Exhibition at Sidcot Arts Centre

Still a few days left to catch this exhibition – it runs until Sunday.  Well worth a visit, we have work on three floors, a selection of cards and small gifts to buy plus plenty of tea and homemade cakes.

The full address is Sidcot Arts Centre, Sidcot School, Winscombe, North Somerset, BS25 1PD – follow the pom-poms when you get there to find the entrance.

Here are my two engine pieces hanging together for the first time – they look much smaller in this lovely large space than they do at home!

A rare opportunity to have my animated piece ‘Resolution’ up and running.  I ended up remaking it from scratch - the software available now is so much better that it was easier to start again than to persuade the original file to run on my current computer.  I also made a slightly smaller and much lighter backboard, so I think of this as the rebooted version.  Making a new backboard was, of course, a purely artistic decision and nothing to do with the fact that my current car is 10cm narrower than my previous one.  Honest.

As a group, we decided to mark the WW1 centenary by each making a small piece on the theme of poppies.  I was puzzled by this for some months as I don’t really do flowers, or at least not realistic ones.  When I sat down to have a go, I found I didn't have any reference images at home and no poppies in the garden so I had a look at The Commons in Flickr.  If you are not familiar with this, it is a very useful resource – images from public institutions that are out of copyright.  Searching for red poppies I came across a page from a seed catalogue dated 1914 which made me pause as it seemed so poignant.  The association we have now with the red poppy and remembrance of war is so strong, but when this was published, that lay in the future.  It was just a flower in a catalogue. This is my finished piece, which is the page printed on fabric with a little hand stitching.

 
You can see lots more photos of the whole exhibition over on http://gordanotextileartists.blogspot.co.uk/ where Jenn is doing a great job blogging about the group.


Now, attentive readers may have noticed that there is no mention of the piece of work based on Irish dance dresses that I was blogging about back in March
  http://jinny-gallimaufry.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/progressing-slowly.html
Well, it is there but in a very different form.  Another long story, so it deserves a separate post (and I will try not to leave it so long this time).

Ceili Headbands Done and A Tiny Animation

It took a while but they are finally done - 17 headbands for the dance school -  and the girls wore them for the All Englands competition last weekend.  Here are a few  - the photo doesn't do justice to the effect of the crystals which really sparkled on stage.

For the September ATC swap, we had to include something beginning with our initial.  I used some of the scraps from the monoprinting I did last month to make J is for Jugs.

Finally, thanks to Sharon over on Pintangle for highlighting this animation by Aardman featuring Dot, the world's smallest stop motion animation character, as she tries to escape from an unravelling textile.  The 'making of' film is also fascinating.

Adding Sound to Animation and Some Tricky Stitches

Over the last few weeks, I have changed my ISP, set up a wireless network and bought a new computer (now the children have the old one and we can stop arguing over who gets to go on the internet and for how long). It is far worse than moving house - hours going through address lists wondering who these odd names belong to and if I want to give them my new email and more hours checking all my online ids. Finally I have moved over all my favourite bits of software, found out if they still work, and sorted out the licences so they work on the new machine. Now it is all done, I have been playing with Vista and especially the Movie Maker and DVD Maker - at last a big enough memory to cope with everything at once. So, I have added some sound effects to the animation (yes, I know I said it was finished but can't stop fiddling). Here is a clip from it to get the idea - you need to imagine it projected onto the background I made.Have a look at the Coursework pages of my website to see my earlier notes and pictures. The sound is intentionally quite low so you may need to turn up the volume. It is part of my plan that if you were in the room, you might not be sure if you heard it first time.




In complete contrast, I have been continuing with the stitch sample for the Tudor historical study - having a hard time with the plaited braid stitch so I have just kept doing it. There is some very dodgy tension as you can see in this photo but I refuse to be defeated.

The sample shows basket stitch, braid stitch, plaited braid stitch, ladder stitch, detached buttonhole, knotted detached buttonhole.

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Tidying Up

Well, I think I have finished module 2, so I will bring it all to summer school and find out. I enjoyed playing with the faces and figures, which surprised me as I normally avoid them. This week, I have been having a bit of a tidy up/sort of all the loose bits and have also updated my website. It now has all the notes relating to making the assessment piece (previously scattered around this blog) including the sample animations and a link to the complete final version on YouTube - click here to visit my site . I still need to do something to show the complete piece in situ, so I can't wave it goodbye quite yet. I can't believe it is a year since I started on it - even I don't normally take so long to finish things. Must have been all that thinking time!

If you Can't Beat Them...

The children seem to spend a lot of time on YouTube and have been having fun making animations of their Harry Potter lego, so I decided it was time to have a go. I have uploaded a short clip of the pylons animation which can be found here (I hope).

Weekend in London and More Animation

Last weekend was a bit of a treat - there were two exhibitions in London I really wanted to see so I stayed over and overdosed on art on Saturday. I needed a long walk on Wimbledon Common on Sunday to recover before coming home. The first was Prism at the Mall Galleries, a wonderfully varied collection. Some of my personal favourites were Joan Baillie's Mysterious Stones in atmospheric rusty oranges and browns and Rachel Gornall's calm and restrained Cenote series. I was intrigued by Lois Woodyer's hangings with photo transfers of Canary Wharf combined with stitch and Catherine Dormor's hangings with photographic images of the process of sewing. The gallery was crowded with groups of mainly women happily discussing the pieces and taking tea.

Next stop was the V&A where I went to see Out of the Ordinary:Spectacular Craft. Sian had already pointed me in the direction of Anne Wilson's work that includes animation so it was exciting to see Errant Behaviour running. Over two screens, threads, pins and lace fragments wind, form into heaps and move. Sometimes they seem like animals or undersea creatures, sometimes they form tableaux like jungle vegetation stirring. Interesting to think about how much the effect is suggested/affected by the sound track.

When I got home, I did some surfing, idly wondering if I could do stop motion animation with equipment I already have (last time I did some was probably 35 years ago when my big brother borrowed Dad's cine camera and we filmed toys moving across the floor). I came across a useful little utility for turning a folder of jpg files into an avi - i.e. stills into a movie - really easily. Eureka! This has overcome the problem of the files being too big too save - I have been able to save the frames individually and join up afterwards. Playing last night, I was able to increase the number of frames and adjust the number shown per second to make a much smoother film.

A bit of Reassurance

We had our Embroiderers' Guild committee meeting at my house last week and one of our members gave a powerpoint presentation. Why is this relevant? Because she had borrowed a digital projector so I was able to see how my animated piece looks at full size for the first time (although without the canvases as background). Cool - as my children would say.

Trying Another Background

After seeing all my bits and pieces for the assessment piece, Sian gave me some more ideas for backgrounds, one of which was to try plain white panels set at angles. I like this idea - it can look interesting by itself while not being too busy when the projection is going. Here are some photos of my trials using artist's stretched box canvases - the mysterious dark shape at the right is a metre rule to show the scale. I haven't worried too much about placing the canvases other than trying to echo the lines/shapes that will appear - the arrangement would need to fit the space where it is being shown and the size of the projection may vary. I was hoping to get some strong shadows as well but may have to wait until the summer - it is cloudy and wet this week and we have had virtually no daylight in the house. The three pictures below show stages of the animation - the odd colour is because the canvases are bright white but the wall is slightly peachy. My husband has been very understanding about the blu-tac marks on the wall but I think he would draw the line at repainting it white just for a photo.

Picture quality isn't brilliant - it is a case of juggling focus on the projector and the camera and not getting in front of the light. It is quite interesting to see the slide projection close-up on the canvases as the greys split into different coloured pixels. One rainy Sunday, I should try copying the design in paints onto a spare canvas.

Animation Frames

In case it is not working, here are some stills from animation 1 on my website to get a flavour of it. The animation cycles through overlays of these images on a loop, so the second one gradually appears on top of the first and the first fades out. Then the third appears on top and the second fades out and so on ad infinitum. It is not as interesting as the black and white one but quite soothing.

Sample for Background

A quick addition to the last post - a scaled down sample for a fabric background (20cm square). Top a scan of the sample, below it is overlaid with one of the frames from the animation printed onto a transparency.

Some further thoughts on using this piece in different ways 1) get individual frames professionally printed onto box canvases and hang as a series. 2) use individual frames as a basis for further digital development eg as a tube in Paint Shop Pro 3) play with simplified version with software for embroidery machine to produce repeatable motif.

Assessment Piece

Work continues on this piece (see September entries). I have finished the animation finally and need to sort out a background. Unlike the earlier drafts, I haven't published the animation on my website because the file is so large.

To clarify my ideas for the background, I have tried blu-tacking various things to the wall and projecting images onto them to get an idea of the effect. I have done this simply by printing small images onto OHP transparencies and using a slide projector so they are very grainy - the real thing would be better quality (I hope). In the photo below, the wooden stick on the left is a metre rule to give a sense of scale.

The first picture shows various pieces of fabric keeping the blue theme from earlier work - all but one are from my dyed samples so I could repeat roughly the same colours. If I used a fabric background, I would wrap toning threads around in straight lines to echo the paper samples. To see what I mean, see Animation 1 at my website.

An alternative idea is to use a metallic background so I tried sticking up a few different metal samples - eg puree tubes, shim, drinks cans coloured by heating (these are all bits I already had stashed away). From the picture below left you can see there is a problem with reflections and with some parts being too dark to show the image. The piece of metal at the bottom right of this picture with the clearest image is brass shim which has not been used and is smooth, but as it would be rather boring by itself at full size, I heated it over a picnic stove to add some colour - see picture below right.

There are of course other options - I like the idea of using something old and rusty but so far haven't found anything suitable. It needs to be a bit over 1m square and portable enough to wall mount for exhibiting (or maybe lean against a wall). It would also need to be fairly light coloured to show the black lines clearly - all suggestions gratefully received!

Perhaps I could create a project by taking a projector out and about to different locations and filming the results - for example by running the animation against some storage containers or warehouse walls or a gasometer. Now all I need is a fairy godmother with a data projector (is there such a thing as a battery model?) and a camcorder.

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Work in Progress

Now the children are back at school, I have been able to think seriously about the first assessment piece. I am experimenting with the idea of using the animation I created some months ago, replacing the digital image with stitching. I have started working stitched samples which I will scan into the computer.

My first idea was to use free machining with cable stitch to reproduce the uneven lines. I soon realised that the detail would become fiddly and that the thick thread looked too untidy. As I have an A4 scanner, I am restricted to this size for samples. When scanned, there were a lot of uneven shadows. The photos at the end of this post show the back and front of this sample (sorry, I am having trouble getting photos in the place I want them).

My second sample is handstitching on white cotton (photo at top of post). At first I used running stitch but then changed to long straight stitches. I used shades of black and grey to add variety to the lines and left it in the hoop for scanning. It will be interesting to see if the scanned image has shadows from where threads have been carried across the back and how effective this is - or will it just look messy.

As I am planning to lose the background before animating, I am making a further sample on white card, again with long stitches and shades of black and grey. The photo of the partially stitched sample shows shadows on the card which would be good to keep. I shall have to see whether a photograph or a direct scan looks better.