Colours of Pembrokeshire - inspired by rockpools

The blue and turquoise seas of Pembrokeshire inspired me to get this ongoing piece of hand embroidery out again. Stitched on to a piece of fine cotton dyed with Pebeo setasilk dyes which also seem to work on cotton. Stitched area is approximately 20cm square.

Eigg 2018

I have been to Eigg again for a yoga holiday and the weather could not have been more of a contrast to my visit in 2017. Blue skies, turquoise water, sparkling sunbeams, sharply delineated skylines, rusty boats.

Lots and lots of rockpools and beachcombing

Inspiring this little work in progress

 

Still, still life drawing and beautiful stitch

 A return to the still-life this week with more focus on "dark darks" and "light lights”. Our teacher had us all drawing the composition for 5 minutes without looking, before we got into refining the drawing:

In the afternoon, off to a lovely little exhibition of stitched pieces at the Daniel Raphael Gallery in Marylebone. Beautiful work from two artists whose work I am familiar with,Maryam Ashkanian, Alison Holt and from some that I am not: Richard McVetis, Julie French, Lucie Feighan, Ulla Stina Wikander and Robert Dean ( who I cannot find a link to).

 Lucie’s website very generously shares full pictures of several of her sketchbooks, many hours to be lost looking at those.

Well worth a visit, and on until 22nd March.

November challenge, bacteria blooming

Two challenge pieces to complete by the end of the year, and I’m rushing to get these completed.  November is a single bacterial colony on a microscope slide. A chance to use some toggles made a long time go with Karen Ruane. I must have had my camera on some very odd setting as these colours are all too blue.

An embroidered pebble for a friend

 

To bead or not to bead, that is the question......

…. and for the October challenge on the theme of bacteria, the answer was most  definitely “to bead"

and, to button

Thanks to Virgin Trains..................

... and a train journey of 2h being extended to 3h and 45 mins, I had time to start on my next series of the challenge.  Bacterial colonies, being embroidered on to cloth printed using the breakdown method.

Where has all the stitching gone, long time passing

With apologies to Peter, Paul and Mary, time to ponder where my stitching has got to.  I’m being diverted in to sketchbook work, which is a good thing, in light of the degree of mental block I have about thinking my scribblings are worthy of the word sketchbook.

Work in the studio at Mary Ward, continuing with this piece, cutting a stencil to allow multiples to be drawn on top of each other

Then as ever, I felt the need for some collage

One more week to work on this in the studio.

I am still working on the CQGB monthly challenge. with the last one of the seed series well underway. Applique, embroidery and texturing with TextureMagic

Shadowing with oilsticks has been overdone, I’ll need to see if I can tone that down.

The final three in the series are based on bacteria, and the threats posed by overuse of antibiotics.

I’ve filled a sketchbook,, so needed a new one. Breakdown-printed cloth with an appliquéd piece of melted ( deliberately of course!) gold lame fabric. 

Filling up

 

Experiments with drawing ink and an angle-cut hair dyeing brush on pasted tissue paper - swans, gondolas?

Inspiration this month has come from: Ruth Padel and  Issam Kourbaj, “Dark Water, Burning  World” a small installation in the Islamic Gallery at the British Museum; The Business of Prints at the British Museum; Prism at Hoxton Galleries, now finished, particularly the work of Ross Belton using found natural materials.

Finishing on using found natural materials, a note on Margaret Cooter’s blog, inspired me to search out this beautiful method of making decorative roses from autumn leaves.