Desert Blue

It's over 4 months since I lasted posted about this piece. I had no idea it would take so long for me to get to this stage, which is probably just as well but I'm pleased with the way my idea has developed. When I start a piece of work I usually like to have a view of how the finished piece should look albeit this view can change as the work progresses.  With this piece, try as I might, I couldn't get a clear view of how I wanted the finished piece to look, which may partly explain why it has taken so long. So there was nothing for it but to take it one section at a time.

There is dense stitching in places which was very hard on my fingers but I'm pleased that I persevered. I'm sure I could go on and on with the stitching but I'm going to stop here.

It's not quite over yet though, I still need to finish the work and get it ready for hanging but starting a new piece seems more appealing at the moment. This is definitely the first in a series. I have a number of other ideas to persue, in fact one experiment is 'brewing' at the moment, and I can't wait to see how it develops. More of that at another time.

Printing with my 'Torn Paper' Thermofax

The two pieces of fabric I printed with my torn paper thermofax are now ready for stitching.  The photographs do not show them at their best, partly because it was a dismal day when I took the photos and partly because they are light in colour making it quite difficult to capture the detail. 

I printed two pieces and for both I cut the fabric in two, lightened the sky and roughly pinned some darker fabric along the horizon line. I have started to add some tacking stitches to mark the stitching areas in the piece below:

Although the overall effect is light, it is made up of layers of colours, which I hope adds interest to the piece.

I used some brighter colours in my second piece, as I knew I would overprint with white fabric paint, mimicking the processes I used on the paper and trying to link back to the whiteness of the salt flats.

This is a close up of the piece and hopefully you can see where I've added texture and the brighter colours underneath the white over printing.

I'm really looking forward to stitching into these as it seems ages since I've done any and hopefully I'll find some time over the Christmas break. I've had some valuable feedback on these pieces which in my heart I think I knew but tried to ignore so I could move onto the stitching phase and that was that these pieces of fabric don't begin to show the scale of the landscape I'm trying to convey. I think this is partly down to me working on a smaller scale in my kitchen but now I'm going to plan my next piece better and not let the space dictate the cloth to me and that will probably mean wearing several fleeces and working in the garage. Brrr..I'm just going to have to treat these as two very large samples!

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.

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!

Geometric Landscape 1

Geometric landscape I is finished at last, finished except the backing and the hanging device and I'm going to keep my options open on that until I've finished the other pieces in the series. The piece is 59cm square and I know this is true because I measured it a number of times (!) but it doesn't look square to me it looks more of a portrait format.

The real colours are closer to those on the right hand side of the picture

There is very little decorative stitching on the piece, only on the horizontal ochre strip but that doesn't mean it hasn't taken a long time to complete. I've lost count of the amount of time I have spent cutting, stitching, moving the pieces around and thinking about this piece. If I put it away for a while and come back to it, I'll probably appreciate it more. 

I have now started stitching the background for the Geometric Landscape II piece and there is going to be a lot of stitching on this piece and I'm enjoying it - hope I'll still be enjoying it at the end!

I've now started printing a background fabric for my 3rd geometric landscape, which I hope will support some of my fabric origami, more of that another time.

Background for the Geometric Landscape

Finally, I have a background for my geometric landscapes! I have printed, dyed in a bucket, discharged some of the colour, over dyed and over printed. Nobody could say the fabric has no history and has been through so many processes that I probably couldn't replicate it.

It was the final overprinting that pulled it together and somehow gave it a purpose. I took the shapes from this landscape and shuffled them around a bit to remove the rectangular shape and screen printed the shapes onto the fabric. To give the background a further feeling of landscape, I printed the pattern at the top of the cloth smaller and lighter than the pattern at the bottom.

I plan to hand stitch around some of the shapes, which will take time but a process I think I will enjoy. I am hoping to get this piece into an exhibition in the autumn and details of the finished size needs to be submitted soon, so it's a relief to get to this point, a point where you've got everything you need, most of the big decisions have been made and it's just a matter of stitching. 

In the picture above, the fabric is still just roughly folded and not all the individual landscape pieces are finished but hopefully you get the idea of where this piece is going. Then there's still the decision on which order to place the pieces. Lots still to do but really pleased to get to this point. It's surprising what you can achieve when a deadline is looming.

Colour Explorations - Take Two

I'm feeling a lot more positive about my yellow piece since I posted about it here. I am going to top and tail it with some dark green fabric and add some stitching to horizontal strip - I think that'll work. I have now started another piece on a similar theme, partly because I want to work in a series and partly because I think I can improve on the first one, so why not?

I have done some initial dyeing on the background cloth, just to get rid of the white but have concentrated more on creating the horizontal strip of fabric. I wanted to keep to the original colour scheme and decided after a lot of deliberation that I would use my landscape theme to suggest the shapes and patterns. 

My plan is not to use them in a run but to cut and fold then so that the patterns are broken up. This time I'm going to work the horizontal strip separately as I think it will be less risky that way and also easier to handle.

I've had family staying with us for a week, which has been very nice but not left much time for creativity, except in the kitchen! I did manage to take the girls to see the Wedding Dress Exhibition at the V&A though, which I enjoyed but not quite as much as I thought I would. I suspect that this was partly because I'm spoilt by the number of great exhibitions I get to see. The exhibitions I get most excited about seem to be those where I go more out of curiosity than expectation and the Heatherwick Exhibition and the Kwang Young Chun exhibition fall into this category - I loved them. 

The wedding dress exhibition is worth seeing and I expect I will go back and have another look at some point. My favourite dress was Kate Moss', which had some beautiful embroidery on it. Not that it was one I could ever wear. The pictures on the web don't do it justice, so you'll just have to go and see it!

The Creative Habit - Twyla Tharp

I've recently enjoyed reading the Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp. An interesting name and one she says has helped her creativity! 

Twyla is a choreographer but her message is aimed at people engaged in all sorts of creative disciplines. I think this will be a book that I will return to again and again and I suspect that different parts will provide inspiration at different times. For instance the book starts with useful tips on how to...well...get the creative habit. Not something that I have an issue with the moment because I have so many ideas but not enough time to follow them through and I'm always looking for opportunities to squeeze in some creativity.

On the other hand, the book contains some positive thoughts for those times when things don't go to plan and this is what I need at the moment. Twyla says 'doing is better than not doing' and 'the solution to failure is to learn to do it better next time' and suggests we 'waste time and materials' in order to achieve our creative best. Although, I understand what she means, I'm finding it difficult to find it comforting at the moment.

I have dyed some lovely fabric that a friend gave me and I am very keen to do the fabric justice and to use it in a piece I am proud to show her. Maybe I have put too much 'pressure' on myself to create something 'worthy' of the fabric? I dread to think how long I've spent on the cycle of cutting, arranging and staring at the fabric without coming anywhere close to enthusiasm I had for the paper design. 

One suggestion that I think is useful at whether you are in a creative rut or a creative groove, is that we should stop our creative endeavour when we still know what to next. This leaves a bridge into your next session and you will find it easier to start up again and once you've started again, the next steps will become clearer. I'm definitely going to bear this in mind. 

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!

Blue and Yellow Landscapes continued

In a previous post I showed some of my colour experiments on paper. I liked some of the accidental landscapes that I found within the experiments, particularly those with unnatural, or unexpected colours so I used this blue and yellow piece to inspire a printed textile. 

To be more accurate, it inspired 3 printed textile pieces. I didn't intend to start 3 pieces but I was struggling to recreate the same effect on fabric as I had on paper. 

               

                              

 

When I thought I knew how the process could be improved, I started another piece. Maybe the effect I was looking for would be achieved if I kept some slack in the fabric and didn't pin it so tightly?

 

Maybe if I wet the fabric first, then the colours would blend more easily and I'd achieve what I was looking for?

 

 

But non of them seemed to quite hit the mark and if you're thinking that they all look pretty similar and you can't differentiate between the different techniques, then you're not alone - nor can I!

 

I can't say that I'm particularly fond of any of them at the moment but I do know that it's very, very rare for me to be happy with a piece of cloth that has only had one process or printing session. So I'm not giving up yet. Next, I will try to protect some of the yellow dye and over print with a much darker blue to see what happens. I'll let you know.

Missing the boat?

It's funny how things turn out sometimes. I was looking at my stash of dyed fabric and in particular a grey piece which, like my green piece, was inspired by a barge on the Rhine. I really didn't like the boat and no amount of markal stik or overprinting was going to make me like it. But I did like the texture I had created on the 'water' and I was disappointed that this texture was going to go to waste. So I decided to cut out the section of fabric with the boat on. What had I got to lose? I looked back at the my misty photographs, found another I liked (no boat in sight!) and doodled with my markal stiks. 

I liked the way the piece was developing so I stitched the two pieces of fabric back together and developed the drawing further. I've fiddled refined my drawing until I was in danger of ruining it, so I've decide to stop here. I do want to add some stitch but not sure how or where yet.

I have backed it with this fabric, which I dyed some time ago. Although I like this textural marks on this cloth I couldn't really see me using it on the front of a piece, much better to use I thought.

I need to give this stitching some thought but will concentrate on the 'green piece' first .Both pieces I hope to include in the Hue exhibition. More of the exhibition later but in the meantime, do have a look at the exhibition flyer on the left hand side of the blog.  

Green Piece

Despite this piece having the working title of 'Green Piece', I started it when I was on the 'Gorgeous Grey' course. It is inspired by a photograph I took of a barge, one misty morning on the Rhine.  I have used various strengths of grey and also a black mixed with yellow to create the green colour.   

I've lost count of how many layers of the grey dye I painted on, to get the effect I was looking for. The problem was, I was never happy with the boat. I considered cutting out a panel of fabric to remove the boat but I would have also lost some of the colour gradation that I worked so hard to achieve. Another idea I considered was painting over the boat with screen inks. I did some trials with acrylic paint, which proved it was possible to achieve but risky.

So on Saturday,  I asked the group at C2C to give me some feedback. They didn't seem to have the same issue that I did with the shape of the boat but did suggest that it was too bright , too well defined if it was indeed in fog... and they were right. I was guilty of not looking properly!  I used the colours I thought the boat was not the colours I could see.

The original colours of my boat

The suggested solution was to work on the back of the fabric, where the boat did indeed look misty. The problem was that I didn't have the same background definition I had on the front and although I added some more grey to the back it was clear it was going to take some time and effort to get it where I wanted it to be. I wasn't sure I could face all those dyeing sessions in the garage to bring the back up to the front's standard - what if I never achieved the same effect on the back? Besides, I had hoped to include it with my Lago Maggiore in an exhibition in April and time is running out.

 

Another plan was required so I got out these.....

 

...my box of Markal Stiks and used the beigey one over the boat to knock back the colours and make it appear more like it was in the mist. As you can see by the length of my stiks, I don't use them very much but I'm usually pleased when I do.

 

So now I need to layer up the fabric, and get stitching. I plan to do simple machine quilting and then to add hand stitch to the boat.  I'll let you know how I get on but I'm feeling a lot more positive about where it's going and that I will have it finished in time for the exhibition at the start of April.

Gorgeous Grey

A couple of weeks ago I attended the 'Gorgeous Grey' course run by Claire Benn at Committed to Cloth. A couple of foggy mornings on my recent cruise down the Rhine provided inspiration for the course and my favourite 'grey' photo was taken when a passing barge became visible through the fog. I wasn't happy with my representations of the barge, and so I decided to concentrate on printing simple shapes but then they started to look like buildings.....

 



So more experimenting with barges is required and when I (hopefully) achieve the look I am seeking, I may even cut off the right hand side of this piece and print my barge on the left hand side. 

But before any printing started we experimented with making different shades of grey (and before you say it, it was more than 50!). I experimented by adding small amounts of colours to black and then reducing the value to see the different greys that could be created. 

And I had some happy accidents. An over generous addition of scarlet, created just the dusky pink I was looking for in another piece, which you can see on the right hand side of the cloth below.

And I was rather pleased with the beigey colours I created  here. Could be very useful in landscapes.

 

Another trial looked at what would happen when different values of rust orange were overlaid on different values of grey. I know all of these are going to provide useful references for future work.

Here's an 'action shot' of me printing and my grey trial pieces at hand for easy reference. 

I printed quite a lot of fabric during the course and although I didn't print anything that I absolutely loved, I learnt a lot and came away with loads of ideas to follow-up on and I'm sure you'll see more of these in time but here's one other experiment. After I created the fabric background I wet the cloth, added liquid orange dye and tilted the fabric so it ran.  

This reminded me of the reflections on the Rhine. The orange on the horizon line needs beefing up to give the colour some more depth or maybe I could enhance it with stitch? Whatever I do to it, I doubt that I am ever going to really love it. But I do want to experiment with creating pieces where I embellish just the horizon line.  How would this impact the feeling of distance? This could be the piece to experiment on.

Breakdown Printed Blouse

In a previous post I showed my breakdown printed cloth and here is what I made with it. Hands up those who thought I wouldn't do anything with it? Even I feel my own hand twitching to go up at this point! I was hoping to make a simple dress, simple because it would be easier to achieve but also because simple would mean less seams and darts to break up the pattern. 

 

 

The pattern I chose to use was Butterick 5211, the one illustrated in purple below.

I had enough to make the dress if I had the pattern going horizontally but I really wanted the pattern to remain vertical but this would have made the dress too short. I wasn't overly concerned about this as I thought it would make a good tunic. But after I had made it up, I tucked it in and I left it loose and I tied it with a belt and came to the conclusion that it looked better as a blouse.

 

I am quite pleased with it and it looks better on with real arms going through the sleeves than it does on the dummy and there are some interesting patterns on the off-cuts that I could do something  else with. Now who thinks I'll soon be showing what I have done with the off-cuts? My hand is firmly down now.