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.

Collage

I've been spending time making collages.  This was inspired by a 10 day class called Collage Makers Summit organised by @drewsteinbrecher.  He had organised 9 other collage artists to join him with a different collage idea each day.  One of the ideas was to use your own photos, and one was to use black and white plus a pop of colour.  A third tutor gave us sketches of layouts we could use.

So I put all three ideas together.  I printed out black and white versions of my canal photos and chopped them up.  I made these six 10cm square collages.

Kellee Wynne introduced the idea of grid collages.  She is currently offering a free course Grid Journal Mini Course.

These are 7cm square collages using my gel prints.  You draw out the grid and work on all of the squares at once with a limited palette of papers.  It makes for a really cohesive collection.

Then I made these four 10cm square collages with the gel prints but adding in some of my photos.

I may go back and add some marks with pens or markers.  I don't think there's sufficient contrast so I may use black.

Thanks for joining me today
Bernice

More Creative Play

Following on from my last post about paper collage play, my last two days were spent with paper and fabric.

At Festival of Quilts I had printed Venice based themes onto white cotton poplin.  I had taken the fabric with me to C2C.  After the conversations about contrast I decided it would be good to overdye some of the fabric to produce a medium and a dark version.   While I was waiting for the fabric to absorb the dye I made a paper collage using only black and shades of grey paper.

I also made a small zigzag book and inspired by some work I saw on Instagram from Littleheath Barn Studio I cut out circles and reinserted them.

I washed out the fabrics and dried them.

The fabrics didn't turn out quite how I had envisioned but this is what I have to work with.  I started cutting up the fabrics into different sizes of rectangles and put them on the deisgn wall.

The finished design which was then bonded to a backing fabric.

I also cut some squares from the original fabric and bonded them to a backing fabric.

By the end of the week my design wall looked like this

I enjoyed my 5 days of play.  There's no access to the internet or a phone signal at C2C so it's all about play and conversation.

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice