am quite pleased with the fabrics I have created so far and will show you then in my next post as they are still wet at the moment (I promise the gap between my posts won't be quite so long next time).

But just before I go, I wondered if any of you saw this on the BBC web site: Art and Fear? I had read this story before but it was a timely reminder to me to 'just get on with it'. It's interesting, do have a look.

I'm back...and Dangerous and Vulnerable is finished!

I knew it had been some time since I last blogged but I had no idea it had been as long as it actually has. It's only down to one thing....or lack of one thing...time. Deadlines at home and work and life have conspired to keep me particularly short of time recently but hopefully I will get back to posting more regularly again. Whilst I've been away. I've finished my 'Dangerous, vulnerable' piece.

The steam coming from the geyser is heavily stitched with machine embroidery and I went from trying to knock the lettering back to trying to bring it back out when I'd knocked it back too much. I wanted the lettering to be visible but not 'in your face' and hopefully I've achieved that.

I stitched layers of colours to get the effect I wanted, a technique I don't remember doing before. In fact I don't often do machine embroidery but I was pretty pleased with the way it turned out and the fabric remaining nice and flat, which was pleasing.

I also machined quilted over the geyser, using the geyser shapes as a guide but I couldn't call the quilt finished without adding some hand stitching and I used some silvery thread to emphasise where the light was catching the geyser.

There was one key lesson I learnt during the stitching process though...always choose the colour of your thread in daylight. It does save a lot of time unpicking later!

If you're wondering why I incorporated the lettering into the piece then this is the artist statement I have written to accompany the piece: 'The boiling water from the geyser gives off unpredictable clouds of steam, reminding me that just as the earth is vulnerable to our selfish actions, so we are vulnerable to it’s dangerous forces.'

I've entered the quilt into this year's Festival of Quilts at the NEC, so if you're going to the NEC look out for it in the Art Quilt category.

Dangerous and Vulnerable

I seem to have a number of  textiley things on the go and not as much time as I'd like to progress them. At the moment I'm trying to concentrate my efforts on this piece, which is based on a photograph I took of a geyser in Chile. 

I've had the image printed on fabric by Fingerprint and it's roughly 140  x 75 cm. Seeing the boiling water bubbling from the geysers made me think of how the earth is both dangerous and vulnerable. I wanted the words 'dangerous and vulnerable' to emerge from the steam and I played around with different lettering.

I wrote with liquid dye on paper and planned to add the lettering digitally to the photograph. I really liked the colour variations in the lettering but I didn't really like the way it looked on the image. In the end I created the letters in Word which I then placed along the horizon line. 

The fabric was larger than the image size and so was pleased that they filled the fabric with images I could use for sampling. 

The lettering came out stronger than I planned but my machine stitching is gradually knocking it back.

I wasn't sure how clearly the image of the geyser would print and had expected to over print on the fabric but it has printed so clearly that I can't see how over printing would enhance it. 

So my original plan's have been turned on their head but then I should be used to this....very rarely does my printing turn out exactly to plan. Do I enjoy printing because it's unpredictable or despite it? I think despite it!

Collograph Print on Paper and Fabric

I previously posted about some collograph printing that I did with Kim Major George and this print suggested stitching more than the others to me. 

Collograph print on paper approx 13 x 15 cm

I was going to stick to my normal approach of printing a background fabric and then adding stitch but I knew that I would need to try a number of different printing approaches to get the look I was seeking.  I do plan to trial some printing techniques but I thought that this would be perfect for a trial of a different type - digital printing. And here it is the design digitally printed on cloth by Fingerprint Fabric, and I am very pleased with the results and will definitely use them again.

Digital print on fabric approx 38 X 45cm

What I really like about the service they provide is that you can print small amounts of fabric at an affordable price. I have effectively printed a fat quarter...that was it...no requirement to print yardage and the fabric came very promptly which was just as well as I couldn't wait to see it.

The problem with printing my design larger was that the white bits also became larger, which I know shouldn't have be a surprise to me but they were definitely too prominent. So I decided to paint over the piece with so-called ecru dye, which looked scarily like dusky pink when the fabric was wet but has dried much lighter and may not be the colour I had in mind but I do think the piece looks better for toning down the white. The problem was probably that I used too much dye.

The (my?) photographs don't always show the subtle variations in colour but hopefully with the white envelope next the fabric you can see how I have changed the background. 

So the fabric has been soaked in soda, over dyed and washed and the colours are still looking as good as when I first received the fabric. So I'm very pleased. I know I said it was a trial piece but I have every intention of stitching on the fabric and it's probably an ideal piece to take on holiday. Watch this space!

Working with Grids

At the end of  a previous post is the image I used to create a gridy thermofax screen and I thought I'd use this post to show you the results of some of my experiments with it. 

I used the thermofax to print sheer screen inks onto white cotton. Never easy to see nor easy to photograph but hopefully you get the idea. 



This was quite a small piece of cloth which I scrumpled up into a little pot and poured on yellow and blue procion dye. I wanted to see how the dye would react with the screen inks.

As you can see the grids are still visible and the cloth has quite a high proportion of green where the yellow and blue dye mixed. The dye created a transparent layer of colour on top of the grids and I guess the degree of crumpling determined the extent to which the grids were coloured. There was no trace of the grids on the back of the cloth at all.

I also took a larger piece of fabric and scraped green dye paste on the top with an old credit card. It is more of an appley green than the picture suggests and is just work in progress. What will happen if I over print and then discharge? What would happen if I used more opaque inks? What would happen if I used coloured screen inks? So many ideas, so little time.

I also used the screen to print with discharge paste onto a ropey piece of fabric that had seen the tail end of all sorts of dye. Although it's not going to win any prizes for dyeing, the technique does show some potential, I think.

I have also been printing on some larger pieces of cloth, trying to create interesting cloth which I could potentially stitch into. There's still lots of work to do on that and I'll share some of those with you in another post.

Here at last!

For sometime now I have been meaning to start a blog and at last I am writing my first post! Once I'm over the initial hurdle of setting up the blog then it'll be easier and less daunting to post to it - well that's my theory! Only time will tell.  I aim to use this blog primarily to record the progression of my textile work but where to start? I've decided to start at the beginning of 2012 and take it from there.

In January this year, I went on the 'Digital Design for Fashion Fabrics' course run by Fabpad  at the University of East London. I would thoroughly recommend the tutor Vicki Fong, I learnt a lot on the course and I was very pleased with Fabpad's fabric printing.

On the course I practised with a number of different images, some provided by Vicki and some of my own.  But the really big decision came when I had to decide on an image for my final project. This would be printed on fabric which I hoped to make into a blouse.  This is the image I eventually chose:

I 'played' with the colours, extended the water and selected part of the image for my blouse.  I also created some machine stitching which I used to replace some of the leaves - well I had to have some embroidery in it didn't I? 

I then used my images to fill my pattern pieces and filled in the gaps with additional images:

 

 After many hours of tinkering and work, my blouse was finished.

  

Now  all I need is some warmer weather so I can wear it!