Module 3, Chapter 8

Investigating edges - for this exercise, I have taken strips from this fabric and come up with some alternative edge designs, based on what is on the strip.

1) Felt tip and pastels. I enjoyed drawing this but then realised I had created a new repeating pattern rather than an edge.

2) Coloured pencils
3) Brusho ink and koh-i-noor dyes.

4) Felt tips and pastels. Not sure if these are pea-pods or teeth.

Stitch Explorer - May

I have slipped behind with the stitch explorer challenge on Pintangle, but as June is going to be a catch up month, it should sort itself out. May's challenge is needleweaving so while I think about it, here is one I made earlier for the City and Guilds Part 1. It is made in three layers and is a picture of snakes in a tree.

Module 3 Chapter 7 - Weave

For this chapter, I am exploring the contruction of weave through using paper straws and small samples in fabric, thread and anything else that fits my theme. I am continuing to use the same colour scheme and some of the braids from chapter 5. (In case you are wondering what happened to chapter 6, it is a choice between using knit or weave). I had done some of this work during module 1 before the course was rewritten, but never finished it, so I have been adding to it this week. First, here are the paper experiments I had already done.

From Gallimaufry

From Gallimaufry

Two old samples, one in strips of fabrics and the second trying water soluble paper on metal strips and wire. I need to have another go with the paper as this is not very good.

Next is a larger sample which incorporates some of the braids from chapter 5 with coloured and textured metal and strips of fabric and yarn in the colour scheme from the research work in module 1. Most of these are ones I dyed as part of that module. I have tried to reflect the machinery/industrial landscape theme by weaving in triangular sections that relate to the work on pylons and by including metal.

My next sample (to the left of the picture) used wire for the warp as I wanted to fold it in the same way that I folded paper for the pylon designs shown on this project page. By coincidence, the speaker at our Embroiderers' Guild meeting last week was a weaver called Laura Thomas who has (amongst other wonderful things) made some pieces using very fine wire and silk, which she has then folded and pleated. This inspired me to have another go using a much finer wire and yarns and weaving it tightly. This gave me much cleaner, sharper folds but as it is time-consuming, the sample is tiny - about 2 inches square after folding and I could only fold it side-to-side (the paper is A4 sheets pleated in several directions).

Finally, I tried a bit of circular weaving by warping around all four sides of a square frame, a technique featured in Workshop on the Web some time ago, to make a cog-like shape.

A Busy Week

You know how it is - you wait all winter for an exhibition to visit and as soon as May arrives they all come together. I took some time out on Sunday to go around part of the Severn Vale Art Trail in Thornbury and met up with Heather whose blog I have been reading for a while. Yesterday I braved the rain to go over to Ashton Court to see the work by Gordano Textile Artists and catch up with some friends. Heather is also a member of this group and has posted pictures on Ragged Old Blogger which are well worth seeing. All being well, I am heading into Bristol on Saturday to see another group exhibition at Bristol Guild and I must get my act together to go to Stroud before the textile festival finishes. Whew.

Last Bit of Chapter 5

Finally finished playing with these braids, rearranging and layering them to make an acceptable presentation. I wasn't happy with the backgrounds I had done so I tried again and came up with this by stencilling using folded strips of freezer paper and Markel sticks on a previously dyed piece of cotton.

And then added the braids...

From left to right we have
1) Scraps of dyed scrim decorated with built-in machine patterns using soluble fabric as a base, stitched onto a braid made by wrapping a long thin wire frame made from a coat hanger with lots of yarns and strips of fabric (actually more like a fringe because I had to cut it off - looks quite cute as a bracelet, perhaps I should make some more).

2) Free machining on felt to make spiky cog shapes cut out with soldering iron, threaded through with a short piece of free machining on soluble and longer strip of built-in pattern stitched onto fabric and paper.

3)Free machining on felt triangles (relate to pylon shapes from earlier work) threaded through with another piece of braid from 1).

4) Free machining on felt circles threaded with short piece of braid from 2) and longer piece made with threads/yarns laid out on soluble fabric and secured with built-in patterns.

5) 2 wide braids made by combining lots of thinner ones using all the techniques above. The orange piece also has a sheer fabric decorated with French knitting made with a very fine metallic thread that is very loose and loopy held down with a machined pattern, and the blue has a twisted centre strip of fabric-wrapped wireform.

Finally, I cut up the two wide braids and rearranged them to create a new textile piece.

And while I had the paints out, I decorated the cover of my knotwork/braids sketchbook using the same stencil and Markel sticks over acrylic paint. Here it is drying before varnishing.

Module 3 Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 Continued

Chapter 4 is making backgrounds by using paper braids as stencils to decorate fabric for backgounds - above are two I made but not looking very interesting at the moment so I will probably add to them. I have carried on making braids for chapter 5 by machining soluble fabric, wrapping wireform, and stitching down groups of threads and am starting to weave and join them to make wider braids and new textiles.

Finally, I have carried on thinking about the cogs piece and been playing with having bits move. I have made a mock-up to try various arrangements of cogs running on the minute hands of the clock movements. As they are mounted off-centre, I needed to check that they would not crash into each other. I didn't fancy staring at it for an hour while they completed a revolution, so I set it running and used a webcam to make this little time lapse film - it is only 13 seconds long and not good quality, but you get the idea of how it might look.

Pink!

I mentioned a while ago that I had joined an ATC swop group on Facebook - well the Feb/March swop fell apart but a new volunteer has come forward so we are trying again, the theme this time is My Favourite Colour. Now, my favourite colour is pink - not the nice pastel shades but the glorious and outrageous bright pinks. It doesn't often appear in my pieces because it is too...well...pink but I have been hoarding a fragment of rather lurid spandex that called to me one day from a remnants basket so this seemed the time to use it. I backed it with pelmet vilene and free machined with about 10 shades of pink following the pattern on the fabric, leaving some of the sparkly bits showing through. The photo shows the ATC on top of the original fabric - people with a nervous disposition look away now (although I am not sure the camera does it justice).

Spring Cleaning

We have had a couple of lovely bright days over Easter which has inspired me to start decamping to my summer workspace -

a table in the store room over the garage. This is how it looks after cleaning up - imagine how bad it was before. The midday sun is just about high enough now to shine in the windows and give a bit of warmth (and dry out the damp) so I can leave my stuff there instead of moving boxes and sewing machines around the kitchen and hallway as I have been doing over the winter. It also gave me a chance to sort out all my bits of loose coursework and see where I am. Now just waiting for school holidays to finish so I can sit down to some work for a few hours. (It occurs to me that I seem to say that rather a lot - I do love spending time with my family really!)

Stitch Explorer - March

The challenge for March was to explore the style of Assisi work. This is usually seen in cross stitch, where the background is filled in around a shape outlined in back stitch. The actual motif is left unstitched. You can find details of the challenge and links for more information here. I decided to try long stitches around a cog shape using variegated quilting threads and a piece of hand dyed cotton for the background.

Bits and Pieces

Had a bit of a shopping spree this weekend but it is all good stuff. At the Embroiderers' Guild meeting on Friday, I picked up these lovely metal braids.


They are flat braids but scrunch up nicely - I think they would be great for bracelets with wooden beads stuffed inside. Another one on the "things to try" list.

Saturday was the South West Regional Day at Cannington, near Bridgwater. A chance to hear talks by Audrey Walker and Lucy Goffin on the theme of journeys (and make pages of illegible notes) and to browse in the Guild bookshop. Okay, more than just browsing - I came away with these two new books.


Art Van Go also had a stall, so I stocked up on some small samples of copper shim in different thicknesses and Wirecloth - woven metallic fabric - that I can use in my cogs piece (see here).
A good day all round.

Making Banners

I have been keeping busy this week making banners for my daughters to display their Irish dancing medals. I don't normally post about domestic sewing - the embroidery designs are bought in ones for the computerised machine - but I am hoping that some of the other dancers would like to have one made, so I wanted to put up some photos. The dance school is fundraising to send a team to the All Ireland competition next year - we need to raise enough for a set of matching dresses - so for each one sold, I will be making a donation. If anyone reading this is interested, please email me for details. More pictures below.

X&*!**&

Grrrr... Tried to post twice - the first time, the photos disappeared and then the whole thing crashed. I will get back on tomorrow and sort out the last post.

Later - yippee, fixed it!

Module 3, Chapter 5

Thank you Margaret and Helen for your comments on the cogs. I am looking forward to developing this idea, and Sian suggested making the whole thing in metal and wire for my 'piece using metallic techniques'. Foolishly, I agreed to work overtime until Easter (and the extra cash is already spoken for - sigh) so time is a bit limited - lots of little bits but no nice free days to really get stuck in. I have ordered some clock movements to play with - as often happens, it costs as much to buy 1 in a shop as it does to get 5 online so I will have plenty. If this doesn't pan out it is clocks all round for Christmas!

Meanwhile, here are some pictures of machine braids for chapter 5 - I will come back to chapter 4, which is stencilling, but I am in sewing mode at the moment (see my post on Quodlibet).

The first picture is, from top, combining built-in patterns on felt, then on strips of fabric and paper. The colour scheme is from a colour study back in module 1, using up bits of dyed fabric samples. Below, a selection of built-in patterns overlapping, stitched on soluble fabric. Finally, I digitised one of my knotwork drawings and made this sample by stitching it out several times - to add to the sketchbook.

More Ideas With Cogs

I hadn't realised how long it has been since my last post, so here is an extra long one to make up. I am still keeping busy with machined braids but have no photos at the moment, so those will have to wait for another post. Today I have been revisiting my cogs ideas after seeing Sian's comments on the proposed wallhanging. My problem here is that it is quite similar to the last piece - i.e. black and grey on white background, layers showing through - and for the course I need to show that I can do other things. Which means I can either adapt it or pull another design from the sketchbook to work on. I have grown quite fond of the hanging, so I think I will put it aside as a future project (you know -something to do in the odd 5 minutes of free time) and have a rethink.

You might remember the sketchbook pages from this post using the same small cog image repeated to fill an A4 sheet with added lines in gold pen. I didn't mention it at the time, but in amongst the pencilled scribbles in the book were some thoughts on making moving pieces, perhaps by using clock movements, so I got into 'cutting and sticking' mode to see how this might look.
So - how about using the print as a background and having cog shapes moving on top? I attached some paper ones with brass fasteners to look at the shapes as they turn. Ignore the colour for the moment, this is a rough sketch. If the pivot is offset from the centre, it is more interesting (see below) and at various times the cogs would overlap, so I would need to figure out how to mount them to allow free movement. I toyed with the idea of making them 'real' cogs that move each other once the first one has started, but I felt that the engineering would overtake the piece, by which I mean that the requirements of accuracy of shape and robustness of materials would limit how I could make the cogs. This is meant to be textiles after all.

Next question - what would it be made of and mounted on and how big? Obviously this would need to be a solid panel and the background should be strong enough to take the clock movements. The size is also going to depend on what the movements can cope with. A couple of months ago my husband came home with this sheet of copper, rescued from the skip at work (you can see I have got him well trained). It is about 31cm by 48cm (a bit longer and thinner than A3) and nicely distressed with lots of scratches and a bit of verdigris. Could make a background?

To get an idea of how it could look, I printed the design onto a clear temporary sticker and laid it over the copper sheet.Okay but a bit busy. I could transfer the image to the background using dry rub decals (I have some to try) but would have to do it in pieces as I can only print A4. So I might as well change it around a bit. For the last picture, I cut up the image and then put on the textured (card, gesso, paint) cogs made back in November to see how they would look. They need scaling up for the larger size and I haven't planned how to interpret into textiles. Lots more work needed before the design is complete, but I think we have a contender for the assessment piece.

PS do you find that as soon as you write something, a better idea comes along? I was just about to hit the publish button when a thought popped into my head. How about making it all look a bit more distressed/older by hanging something like cobwebs (threads? distressed scrim?) around and about the cogs, maybe distress the metal some more as well. Also needs some kind of edge treatment, possibly frame with pieces of copper shim (emboss/stitch).

Stitch Explorer February, Trellis Stitch

The challenge for February's Stitch Explorer is trellis stitch, which can be made 3d. I haven't tried this one before, so here are a few first attempts. It stands up nicely but at the moment the tension is going funny when I decrease so it doesn't look very neat. Must keep trying!

Mini Book and Cover

Here's a picture of my latest project from Maggie Grey's online lesson, just finished today. The little book can hang as a handbag charm or on a pair of jeans and slips inside the sleeve for storage. The sleeve is made from a matchbox. The colours haven't come out very well, the sleeve is dark gold and iridescent green.

Below is the latest page in my altered book made from a leaf stamp and puff paint. Only two more to go and it is complete.

Module 3 Chapter 3 and a Wallhanging

For chapter 3, I have been playing with paper to make braids in different ways. Above, folded strips of paper make patterns seen in old manuscripts. Next, shaped cut strips interlaced.


Finally, ways of linking cut out hollow shapes. The shapes have been chosen to reflect my theme of machinery.

I have also revisited the cogs design (see here and here for earlier thoughts). My earlier post showed a sketchbook page with a black and white design repeated three times and linked by gold lines and I decided to develop this into a hanging. Using a (borrowed) projector, I enlarged the image onto a wall and traced the lines onto paper. I split it into 3 layers and traced each one separately. I thought it would be interesting to get the shades of grey by having three layers on top of each other so I made a paper mock-up in black and white tissue. This is sized about 90x30cm. The picture was taken over a glass door so light came through the layers.

I then carried on to try out some different sheer fabrics to see if I could get the same effect by layering them. You can see the effect on the right of the picture below - there are the same number of layers in each strip but the fabrics are different weights.

And a few samples with machine stitching - first heavy stitching,
and then lighter scribbles, which I prefer as the light comes through more. These samples use shades of black and grey thread rather than just black, and I also tried the layers in different orders.
The idea is to make 3 identical panels, each with three layers, and add gold lines (not decided how as yet) to give the impression of another giant cog in front. The panels would hang staggered as in the sketchbook page. I have sent off all this work for Sian's comments before going any further - could be a lot of work.