New Talent

I love this doll! Especially her eyes. This doll was made by Ella Oliver, aged 11. How talented is she? I have never met Ella but I work with her Mum and I enjoy hearing about Ella's enthusiasm for textile art. I hear Ella's thinking of starting her own textile blog - I look forward to reading that. I have shown this picture to lots of my textile friends and everyone has loved it, keep it up Ella.

                                          

To mark the National Day of Stitch and to try to attract new talent to our branch of the Embroiderers Guild, Anne, Gina, Gill and I sat and stitched in David's book shop, Letchworth and very enjoyable it was too. We laughed, we enjoyed lovely cake from the cafe, bought books from the shop and met some very nice people. We had much more interest than we dared hope and our thanks go The Comet  for featuring us in the paper. So many people came in saying they had seen us in the paper. Thanks too the staff at David's bookshop for allowing us to use their venue and making us feel  so welcome. 

Us just settling in at David's book shop - minus Gina who took the photograph.

We gave out free broach kits to all interested stitchers, the only catch was that there were no instructions in the kits! We will be showing how to make the broaches at our next meeting on 6th September and hope that many new people will come to our meeting and see what a friendly group we are. You can see that we are each wearing one of the broaches we have made. It would have been nice show some photographs with our visitors but of course when we enjoying chatting to visitors about stitching, taking photographs was not on our mind.

This may seem like a simple idea but it took a lot of organisation and took a lot of time to make up the kits and I did none of it. All I had to do was turn up, stitch, chat and talk enthusiastically about our group which was easy to do. Thanks Gina, Anne and Gill for all your work.

I'm sure Ella will soon be inspiring others to pick up a needle and thread too.

Whispers 2 - Judith's Stream Complete

In the last year to 18 months, I have shown shown some of the work that I have done as part of the Chinese Whispers group. In this 'round' we each created a piece of work which would be used to inspire the others in the group. Any source of inspiration could be used and any technique . The other 4 members of the group would use this to inspire a piece 1/4 of the size of the original piece. 

Below is a stream of work Judith started with her Seattle skyline inspired piece. At the time, I was walking along the south bank of the river Thames on my way to work and really enjoyed seeing St Paul's. So my piece was inspired by a city landscape closer to home.

I think they work well together and I hope you agree. We have no plans to exhibit them publicly but we do plan to show them to our local branch of the Embroiderers' Guild later in the year.  I'll show you some of the other streams as I process the photographs.

New Inspiration: Close to home and in Italy

I seem to have been busy busy busy, recently and not enough stitching has been going on but I have been enjoying myself! I need to get on and finish my current work because I have been collecting new inspirations. Last week we had a long weekend in the Italian Lakes, which had previously inspired my Lake Maggiore piece and I think it's the sunset pictures that I will turn to again for inspiration.

In February, I had a new camera for my birthday but it only came with very brief printed instructions and it wasn't until I was on the plane to Italy that I got to read the electronic manual that I had downloaded.  The next two photographs used two of the settings I discovered.

I like the effects they created but unfortunately I can't remember which ones I used!

Back in England, we had friends staying with us this weekend and yesterday we enjoyed a very warm trip to the Hampton Court Palace Flower show. Philip is the gardener of the household but I couldn't resist buying this plant. I thought it looked like a living pin cushion.

Today we walked through the fields at Hitchin Lavender and now my trousers smell nicely of lavender - I should be very nicely relaxed by bed time!

Although the lavender fields have been opened since 2000 and I live quite close, I didn't even know they existed. The entrance price entitles you to pick a bag of lavender, so looks like I could be relaxed for some time to come! Although it is very nice to come back with some lavender, it was the seeing the purple fields that I enjoyed the most.

Hopefully, I will be able to get some stitching done this week.....deadlines are looming....

Barge in the mist: Short Listed for Fine Art Quilt Masters Prize

Last month, I was thrilled to receive an email to inform me that  'Barge in the Mist' had been short listed for the Fine Art Quilt Masters prize. The selection is made from two photographs, one of the whole piece and one detail shot. Although the piece is green, it is quite subtle in many ways and I thought it might not suit selection by photograph but taking lots of photographs until I had a decent representation obviously paid off.

There were 20 quilts short listed and they were exhibited at New Designers last week. I do try to go to New designers (ND) every year and already had my ticket for this year when I heard I had been short listed but I had an additional  reason to go this year. So yesterday, as planned, I went to ND.  First stop the quilt exhibition on the top floor - what a relief to see my quilt hanging there - they hadn't changed their mind!  I always think of my work being generally quite large but next to the other pieces it looked quite small. 

You can find images and details of all the short listed quilts here: Fine Art Quilt Master 2014. Do have a look, as there's are some lovely work. I can't imagine how you pick a winner but perhaps I should try and find out!

I enjoyed seeing all the students work too. There was lots of fabric printing and came away with a desire to print a blind or curtains. Not sure when I'm going to get to do that though but I think that printing a smaller piece and getting digitally printed is the way to go - probably quicker and certainly safer. You wouldn't want to get to the end of a 4 metre print run and drop a blob of dye where you didn't want want one, would you?

I also noticed a number of students had pleated their fabric. Maybe there are always students who pleat fabric but I just noticed them more because of my fabric origami ? Sahsa Hocking had some lovely pleated knitted fabric and she generously recommended a book on pleating to me which I'm going to get. 

I always have my radar tuned in looking for stitching and there's never as much as I'd like to see, so I was pleased to see the work by Maria Boyle . I obviously wasn't alone as Maria had been selected to be the Textile Study Group graduate of the year. Congratulations Maria.

Now need to concentrate on my pieces for the next exhibition but looking forward to Festival of Quilts in August.

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.

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!

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.