Creative and moral influences

I seem to have had  week full of creative and moral influences, and it is only Thursday.  The creative influences started with a visit to the British Library.  I am embarrassed to admit that despite liven gin London for 30 years, and regularly passing the library, I have never been in .  I went to hopefully see the original manuscript for Alice in Wonderland, which was " Alice's Adventures Underground" but it was not on display.  There were many other marvels, including an original piece of the manuscript for The Messiah.  The building itself was wonderful, with pieces of art dotted about.  Good to see this anamorphic artwork by Patrick Hughes in the basement.  Photos form my phone, so a bit blurry.

Out on the street, on the way to the Diwana Bhel Poori house for lunch and some intriguing grids and reflections

Then on to the painting course, where we did more colour mixing, and then a colour study of a shell.  It was only when we were about half way through the exercise that it dawned on me that this was exactly the same exercise that I did in the "Embroiderer's Ledger"  course with Karen Ruane, only using paint rather than thread. 

Source material

Resulting colour study, needs a bit more pink.

The day finished with a sobering talk from two of the volunteers from Fine Cell Work, who teach prisoners how to embroider.  It was sad to hear that the charity can only support working in 25 prisons, particularly in light of some of the letters written by the prisoner participants about how the stitching had helped them in so many ways.  There is an exhibition of the quilts made by prisoners currently at the Quilt Museum in York.

It was also an opportunity to borrow the new books by Linda Seward, " The Ultimate Guide to Art Quilting".  At first glance, this is a very thorough introduction to many of the techniques used in art quilts.  Linda has continued to use the diagram format as in her previous book, The Complete Book of Patchwork, Quilting and Appliqué. As I refer to that book often, I might be buying this one as well.

I have also been following the work of embroiderer Rebecca Harris recently, particularly her spat with Facebook about whether her embroidery " Symbiosis" was an "overly sexual" image.  She is now setting up a website, " StitchingScience"  featuring the work of professional textile artists who use science as their inspiration.  It has really made me think about how to better link my science knowledge and my stitching, as I have not really done that to any great extent.

My own stitching this week has been to complete more cards for our group's exhibition in October, using a combination of appliqué, embroidery and a bit of iridescent paintsticks.

 

and…….. I am going to see this next week.  That will be inspiration overload.

 

 

Black and white ledger for Halloween

In between helping my elder son prepare a costume for his first Halloween "home alone", I have been continuing to explore the shapes from my first ledger exercise. A fortuitous mistake with the Morley photocopier, led to an interesting juxtaposition of a grid underneath the more biomorphic shapes. The paper is reinforced with iron-on vilene to allow reasonably robust stitching on top.

I also used the copier to experiment with changing scale, inverting the colours of the shapes and multiple repetitions. This is such a revelation to me, that design can be worked at methodically to come up with all sorts of interesting variations. Before doing my recent courses, I had this image that design / art just appeared in makers' minds, fully formed and as a result of some sort of cosmic inspiration force. I now realise that this is not the case.

The left hand side has more stitched inserts


and the right hand side has some stitching in glow-in-the-dark thread. Difficult to photograph, but this gives the idea.


Happy Halloween.

Ledger, loving it, but I'm still on week one

I am absolutely loving this online course, but I am still fixated on the shapes generated during week one. I am applying some of the other techniques we are learning, but by now, I am supposed to she another design source, and a study of lace, with its derivatives. Still, Karen is a generous tutor, and is happy for us to develop our skills as we wish or need, and not to rigidly follow her curriculum. The week's explorations follow.


Overlay page and its inverse. The inverse is a photocopy, as I am using the inverse fabric piece for another ongoing project.


Shibori, indigo dyed polyester acetate, attached using Bondaweb, due to the narrowness of the stems / arms/ branches/ tentacles. FME, with rayon thread, using different patterns of stitching.


This was the page I really didn't like , so I've covered it up with an overlay, but still kept it so it can be seen.


The orange piece is screen printed paper, reinforced with lightweight Vilene, and machine stitched with wool thread. The marking on the magenta page was seeing if I could continue the "quilting" lines on to the overlay.


Top sheet is painted paper backed with very soft Vilene, with embroidered inserts. This overlays an inserted panel of the same paper, ( also reinforced with Vilene) . The background paper is coloured with Inktense blocks, and stamped with lettering from an acrylic blocks set found in a charity shop - some letters missing, so I had to improvise. The paper shapes are the left-overs from cutting the paper stencils for the screen-printing. I like their floppy characteristics, so I stitched them together and included them in the ledger.


Mounted with a piece of paper from an old music book, and lots of ideas spinning in my head from the two stitches added to the music.


Underneath - stitched paper, inserted in to the background paper.

Colour in the garden and more ledger

We still have sweet peas flowering, but they are getting towards the end of their flowering. The colours are still as vivid, but the scent is no longer as wonderful.





These colours also appear in the ongoing work in the embroidery ledger


Screen printed shapes with Procion P dye paste, through a paper stencil, on to recycled cotton sheet.


Stitching in to the screen printed shape with stranded cotton and cotton perle: pistil, feather, chain stitches and fresh knots.

Embroiderer's Ledger, task 2

Next task is to separate out some shapes from the image, draw them and work with the extracted colours to explore them further.

I couldn't get anything beautiful out of the mountains in the background -that's the attempt at the side. As I was drawing, I realised that I wasn't happy that my shapes were looking like peculiar breasts, so I've simplified them. ( Any advice on how to convey the twisting in the dominant yellow shape from the image would be greatly appreciated. I've tried to draw it in with the yellow and orange shape here, but it isn't too my liking yet.)

I really like the possibilities of overlaying of shapes and blending colours, but that may be beyond my technical capabilities. Trying to match colours under artificial light is tricky, so I'll need to do something about the quality of the light under which I am working. The colours are actually not as bright as this on the page, I'll try to re-photograph under natural light.

It takes me a while to get in to the swing of these exercises, but once I do I am really enjoying them.



Next step is to stitch in to these shapes.