A new project

I am doing a Seasons based course at Littleheath Barn which I realise I haven't shared here but I will do soon.  One of the things that Liske has been suggesting is making a different style of book for each season.  Her Winter book has been a Wabi-Sabi book.   Whilst this style of book doesn't fit with what I am doing for the four seasons, I loved the idea of making such a book.

I have bought lots of rust dyed fabrics and decided I would use those and I stamped and printed circles onto the fabric.  I cut the fabric to the size I wanted them to make a book.

At this point I was just playing with fabric and not really having a plan.  And then the light bulb moment!

I wrote about how I played with some ideas at Committed to Cloth in this blog post. At C2C I was working on the theme of Senses and in particular Taste and oranges and lemons.  The week of play produced this amongst other pieces.

I could see the influence of the work above on the printing I had done on the rust dyed fabric.  Great - I have a theme for the book.

I sorted out the fabrics into pages and was sure I had made 12 pages.  However it turned out to be 11 and then decided rather than have one book, I would make 2 books.

I cut circles and wedges from other fabrics I had and bondawebbed them to the pages.  I had also realised that the book needed some contrast and bought some hand-dyed fabric from Leah Higgins.  I started some free-machining on these pages but soon realised that it's not really my thing - insufficient practise really!   So I am now going to hand stitch on the pages for now.

This is the larger book.  The photos show both sides of the page.  When you sew on one side, the stitching shows up on the other side which is interesting.  But as you can see I'm not good at free machining circles!

I'll show you how I get on with these books in later posts.

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice

Creative Play

I have just got back from a 5 day retreat at Committed to Cloth called Unlocking the Mystery of Creative Play.  I went last year to the same course - only to find that it was totally different this year.  Partly due to the make up of the group and partly to do with my thought and design processes having moved on in 12 months.

My starting point was the theme of 'taste' for a new series of work on Senses.  I had in my head the idea of oranges and lemons and the nursery rhyme to go with it.   However as you will see from the photos it developed into a more abstract form.

I started with mark making - first trying a rubbing with a commercial stencil.

I moved on to making marks with various circular objects.

And then tried words with various tools.  I love drippage.

I cut some of the pieces up very small to make mini collages.

I played with the bits left over after I'd cut circles out.  I loved the circular mark at the bottom of this page which reminded me of the spray from peeling an orange.  I had this made into thermofax screens with 3 different sizes of the image.

I joined four A3 sheets of black card together and glued all the bits down - the circles and the bits from round the circles.

I took numerous photos of sections of the above using grey 'L' shapes.  I've just put one photo here to represent the 12 I took.

I used my new thermofax screens over the top of the large sheet.

Then I took the sheets apart and worked on the individual A3 sheets.

I looked at segments.

I played again with the 'L' shapes

The next 4 photos show the sequence of auditioning and the final cut.

Here are some of the other pieces I made.   Each of them went through the auditioning process and the cutting process before being pinned to the wall.

And then more mark making

And my final gallery displaying my 5 days of work.

In the last hour I was there I took the original sheets of mark making and tore them up and glued each of 2 pieces of paper together to make a book.  I'll do another blog post on that soon.


I don't know whether any of these ideas will make into a textile piece.  I don't think it matters really - I just had a happy creative time and that's what matters.

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice