Dreaming Spirals

I have taken the free online courses offered by HP Learning Center in the past and so occasionally get email notifications when new courses are coming up. One which attracted my attention dropped into my inbox yesterday and I have signed up for it. It is called “Jump-start your creativity; exploring Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks”. It starts on October 4th and you can access new lessons twice a week or download the whole lot at once in a PDF file, or they are available on podcast. They also have a discussion forum. I’m looking forward to doing it!

I have taken several of their courses and the one which I have probably benefitted from most is Building your first webpage. It started me off with basic html, from where I was confident enough to search online for html and css resources and to build my website. Which reminds me, I really must take more photos and update it!

My rust dyed fabric came out really well and when I’ve taken photos I’ll post them here but at present my studio is a bit … dark…. the bottom middle window is boarded up at the moment because DH found part of it was rotten so now it is away at a timber merchant’s being rebuilt… oh well, maybe I’ll be back in there by Christmas!

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No posts for almost a week and then like buses, two come along at once…

I have moved all my bookmarks to del.icio.us, which is a sort of communal bookmarking site and am busy sorting them all out, and clicking on all the links to test which are still live and which have perished in cyberspace. If you haven’t come across del.icio.us it is a way of sharing bookmarks - you sign up and can install buttons on your browser so that when you click on them you can add a link to your bookmarks and tell it which category to put it into. Then you can make them public if you want to… I am in the process of doing this and you can find them here. I will add a link to my sidebar in due course.

Anyway, to the purpose of this blog post! While I was sifting through my bookmarks, I found this useful article again: 9 reasons why every artist should have their own art blog.

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On Monday I decided to do some dyeing with an indigo dyeing kit which I had bought several months ago.   Actually, I started thinking about it the previous Saturday and spent the best part of the morning tying little marbly things (they are actually playing counters for a game) into a piece of white cotton fabric.  The result was oddly satisfying, and I could see why people manipulated fabric or made the 3D sort of shibori - such as Michelle Griffiths who has her studio just west of where I live, in Llantrisant.

Here is the piece of fabric when I had finished tying it.  It was about a yard in length before I started.

I was so pleased with that one that I decided to use up the rest of the counters in a sort of flowing line on a long white silk scarf:

So on Monday I was all prepared.  I made up the indigo vat and decided to dip each piece several times for strength of colour.

Here is the first piece hanging on the line after dipping:

And some other pieces which I did:

The yarn is some white recycled sari silk.  That took the dye the best out of all of them.

Here is some fabric in the dyepot on the grass.  The good thing about this was that once I had prepared the vat I could do all the actual dipping in the garden and keep all the mess out there!

The second (or it may even be third by this time) dipping of my tied fabric.  The yarn is the pencil roving which I used for my felted bag.  It was put in when the indigo was nearly exhausted so is much paler.

I also put in a bit of my rusted fabric.  It is a lovely pale blue colour which complements the rust very well.  It was interesting to see that the rust seemed to act as a resist - or maybe it was just that the dye was so pale it didn’t affect it in any way.

I started untying the counters before I rinsed the fabric… here it is half untied - I quite like the effect!

Here it is fully untied but as yet unrinsed and wet:

I did untie some of the counters before dipping the second and third times - as you can see, there is a variation in shade of the circles.

And here it is, washed, dried and ironed and pinned up on my design wall.  As you can see, it is considerably paler.

And here is the silk scarf:

And a detail of the bottom part:

I’m not sure what I shall use these for yet - I will probably do more printing or dyeing over the top but I think I would like to leave the large piece whole.  Maybe even some rust dyeing?  I have some more pieces of fabric in the process of being rusted - now the roof has finally been fixed (we hope!) I am using up the rust from the baking tin which was collecting water underneath the window in the loft.  When that’s done I will slather it in oil to stop it rusting any more (I hope!).

Here they are in the process of rusting:

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When we went to France in the summer, because we were in the Loire Valley we visited a lot of chateaux.  Unsurprisingly, after a few days of this the kids (and I) began to get chateauitis.  So we started to find ways that DH could indulge his passion for looking round them while entertaining the kids in other ways.

At Chaumont there was a brilliant garden festival in the grounds.  The kids were a bit dubious as to the entertainment value, but they soon decided it was worth it.   The grounds were divided into several different sections, like small rooms and each had been made into an original garden by a sponsor.   The Garden Festival website has a link to each garden with an English version.

The entrance to the festival interested me especially.  It had sculptures made from rusty poles.

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you will not be surprised to hear that I wanted to enhance it with some fabric!

They especially liked the one sponsored by the French railway company, SNCF, called Just Move It.  It had tubs and sections on bits of railway line which you could push and pull about to rearrange it to suit the way you wanted it.

Another noteworthy garden had lots of planters up in the air suspended by wires:

And yet another made the garden look bigger using mirrors:

They also had an interesting garden where you could move various ’screens’ to frame the flowers planted behind.  This made me think of the use of aperture cards to find interesting portions of a design which we learnt about at City & Guilds.

I also liked this garden where they had painted tree trunks blue to make a very sculptural, and rather eery set of figures…

They marched off across this lake as well:

They had a graffiti garden, too!

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I found a great tutorial on screenprinting with paper stencils - I did this at college a few years ago when I screenprinted my Dennis the Menace window blind for City & Guilds, for my son Barnabas. Here it is:

I used newspaper to make the stencils for this because the image was so huge but I notice she uses freezer paper, which would be more durable. She has also posted a tutorial on using a Thermofax machine for those of you lucky US readers who can get them fairly readily! I have found a couple of people who sell either custom-made or ready-prepared Thermofax screens for people who don’t have access to one…

Claire Higgott - Thermofax Screens
Marcy Tilton

Let me know if you know of anyone else who offers this service. Thanks!

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I haven’t been doing much blogging recently but I have been using my hands.  I bought this gorgeous Uruguayan yarn from Rio de la Plata via the online coop of which I am a member. 

It is a bit darker than this but that may be my laptop monitor.  I decided to use some of it to make a sweater and have been getting on with it like a house on fire.  It is from the book Fitted Knits by Stephanie Japel and has a long ribbed section at the bottom to make it fit more snugly.  This is where I was a couple of days ago:

I have now finished the ribbing and tried it on and decided to keep it sleeveless, so I have only got to finish the neckline and armholes.  I think it will be a bit hot as a jumper with sleeves and the yarn is quite bulky so I’m afraid sleeves will make me look too much like a Michelin Man! 

I have been experiencing a veritable boom in my knitting activity this past year.  This I attribute to two things - the gorgeous, yummy yarns available via this coop, and the wonderful podcasts which I have uploaded on to my Ipod Shuffle.  I have been working my way though the archives of Brenda Dayne’s Cast On - the music is just the thing to get a rhythm going!  I have got as far as No. 10 so far.   And Craft Cast with Alison Lee is another.  I found a couple of interviews with past contestants on Project Runway the other day, which are next on my current Ipod itinerary to listen to.  Alison has a great variety of interviewees - I have listened to an author, someone who prints her own books (and artwork) on a letterpress printer (that one was so inspiring I listened to it twice), a jewellery maker, etc etc.

I have also been working through the new book by Leslie Morgan, Claire Benn and Jane Dunnewold, called Finding your own Visual Language.  They have lots of exercises to do - I’ve only taken a few photos of those so far, so when I’ve done a few more I’ll write a post about what I’ve done.  And the house has been surrounded by scaffolding for the last couple of weeks and we have had builders patching up various holes and crevices where the roof has been leaking over the last few years, so hopefully my studio won’t have to be half covered with plastic next winter!  So far we have had a skylight replaced with a Velux window, the west wall painted with waterproofing, various bricks pointed, the bath stones on our coping (I think that is the word) taken up and repaired or slates put underneath and a myriad other things which I’ve forgotten about.    Nearly finished now, though!  Hurray!

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