A new journey

This year, for the first time, I am taking part in #septtextilelove arranged by @seam_collective on Instagram.  You can find me on IG at @msbernice7 

The topic for day 10 was Risk.  I put that I was considering launching myself into giving talks and workshops and had so much positive encouragement from my post, that I was convinced that it is the right thing to do.   I was already booked to do a workshop locally and here are some of the results.

We worked through my Venice Tiles workshop, firstly printing fabric.

 

 

A couple of the ladies had to leave early so I only have these almost finished pieces.  The fabric is ready to be mounted onto a 20cm square canvas once the ladies have finished adding stitch.

The day was about process and technique rather than completing a finished piece.  To be honest, when they think about it they may not like the piece they've made but they have all the skills to make it again and make it their own.  Which is what I think it's all about.

You may not have noticed but at the top of this blog there are now links to the talks, workshops and Exploring Creativity courses I am offering.

I am asking for my fees to be paid as a donation to Jubilee Solihull Community Trust where a team of wonderful people run a children's clothing bank: Jubilee Children's Storehouse.  You can find information about the weekly clothing needs and how many children are clothed each week on their Facebook page.

Thanks for joining me today
Bernice

Online and In-person 2022

If you are a regular reader you will know that I frequently write about how many courses and workshops I've signed up to.  Most of which I don't complete.

So, what am I up to in 2022?

I currently have two online courses that started in 2021.

Notice What you Notice with Christine Chester started in September 2021 and ends in August this year.

There's also Saturday Sketchbooks with Hilary Beattie.  This started in October last year. There are livestreams once a month and pre-recorded videos once a month. Apart from starting to make a book pf patterns and making a few collages I haven't really done much with this yet.

The in person workshop that started last September is Textile Explorations, where I'm making small fabric collages.

You may be wondering by now what I have lined up for 2022.

Not as much as usual really!

At the beginning of 2020 I had a discussion with Leslie Morgan about my continually booking workshops.  I came to the conclusion that I should book less workshops.  And then I had to go cold turkey!  Covid-19 brought about the cancellation of most workshops through 2020 and I made better choices from those that were available in 2021.

So back to the question of what is lined up for this year.

Three days with Christine Chester doing Paper Lamination and four days with Liske Johnson doing Art Cloth: Maps and More.  Both of these are in July at Littleheath Barn Studio.

Plus an online course with Hilary Beattie called Inspired by.  The first class being Inspired by Tulips.  

I was clearing out a cupboard over the weekend and found this tulip stencil I made in 1996!!!!!

Strange the things you hold on to.   Mind you I also found some work from my college finals in 1970.

What creative things are you planning this year?

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice

Some questions to answer please

I'm interrupting my Norfolk series to ask you to answer some more questions.

Thanks to all those who answered my questions about my blog last month.  I really appreciated you taking the time to reply.  The concensus was to carry on as usual.  For me to blog about all the things I listed in the Taking Stock post.

As I said, I have more questions, but this time I've put them on a Google Form.  That was a whole new learning curve!

I'm contemplating putting together a series of short video courses on a variety of mixed media topics.  There's a possibillty of textile ones as well, at a later date.

These courses would be for beginners, although they would serve as reminders for those who have some mixed media experience.  They will come under the umbrella title of Simply Create.

Although I can think of several topics to cover, it's more important to know what you would like to learn.  What media would you like to know about? What techniques would you like to know how to do?  Click on the link to the Google Form to let me know.

See you on Saturday for my last post from Norfolk.

Thank you so much
Bernice

Oops! I've done it again

You may remember that at the beginning of 2018 I told myself to stop signing up for online classes and only do in person workshops.  And mostly I kept to that!  Although I did do rather a lot of in person workshops despite having to cancel a few because of my hand.

By the end of 2018 I felt that for 2019 I should cut back on in person workshops and concentrate on my own work.

Let's see how that worked out!!!!

January
Cas Holmes: From the Land
A mixed media workshop introducing the student to approaches to using paper, textile, print, dye and stitch to create pieces based on the ‘land’ and landscape or a subject of your choice. A focus will be placed on stitching as an extension of mark making and drawing, and various means of layering. We will use photocopies, and build up images, textures and mix materials. The workshop is experimental and intended to provide students with different ideas for development based on the artist’s own practice.

My work from a previous Cas Holmes workshop

January/February
Unlocking the Mystery of Creative Play
‘How do I make better work?’ We will look at simple language and principles of design found in the physical world. Working from a personal starting point, discover tools to create contrast and harmony using colour, value, size, shape, and texture. Bring your curiosity to discover what you like and how to achieve the elements you need to work with your theme and create effective compositions.

Triptych Wallhanging
Three panels that will be mounted on a canvas that can be attached together or presented adjoining each other. Each panel will be a different felting technique and you will be encouraged to use an array of mixed media, metal, stone, fabric, gold leaf for added interest and surface texture, stenciling paints. Cutting and revealing hidden surfaces to building up 3 dimensional tassels, tubes or multiple level craters

May
Eco Dyeing and Botanical Prints
n this course we will cover;
•fabric preparation with mordants in order to develop the richest colour, an essential foundation
•immerse dyeing to achieve beautiful colours and shades
•modifying and enhancing shades and tones
•botanical print direct leaf contact transferring colour from leaf to cloth
•solar dyeing, an effective way to simply allow colour to transfer to fabric
•happa-zome, a quick and satisfying experience of creating pattern and print

In Detail: Inspiration for stitching from sources hardly noticed
Many wonderful inspirational design opportunities exist around us if we take time to discover them. The aim of this workshop will be to begin with the study of examples of small details from natural objects, leading to the development of different personal ideas for work in stitched textiles. Structured experimental design exercises, investigating the scope offered by changes of scale, tone, texture and colour, together with demonstrations, will encourage students to choose ways to develop their ideas both 2 and 3 dimensionally.  Throughout the course, emphasis will be placed on making notes and sampling in fabric and thread in order for work to continue later if wished

June
Tactile Notebooks and the Written Word
This workshop will help you to find your own living language through the creation of a vibrant notebook practice. Motivated by ‘haptic’ considerations we will use the sense of touch to stimulate and awaken perception to guide the making process, and to revive sensitivity to the way we communicate both visually and verbally.

July
Leah Higgins: Breakdown Your Palette
This five-day, focussed, workshop combines an in-depth exploration of breakdown printing and the study of colour to create a palette of beautiful, co-ordinated cloth. Working from your own inspirational images or objects you will extract colours to use as you work with a range of breakdown printing techniques. We will also investigate the use of discharge paste in breakdown and how your printed fabrics can be enhanced by other surface design techniques.

Breakdown printing from a Committed to Cloth workshop

So that's 7 major 2,3 or 5 day workshops booked into the first 6 months of 2019.   Not to mention the on going Art Textile Group at Littleheath Barn,  the exhibitions with Traverse and the Master Practitioner course.

It's just as well I'm retired, have no dependants and never do housework!

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice

Traverse at Uttoxeter

Traverse exhibited recently at the British Quilt & Stitch Village at Uttoexeter Racecourse.  You can read about the exhibition on the Traverse website.

Our theme has been Destinations and the work I exhibited at Uttoxeter was the same work shown at the NEC that I wrote about here.

Venice Tiles

The show was much smaller than the NEC but we spoke to far more people and received much more feedback from visitors.

On the last day I was approached by 4 different people who want to book me to teach the technique I used for the Venice tiles.  They all promised to email me so I'll have to wait and see if it happens.  I'm feeling excited, flabbergasted and terrified all at the same time.

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice

Excited for creativity in 2018

There's still 6 weeks or so of 2017 left, but my calendar is filling up already with creative things to do.

As regular readers of my blog are aware I regularly sign up for far too many online courses.  Earlier this year I determined that I would try to do less online and more in-person workshops.  I haven't been totally successful with the online courses but I have booked some great workshops for next year.

Leslie Morgan: Unlocking the Mystery of Creative Play
‘How do I make better work?’ We will look at simple language and principles of design found in the physical world. Working from a personal starting point, discover tools to create contrast and harmony using colour, value, size, shape, and texture. Bring your curiosity to discover what you like and how to achieve the elements you need to work with your theme and create effective compositions.

Amanda Hislop: Developing Sketchbooks as a Rich Resource
A two day creative workshop working with a free approach to generating ideas through a working sketchbook, exploring abstract ideas and personal themes relating to land and seascapes. Explore mark making to develop exciting sketchbook pages, work with loose marks on paper with drawn lines, resist wash and layered tissue to develop a surface to fragment creating a series of abstract images to develop into personal sketchbook pages, with the option to include hand stitch to further enhance the surface.

Debbie Lyddon: Exploring Place
Discover new ways of inspiring your creative work by using all of your senses to observe the world around you. Part of this workshop will be spent outside – looking, listening and touching – to collect information from the environment. This material will be documented with drawing, sound recording and writing. Back in the studio your collections will form a starting point for experiments with paper, cloth, stitch, mark-making, collage and printing to create a unique and personal record of your exploration of place.

Cas Holmes: Spaces Places Traces
The colours and textures in the urban and natural landscape, from light raking over a ploughed field, bright summer flowers, to buildings reflected in water can provide stimulus for the design process involved in the creation of the narrative, formal or abstract qualities in textile and mixed media work. We will use a range techniques from the application of dyes and paints ,to create marks, to informal collage, appliqué involving the bonding of fabrics best described as ‘painting with cloth. This will include the application of sun printing techniques, weather allowing, as part of this explorative process.   These newly created surfaces, with the addition of stitch, will evolve into individual samples and pieces reflecting the locality and places which inspire you.

Julia Triston: Analysing Colour
This is a design workshop all about analysing colour. There will be several practical sketchbook based exercises working with papers, paints and threads. We will investigate compositions, collages, colour proportions and colour distinctions. Students will work at their own pace to develop a range of ‘samples’ which may be used as inspiration for stitched textiles. An ideal workshop for those wishing to develop their design skill basics further and really get to grips with using colour in their work.

Alice Fox: Land Marks
Exploring the wonderful surroundings we will use a variety of ways to record the landscape around us. Using gathered materials in a range of techniques we will make marks that record our experience, bringing these together into tactile book forms.

The first one is in January and the workshops are spaced out across the year as far as September.  I think I need to stop booking classes now!

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice

Seth Apter Workshops

I'm interrupting my armchair travel guide to New Zealand & Australia to share the workshops that I did last weekend at Art from the Heart with Seth Apter.

On Saturday Seth presented 'The Book of Moments'.  He showed us an easy way to bind two book covers together.

And then we made the pages.  I'm really pleased with how much I got done in one day.   I love Seth's teaching style - structured technique in the morning and supervised play in the afternoon.

I have the backs of all these pages to collage and one more doublesided page to make.  I am thinking of using 3 tags instead for the missing page.

Sunday brought us 'Cutting Room Floor' where we altered photos and then made a background and collaged one of the photos.

I took these two photos with me amongst others and below you can see how I worked into them and colourized them.

This one was a black and white version of the photo above.

I didn't change very much of this one.

For the afternoon's collage, I painted the background

I looked through the collage elements I had taken with me and came up with this layout.

It didn't look quite the same when I had stuck it down but that doesn't matter.  I added some finishing touches.

Here are the links to previous blog posts for Seth's workshops.
50 Ways to Leave Your Layer & Mixed Media Mashup
Collage Camp & Dimensional Stenciling
52 Card Pick-up and the finished project.

If you have enjoyed looking at the work I've done in Seth's workshops why not check out his DVDs and Downloads.   You can buy Seth's DVDs direct from his online shop or if you're in the UK you can download them from the Northlight Shop.

Have fun!

Thanks for stopping by.
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

Being Busy updates and an announcement

In my last post I promised I would update you on how I was getting on with some other classes and workshops I'm doing or getting behind with.  It is a very long post but please stick with it.  Or just scroll down to the bottom for the announcement.

