Make It Personal

During 2014 I am taking a workshop called Make It Personal, taught by Hilary Beattie.  It is great because it uses lots of the techniques I already use in my art but with fabric as well as paper.  Plus it's great to work with a textile artist who see things from a different perspective.  I worked with Hilary last year on a 2 day Masterclass at the Festival of Quilts.

The workshop is 12 days long spread out over the year as 2 days every other month and last week was session 1: Stamps, Stencils and Printing Blocks.  It has been put on again as it was so popular.

On Thursday morning we stencilled with manufactured stencils using fabric paint on white cotton, patterned fabric and all sorts of different papers.  We were encouraged to play rather than think.  When the fabric paint was dry we flooded the paper and fabric with dye.

 Here are some of the papers I made

 And here are some of the fabrics

On Thursday afternoon we looked at our source material and made a stencil.  I used this photo as inspiration.

It is a closeup of this fountain in Sydney, Australia.  I love it because it reminds me of an Agapanthus.

On Friday morning Hilary showed us how to use our papers and fabrics in our sketchbooks and then we played at tearing and sticking!  Then we looked at a variety of ways to make stamps and made our own, yet again based on our source material.

Each time we made something new I worked back into the pages in my sketchbook.  On these pages there are torn papers and fabrics, stencilling with my own stencil (the black lines), drawing with Neocolor 1 crayons, stamping with two of the stamps I made plus the white rectangle which is one of Hilary's stamps stamped on Repair Tissure and stuck onto the page.