This winter has been a long, wet, dreary one. Not particularly cold (sorry, American friends!) but at times we wondered if Britain was going to sink under the weight of water pouring from the sky…
But on my walk on Friday I saw definite signs of the new spring life popping up everywhere…
Time to revive this blog, I think! I got fed up with the sound of my own voice so had a break….
My cat, Ziby, sitting on some newly ironed African fabric
My new website design is in process of getting thrashed out and I have a new blog theme with lots of options for customization to incorporate it, so you’ll probably see quite a few changes over the coming weeks. My life is a bit like that at the moment too – by the autumn we should be empty nesters as my youngest son has been busy visiting universities and if all goes well he should be starting physics with astrophysics at some academic institution or other. Last week we went to a Birmingham uni applicants day, – as it was half term we stayed overnight and while he went shopping the second morning, I visited the archives based in the new library building. It is pretty spectacular and has some great views over the city. Here are a couple of pics:
To give myself a bit of an incentive to keep writing, I have joined a bloghop where I can rant about my love of paper and the stuff I do with it, so look out for lots of papery pics next Monday!
The PaperLove Blog Hop is a celebration of all things paper! Follow the links to discover more bloggers who love paper and use it to inspire and delight. And if you want to explore a whole world of paper, and stretch your paper passion further with a host of creative projects, why not join the innovative new online course PaperLove (starts March 31). Led by book artist Rachel Hazell, PaperLove is a five week creative adventure for paper lovers. Find out more here
It’s been an age since I wrote anything in this blog – life has been rather stressful family-wise and I’ve been doing my best to keep up (and catch up!) with Module 2 of the pattern course I’m doing.
DS1 is currently on a backpacking holiday round the world so September was spent helping him prepare for that – he spent the first month ‘doing’ Eastern Europe and flew to Kathmandu earlier this week. He is planning to travel around Nepal, India, Thailand and a few other places before ending up in Perth, Australia in the New Year when he hopes to get work to fund more travel! He has a blog which is quite entertaining.
Chiaroscuro, the exhibition I mentioned in my last post opened today and the opening night starts at 7pm tonight – if you live locally (South Wales) you’d be very welcome to come along to chat to the artists there! All the details are on our Facebook Page, including several photos of us putting the show up!
It’s on for 4 days until this Saturday, 2 November, 2pm – 8pm each day, Pontrhydrun Baptist Church, Cwmbran, NP44 2ND
I’m looking forward to next Monday – Module 2 of the pattern course, The Art and Business of Surface Pattern Design, is starting! I really enjoyed Module 1 and it got me designing again, drawing little sketches and playing with Photoshop (and cursing Illustrator!) and because I knew that the next module was coming it kept up the momentum over the summer. I could easily have been diverted and distracted by the presence of all three of my sons (or just been idle and got up at noon every day!). This next module is about branding – Creating your professional identity. So no doubt you will see lots of tweaks and changes here! You’ll notice, unless you are reading this from a blog reader, that I have changed the WordPress theme of the blog – please let me know if anything isn’t working for you. I’ve also installed a plugin to give you the choice of reading the blog in a more pared-down, mobile-friendly format on smartphones or tablets – it is supposed to be quicker to load (and, more importantly, uses less data if you’re on a mobile contract) but there is a button at the bottom to switch to the traditional browser layout if you don’t like it.
If you would like to see some of the patterns I’ve been creating, I have a profile page on the new Moyo Directory: here is a quick screenshot of part of it:
I would love it if you could click the ‘like’ button on the page when you visit!
Also at the end of October some of my textile work is going to be in an exhibition in Cwmbran (near where I live) as part of the Diverse Manners Arts Group annual exhibition – if you would like to be notified when it is happening, click on the link and ‘like’ our Facebook page which I helped set up earlier this year. The theme is Chiaroscuro which is an Italian art term for light and dark and I am exhibiting Birth of a City and also four smaller screenprints which I printed a while ago using a paper stencil (once I’ve stitched and mounted them!).
The exhibition is being held in a church and there is a nice tree-lined graveyard next to it with lots of space for bunting so in a mad moment last week I decided to make some and stencil the words ‘ART EXHIBITION’ on them. Here they are drying on the clothes horse:
Of course I couldn’t let all that spare paint go to waste, so I printed it randomly on this piece of dyed fabric!
And here is the rest of the bunting all piled up ready to be stitched together – so far I think I’ve got enough to wrap round the house several times and I’ve run out of bias binding so need to cut some more!
And finally, I couldn’t resist putting in this photo of a gorgeous lily growing in our garden – aren’t the colours yummy?
I’m just experimenting with using the WordPress app on my android tablet and if it is successful it will hopefully encourage me to get blogging again!
The ease of adding photos will be the crunch point to this experiment so let’s wait and see.
The last few weeks since the first module of my pattern course finished, I’ve been busy getting to grips with Photoshop and building more patterns. You can see one in the Graduate Showcase of the course on Rachael Taylor’s blog - I was so excited when it turned out to be the first one! It was based on a thermofax screen design I made from some Markmaking. Here it is:
This week we were excited to go up to Warwick University where DS1 was graduating from his degree in PPE – here he is in all his finery (sweltering in the heatwave!) with his proud parents :
Just after I wrote yesterday’s blog post, I read an update from Feedly about how they had altered their service to provide a seamless transition from Google Reader. They now have a button for bloggers to put on their blogs to help people to subscribe via Feedly so if you would like to do this I have added one to the sidebar underneath my email subscription form.
It is over on the right >>>>>> or this one here will work too:
Hello. My name's Liz Plummer and I'm an artist based in Newport, South Wales, UK, working mostly with fabric. I love dyeing, printing, painting and stitching.
This blog is about the influences on my work, inspiration, my daily life,
and the processes of creating. Enjoy!