Firstly One Little Word and Documented Life.  I have been combining these and really not enjoying it.  I haven't totally given myself to the Unplanner which has weekly art journaling type suggestions.  I really only kept a 'diary' of what I had been doing.  So as a result of Pathfinder - more on that later - I decided to discontinue the Unplanner in its previous form. I also decided not to continue with the I am tags.

I decided to keep track of what I do each day on the calendar on the back of each monthly divider and concentrate on One Little Word.  In April I went to Florida to attend a Ladies Getaway and I stuck the programme cover onto the April divider.

I filled in a key activity from each day on the calendar.  April's OLW task was to define what life was like with more of your word in it.  I attended Pathfinder right at the end of April so I have only just completed this task.

I was trying to exercise every day but that didn't always happen.  The photo on the May divider is of Lacock Abbey.  We went to stay at a B&B in Lacock for our wedding anniversary.  We didn't stay in the Abbey!  However the B&B was absolutely five star.

I signed up for an online class Art & Spirituality because it has been written by someone I know.  It is excellent but requires a daily commitment each week.  As we went away at the beginning of week 2 I got behind.  Still I can keep all the PDFs and do the course when I have time.

So on to Pathfinder.  This was an excellent day with Anneliese Bates.  I've done art workshops with Anneliese before but nothing like Pathfinder.  She provided us with an A5 sketchbook and we coloured the backgrounds however we wanted and then she asked questions.

The class was described thus:  This workshop is aimed at anyone who doesn't know what direction they really want to take, whether you have a new business idea, thinking of a big life change, a change in career or even moving home, Anneliese will guide you through the thought process step by step, interspersing it with art for which you need no experience.

Included in the workshop is a journal that will be become your working thought process, beautifully decorated and personalised with your own artwork and full of your thoughts, dreams and how to make those become a reality.

We will explore the changes you want to bring about, the things that are stopping you, and ways to overcome the obstacles.

I had gone with the idea of looking at whether I should stick with art journaling or concentrate on textile art or do both.  A somewhat simplistic idea in the light of what happened.

The first question was what were you unhappy with in life at the moment and what did you want to change.  I did add a couple of things to my answer.

Anneliese continued to ask questions and we continued to write down our personal answers.  The best part was as there weren't many of us that we were able to ask questions and make comments.  Discussions ensued which helped clarify our thoughts.

Here is a really key page.

When I got home I wrote down all that I had signed up for!  No wonder my head hurt holding all that information in my head.  I went through the list and decided which ones I should stay committed to, which ones I should give up on entirely and those that I had online lifetime access to and could do when I have time.  I have also withdrawn from the Cas Holmes weekend workshop.

This was a really useful page that I did at home.  Some of what is written here came out of the discussions we had on the day.

However you know me, I ignored my own advice about not signing up for anything else and enrolled on a 9 weekend course called Experimental Textiles led by Kim Thittichai which starts in June!

We had also talked about decluttering.  We had loads of boxes of my Dad's stuff in the conservatory - they had been there 2-3 years.  I had made a half-hearted effort to get them sold at an auction but had kept putting it off.  We also had over 300 owls that Andy collected as a child and other collections of stuff.  And stuff it is.  However I emailed a different auction house who accepted everything I listed and we took it all to them - 18 boxes of stuff.  They are sorting it into lots and it will all be put in an auction either in June or July.  Result!

Just as I was sorting out the boxes of stuff to take to the auction house this article popped up on my Facebook newsfeed.     How to declutter and let go of family treasures

I thought this was excellent from that article.

• Memories take up space in our hearts; stuff takes up space in our homes.
• Memories last forever; stuff breaks, gets lost, and fades away.
• Memories bring joy; stuff brings stress.
• Memories are honoring; stuff is diminishing.
• Memories bring peace; stuff brings chaos.
• Memories actually matter; stuff really doesn’t matter at all.

I feel much more in control of what I am doing although there is still much to work through.

Well done, if you're still here having waded through this post.  And now for the big announcement.

Drumroll please!

This is my 998th blog post.  Wednesday will see my 999th.  And on Friday we will celebrate
1000 with a giveaway.


See you on Friday.  Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice