Text in Textiles day 1

At the weekend I did a Zoom workshop taught by Julia Triston called Text in Textiles.  Julia lives in Denmark so was working on Central European Time which is an hour ahead of BST.  So 9am here was an early start.  I haven't been dressed at that time for quite a while!!!!!

I got everything ready the night before.  Not usually so organised!!

We did a variety of warmup exercises.  We also made paper collages

and fabric ones.

We had each been asked to choose a word or a phrase to work with.  I chose 'dancing in fetters'.

I wrote dancing with a wide chisel nibbed marker on fabric.  I put mistyfuse on the back of the fabric and then cut it up into 3cm squares. I bonded these randomly on the fabric collage.

I wrote dancing on a piece of tissue and stitched it with straight stitch, using black embroidery thread.

I haven't shown you all the things we did as teaching is how Julia earns her living.  If you're interested in finding out more go to Julia's website.

I'll tell you about day 2 in my next post.

Thanks for joining me today
Bernice.

Missing inaction

Spot what I did there!  In the blog title!  The phrase should be 'missing in action'.  I have been missing from my blog but no action!  In fact, lots of inaction.  On June 8th I fell flat on my face and broke two fingers on my right hand.  I have spent the time since having various hospital and dental appointments and my hand has been trussed up like this:

It meant that I had to cancel virtually all of the workshops I was intending to be at including a three day class with Cas Holmes.   I have spent four weeks sitting resting and being waited on.  Thank goodness for Kindle Unlimited.

I decided that I would attend a planned two day workshop on colour organised by Textile Explorations.   Even if I only sat and listened!

Please bear in mind that I took the photos with my left hand!

Julia Triston was teaching the workshop.  We started by talking about colour and then naming as many colours of green that we could think of.   Then we had to paint 6 of the colours from memory.

Julia laid out all our squares and it was fascinating to see how we each perceive colour and also the difference different media makes.

Then we moved on to making true primaries with whatever media we had brought with us.

We talked about warm and cool colours and made collages from torn magazine papers.

There were more exercises to do from these collages but I didn't manage to get them done.  And I was pretty exhausted having got this far.

Next day we looked at the proportion of colours in an image of our choosing.  Then Julia suggested we did a thread wrapping of those proportions but I did mine with paint chips instead.  Fortunately Julia helped me with the cutting and sticking.

Then we made a collage in the exact proportions of the original image.

At this point I should have continued with an exercise in fabric but stopped.  I was pleased that I managed as much as I did.

I hope to finish the exercises once I have the use of my right hand.  And I will return to regular blog posts.  Typing with my left hand only is tiring and laborious.

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice

DISrupt-ed

Last week I went to Stroud to visit the DIS/rupt textile exhibition and to do two workshops that were each run by a textile artist who had work in the exhibition.

The exhibition was spread over two sites - the Museum in the Park and the Lansdown Hall.  This meant that there was ample space around each exhibit and made for great viewing.  The exhibits were made from various media and were very thought provoking.   The work for the exhibition was provided by members of the Textile Study Group and details of the exhibition can be found here: DIS/rupt.

I drove down on Wednesday and spent the afternoon looking at the exhibitions and walking around Stroud.  There were other exhibitions to see around the town as part of the Select Festival.  There were some pictures of birds by Jilly Cobbe in a rather lovely cafe called Meme in George Street, where I had a chocolate explosion of Hot Chocolate and a chocolate brownie.  Yum!

The first workshop on Thursday was run by Ruth Issett called Disrupting Repetitive Pattern.  This was really well prepared and we achieved an amazing amount in the 2.5 hours we had available.

We did quite simple monoprinting with a limited palette of colours.  I chose turquoise and lemon and later turquoise and yellow.  At various points Ruth asked us to use black or white as a third colour.  We started on calico.  I ended up with this but I think I was a bit heavyhanded with the black.

We moved on to Cotton Organdie which I loved using.  You can disrupt everything you are doing because it folds so easily and holds the shape.

This is the start of the second piece of organdie.

I disrupted this by screwing up the organdie as tightly as I could, flattening it out and then printing on top of it.

Ruth gave us some black organdie

And then she gave us two pieces of her own dyed fabrics with a square of freezer paper on it.  I printed over the top and then removed the square.

I may have been a bit heavyhanded again with the white.

There was a short break between workshops where I went out for another look at the Lansdown exhibition and had a hot chocolate with a friend.  You can read about her view of the workshops on her blog.

The afternoon workshop, Text in Textiles was run by Julia Triston. This was another excellent workshop.  I didn't take photos whilst I was working!  We had to choose a word or phrase  and find ways to disrupt the word.  I chose 'exiles'.  My initial thought was to put the letters in pairs and have 'ex' larger than 'il' which in turn was larger than 'es'.  Julia suggested I might put blocks of colour and put the letters on top and disrupt the line of rectangles with some of the letters.  I built up a background of calico pieces and sewed them together with running stitch to infer pathways.  I used bondaweb to attach the blocks of colour and the letters.  I still have to finish stitching the 'e' at the top right (which currently looks like a 'c'.)

On Friday I did a little tour of Gloucestershire to view other of the Select exhibitions on the way home.  I went to Painswick to visit a felt exhibition at ACP.  The clothes were beautiful.

Then I called at the Malthouse Kitchen & Bar where there were enormous drawings of children dressed as superheroes called 'Future Giants'.

And then on to The Nursery at Miserden to view the sculptures.

If you're ever down that way Miserden is well worth a visit.  It's tucked away in the Cotswolds.  It's one of those villages where the 'big house' owns the village.

My final visit on the way home was to New Brewery Arts which had a few items for the Select Festival but mostly I went to see Emily who has a studio there where she make beautiful books.

I had a lovely time and my head is full of ideas from both the DISrupt exhibition and the two workshops.

And since the workshop I have continued to stitch and the piece now looks like this.

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice