Fractured Landscape

Finally, my Fractured Landscape piece is finished! I may have spent more time on this piece than any other but that doesn't make it my favourite. I have spent so much time on it that I just had to finish it or all the time spent would have seemed like such a waste.

Another driver for me to complete this piece was that quite some time ago I entered it into the Quilter's Guild competition which will be held at the Festival of Quilts in August. The theme for this year's competition is 'Passion in Pieces' and I have incorporated two of my passions into this piece; my passion for landscapes, which is in pieces (!) and also my passion for stitching which is represented by the text I have layered and layered and reads  'I cannot count my day complete till fabric thread and needle meet'.

I used the text as a way of creating colour and texture and a way of referencing another of my passions and I knew the words would never be legible but you can see some of the letters if you look closely. Although this was a very time consuming method of colouring cloth, there are parts of the fabric that I really like which I probably couldn't have created by any other (quicker) method.

This is also the first time I have left raw edges in a piece and this is something that I would normally shy away from but I think it did emphasise the landscape 'in pieces'. 

And of course I couldn't finish the piece without the addition of some hand stitching. There was more hand stitching on the work earlier in the week but some of it got lost when I cut 2 1/2 inches off the top. Drastic? Yes. Last minute? Yes! The deadline for delivery was yesterday, which I met - just.. And although it was a shame to lose the stitching, I feel the piece looks better for it. 

Lesson learnt from this piece: Pay more attention to proportions, just because a piece of fabric is a certain size, it doesn't mean you have to use it all.

Smart Textiles

I really like the idea of being able to incorporate technology into textiles and although it is interesting to use it in a practical way, I'm more interested in, or maybe intrigued by, how it could be used in textile art, so I booked on the Smart Textile course at the V&A which was run by Sara Robertson. 

One of the things we did was to stitch a circuit using conductive thread which lit up small LEDs which came on and off at different intervals.

We also did printing will thermochromic paint which changes colour when heated and experimented with paints that changed colour at different temperatures and sometimes mixing them with standard acrylic paints.

In this piece I mixed the thermochromic paint with standard acrylic paint and printed with one of my old gridy thermofax screens.The heat of my hand 'removed' the thermochromatic paint revealing the yellow acrylic paint that it had been mixed with.

This was printed with liquid crystal and it was fabulous but expensive. It is hard to capture the colour changes in a photograph but you can see on the right hand edge that there is little colour but some beautiful colours have been revealed where the heat of the hand has been placed. It has been so hot this week that this fabric has been constantly colourful and what's interesting is that different colours are revealed over time. How does it do that?

The garment above was created by See the Unseen using similar paint and I love it! They're based in Somerset House and they're definitely on my list to visit. 

So the really clever thing would be combine the circuits and thermochromic paints together and this was my first attempt. I stitched a line of conductive thread and added power so that it heated up the fabric around the thread and changed the colour of  the paint.

Not exactly a work of art but it starts to show the potential of the technology. 

Whilst I was on the course the V&A design bus arrived and our tutor Sara, had an exhibit displayed. I was very glad it hadn't been me that had to park the bus between two lampposts on a busy London street!

All the exhibits used technology in innovative ways and we were treated to an informative pack about the exhibits and the artists.  

They do things well at the V&A don't they? I really enjoyed the course and it has sown (sewn?) some creative seeds but I think I'm along way off being able to use it in my work. 

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!

Embroidered Bag ...first of many?

On Saturday, I spent an enjoyable day at the North Herts and Beds Embroiderers' Guild on a bag making workshop, which was tutored by Alex Waylett . A girl can never have too many bags, I say. 

We each chose a piece of patterned fabric for the front of our bag and embellished it with machine embroidery and added a few beads and sequins for good measure. 

It's not often that I get an 'action shot' but this one was taken by my friend Jill came who came with me as a guest.  Jill is very creative but had never done any machine embroidery before but she made this lovely bag and is planning on making more. It's a shame that she doesn't live nearer or I'd be getting her more involved in all things embroidery related, until her conversion was complete : )

I could happily have spent a lot longer embellishing my fabric before I made it up my bag but quite rightly, Alex made sure we all left enough time to learn how to make up the bag before going home...and we all had a lovely finished bag to home with. 

It would be nice to embellish some of my growing pile of hand dyed and printed fabrics and to make them into bag. I bought a spare bag frame so what am I waiting for? If you would like to make a similar bag, Alex has a number of workshops scheduled this year at different venues, including some at Art Van Go

Still writing with dye.....

Fortunately, I'm working on a piece that is made up of five separate pieces, which means that I can avoid working in the cold garage on a large table and can work on each piece individually in the kitchen. In the garage I balance a large piece of board between two trestle legs but in the kitchen I have used a smaller piece of board balanced between one of the trestle legs and the work top. It slopes down a little but I'm quite pleased with how the set up works and I can work for longer because I'm warmer. I'm layering colour by writing text, in layers on the fabric until I get the colours that I want. Partly due to the fact that I am printing on a thick linen and partly because I'm adding colour cautiously, it's taking some time and so being able to keep warm is important.

I've got plans to create a stitched sample for a completely unrelated piece and seeking inspiration I had Jan Beaney and Jean Littlejohn's 'In stitches' DVD running on my laptop whilst I was printing. How's that for multi-tasking?

This is the fabric after it was washed. I'm trying to create the type of colour variation that you would see in vegetation on the horizon and this is starting to build but is still some way off, albeit that it isn't quite as washed out as it appears in the photograph. Much more layering of text to do....

Taking Textiles Further - Inspired by Graffiti

Last weekend I enjoyed another Taking Textiles Further workshop. We only meet 3 times a year but even so, it seemed a particularly long since we last met. This time we were continuing with the theme of text but used graffiti as our inspiration.

This was my first attempt at graffiti and I'm sure that from now on, I'll be paying more attention to graffiti designs when I see any.  In my graffiti, I incorporated elements from my landscape photographs and used some landscape related words I've been 'playing with' recently. I even filled the letters with the textures I created for my flamingo in my lino printing workshop,  so one thing builds on another.

I cut and folded the page of graffiti into a book form to see if any interesting or abstract designs would emerge. 

I've used this folding and cutting technique before and have previously been pleased with the surprise designs that emerged but not so this time. I think this is probably because I don't really like seeing the obviously incomplete words, especially when it's such a large element of the overall design. 

So I did go back to the more traditional method of using two 'Ls' to isolate a few areas for consideration. To some extent this has the same issue but I do like the depth in the 'TES' piece and that this could be an idea worth progressing. 

We also cut out words relating to our theme and randomly over laid them...or as randomly as my brain would let me.

We then isolated areas of the words to draw, hoping some interesting and original designs would emerge. I think the first drawing has potential and I'll give it some thought about how I could develop it. Can you see which areas of the words I drew? No, I thought not.

Graffiti is far removed from my usual style of working but I really enjoyed it. I would like to create some more graffiti designs, probably using colours more akin to colours in the Chilean landscapes and putting a little more fore thought into it, now that I have a better idea of what I would like to achieve. I might even borrow some books on graffiti from the library. On the other hand I should read some of the books I already have in my pile first. I'm very inspired by my current project and am torn between following all the trails my research is leading me down and actually creating something. I guess it's better than having no ideas or leads to follow.....