Dreaming Spirals

We did a lot of mark making on the course, and at the start of the week, Claire gave us some small pieces of art paper (not sure exactly what it is but I’ve been using watercolour paper here) to fill with repeated marks of one sort and another.    I didn’t do much with these during the week but I bought a set of Pilot Parallel Pens from them at the end and since then have been going mad filling up pages and pages with different marks!  I love them!!!   These will be useful for design work, maybe blown up on a photocopier or small parts isolated.  Here are a few of them:

Some of them were done with my right hand (I’m right handed) some with my left – I found that mark making with my left hand produced surprisingly creative marks.  Something to do with right brained activities and left brained ones I suppose…

And more:

I wasn’t doing these with any particular design in mind, mostly… just playing.  Which is probably why I enjoy it so much!

The pens came with coloured inks, too, so I had fun with those:

Claire suggested making these into little books so I think that’s what I’ll do.

I have tried to write about my week at Committed to Cloth a couple of times and just ended up with a confused tangle of impressions, ideas and happenings.    So here we go again…

Before the week started, Claire sent us a list of questions to answer and send to them in advance, and this in itself was a valuable exercise.  They were things like, what do you want to commit to in the coming months, what do you need to do to realise this and how can we help?    I think the key word for me both before and during the week, was focus.  To choose one thing and focus on it, and get rid of all the extraneous things; be willing to chuck anything that isn’t working and stop fluttering like a butterfly on to any and everything textile related, the latest technique, the latest ‘must have’ item.   I think that ever since City & Guilds, when you get to try lots of different techniques and samples, I’ve been a ‘butterfly’, hopping on to one craze and then the next without getting deeper and trying to make my own path through one thing, ignoring all the rest.

So during that week I decided that what I really love is to colour the fabric, and that the stitching bit isn’t really important to me; often I would dye cloth or paint it and then feel I had to make it into something, and stitch it, and then it got put into a pile and never used.  So I decided that I’d concentrate on wholecloth work.    Hence my destashing over the last few weeks.  (There are still about 8 fabric bundles left, by the way, plug, plug!!)  I freecycled a load of stuff, chucked out or rehoused another load (what hordes of rubbish I was collecting in there in the hope that it would come in useful one day….), rearranged my studio and moved the tables around to make it easier to paint and print large pieces of cloth.  I did hope that I might be able to have a sink put in there but that looks as though it might be too impractical.  But already it feels more workable and I’ve been getting down to a piece of work that I started sampling on the course.

Claire and Leslie were great during the week – there were only 5 of us on the course and so we were able to have lots of one to one time with them.  Over the last year I have been trying to work on a series about the local river and I had already come to the conclusion that I was trying to do too much in each piece and so got bored and come unstuck.  They helped me see that I had to be a lot more specific – FOCUS again! – so I decided that I would take the theme of reeds and develop design material round that during the week.   Claire advised me to do a writing exercise to help put into words exactly what I wanted to say in a particular piece and so I was able to do mark making around those words and feelings.    Here are some of the designs which came out of that:

When I’d done a lot of design work, with Claire and Leslie’s help I picked out several which seemed to work best with the words and thoughts about what I was trying to achieve, and then we used acetates to see how these would work when layered.  After that I worked on a sample of cloth to see how these would turn out in colour.  Here is the result (though the photo isn’t very faithful to the colours and there are some random shadows which aren’t there in the original!).

I’m in the process of making this into a large wall piece and the great thing is that I have a load of design material and ideas to develop other pieces in a series on reeds.     And, more importantly, I learnt to see how to get from doing a load of design stuff to actually translating it into fabric without being too literal.  I made the above sample with fabric paints using a stamp cut from a rubber, a credit card, a scrubbing brush and a piece of laminated plastic!

Through the week, as well as working on our own designs (and every one of us worked on very different things), we got together and Claire and Leslie taught us about the elements of design, what you have to have in a design to make it work and how to critique our own pieces of work to help us ascertain why they were or weren’t working.   And lots of other discussion about methods of working, ways of framing or finishing pieces of work – and yummy lunches and endless cups of tea and coffee in the process!   The course took place in Claire’s wonderful house and an important part of the atmosphere was the beauty all around.   It was a wonderful week and a pivotal one, for me, I think.  Time will tell on that last point.

This blog will be quiet for the next week because on Sunday I’m going to a workshop with Claire Benn and Leslie Morgan at Committed To Cloth. I’m looking forward to a stimulating and refreshing week! So look forward to lots of photos on my return. I’m going to do the Finding Your Visual Language course which is why I’ve been doing all the exercises over the last few weeks.

On a ‘blog admin’ note, because of all the spam I’ve been getting recently and comments from people who are obviously advertising financial products and the like, I’ve turned off comments on posts over 60 days old. I don’t think this will cause any problems for genuine commentors, but feel free to leave a comment on one of the more recent posts!

I’ve been working through some of the exercises in Finding your Visual Language by Claire Benn, Leslie Morgan and Jane Dunnewold.  One of them is to take lots of photos, paying attention to the possibilities for design, and they suggest going out and taking a whole series just of shadows.  So I did this last week, the first sunny day in ages when there actually WERE shadows…

Oh dear, there’s my shadow as well!

As you can see, I’m drawn mostly to tree shadows (and, to be honest, they were the only interesting shadows around, mostly….).

At least this one has a streetlamp in it as well.

I had fun with this one when I got back.  I used Irfanview, that brilliant free photo programme which I usually just use for resizing photos.  I cropped it, set it to greyscale, made it into a negative image and then got this by clicking on ‘Image > Effects > Effects Browser > Metallic Gold.  And here’s the result:

Cool, eh?  I could see this as a gocco print….

I did the same thing with this photo:

Here it is – I actually turned it upside down as well….

And while I was trying out how I did it in Irfanview so I could write it down for this post , I tried it with a random transfer paint design and that turned out fun as well:

Do you remember this circles rubbing from the post about transfer paints I did a few weeks ago?  What amazing things you can do with photos these days!   Hmm… got a feeling that effect might get used a lot in the future….

When I had my great fabric decorating spree in January, some of my favourite pieces are those I screenprinted with Gocco screens.  I used natural dye extracts mixed with gum tragacanth as a print paste/binder.

Continuing the series on mud and footprints, I made a screen of these bird prints.  I actually made a tiny stamp from an eraser, printed the back of an envelope with it, and scanned it into the computer.  I then made it bigger and made it into a screen. 

A close up:

I then stuck torn masking tape over an empty screen and printed over the bird prints:

I’ll be interested to see how these turn out when I wash them.  I have to leave them for a few months to batch.  The longer the better, really.  And I don’t plan to use them for a while so they might as well sit there….

This fabric below was printed first with torn corrugated cardboard, then printed with a couple of screens made of brick patterns.

And this one is a screen of a tree, made from a photograph I took on one of my walks:

I printed the same screen with colours getting gradually darker.  I also printed some fabric using the same screen and another screen of a letter.

If you read this in Google Reader or another feed reader, you probably won’t notice that I’ve changed the blog ‘theme’.   I changed to this one because it is very easy to alter the way the page looks and I want to try and incorporate my website into the blog so it all looks the same and I think I can do it with this one without messing too much with the code.  But if you find anything’s not working for you in your particular browser, do let me know and I’ll try and change it.  The header, by the way, is rotating, which means you might see a different picture up there each time you come to the blog!  Fun, eh?!!

Before I finish this post, Judy Nolan from the Etsy Boomers Street Team, of which I’m a member, has written a great blog post about the way different people get ideas for their work and capture them.  She got lots of us to tell her what we all do and how we all go about things!  I think it’s definitely worth reading.  You can find it on the Boomers’ blog here.

…. On Bonnie Samuel’s blog today. She is writing a series about artists’ inspiration. This is what she says:

“Fiber Artisans” denotes many creative applications – weavering, quilt artists, knitters, surface designers, tapestry, and more. Many combine various fiber arts in their work. But what inspires their designs, theme, colors and the materials they use in creating?

As fiber artisans, like writers, we sometimes get “blocked,” but then something moves us and the process begins anew for us. Is it an experience, nature, emotion or the materials themselves that brings forth our creativity?

Do go over there and have a look and leave a comment about where you get your inspiration from.