Cutting up a piece of work

Last year I did an Art Cloth course at Littleheath Barn with Liske Johnson.   In my last post about it I said I was going to quilt it.  Well I didn't.  It's been on the back of a chair for months and then I took it back to Littleheath Barn and printed on it some more.

I was still not very keen on the art cloth so I cut it up!  And tried out various compositons using some fabric I had bought (and loved) and not known what to do with.

After some thought and a conversation with Sushi who is a quilter I made some headway with it.  Although first I ordered some more fabric from The Bramble Patch.

The fabric on left, whilst it matched some of the images on the art cloth, was too bright so I decided to use the fabric on the right.

I cut some strips and machined them together.

I cut a strip of the strips and machined it to the art cloth and added the strip at the bttom.

 I did the same with the bottom piece and machined the pieces together.

Then I added the pieces on the right.

Sushi suggested I made a binding with the strips and I've just placed it (rather badly) on the cloth to see what it looks like.

Before I quilt it and bind it I want to print some more over the top of the whole thing to try to integrate the strips into the whole thing and hopefully knock back some of the white.

There's a new Art Cloth course starting in February.And I'm going to be doing it.

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice

Traverse

Last time I told you about the mentoring days with Christine Chester and at last I'm getting round to tell you about my new, possibly risky, venture.

I have been part of setting up a new textile group with Cath, Deb, Dia and Jan who I met on ExTex.

Cath wrote eloquently about who and why we are Traverse: "Traverse is a newly-formed group of five textile artists, based in the Midlands, who came together after studying Experimental Textiles for nine months with Kim Thittichai at Inkberrow Design Centre; we intend to start exhibiting our work next year.

The name ‘Traverse’ grew out of a sense of looking or moving sideways, to find different perspectives as we approach a theme for our work – we may not all travel in the same direction to get there, or use the same vehicle. Indeed, although our work is loosely described as mixed media, we each have our favourites, including working with paper, metal, hand-dyed fabric, felt, 3D and fashion, using heat, print, paint, and stitch. However, a large part of our ethos is to celebrate our diversity, share our various strengths and to grow together.

The title of our first exhibition is ‘Destinations’ and preliminary work so far is already revealing different perspectives on that theme - some based on maps, views of the Earth from Space and imaginary landscapes. The Latin origins of the word, destinare, ‘make firm, establish’, led to it meaning ‘being destined for a place’ and we hope that this, our first exhibition, will begin to establish our place in the world of textile art."

She has an amazing way with words.  I hope my work will match up to the dream.  The working title of Destinations covers maps, journeys, places and travel.  This is a very wide topic and as Cath said we are all finding different ways of looking at the theme.

Before I went to see Christine Chester I had done a mind map - or whatever they are called these days - of all the things that interest me to work on.

One of the sheets of marks that I produced produced some interesting sections.

On the left hand side there appeared to be hunched up silhouettes.  I don't usually put people into my art but since refugees are on my mind map I thought I would look at isolating this image.  I cleaned the image up and have had it made into 3 different sized Thermofax screens.

We had our first Traverse weekend together and I tried out some flour paste resist.  This technique produces random lines on the fabric that have a map like quality.

I have used the Thermofax screens on the fabric.

I printed on other fabrics as well so I am interested to see where this takes me.  I've also started making marks in a sketchbook with no end project in view.

I'll keep you up to date with how things are going next month.

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice