Designing Workshop

We had a very good day on Saturday. People brought some very strong ideas of their own and then we were able to work together to come up with a design for a hanging/quilt.

Suzanne has developed a design for a lace angel which she is now working. She saw the angel when we went for our walk to Kensal Green Cemetery and took a photo.

We are very lucky to have such a beautiful design  there is a lot of movement in her, she looks really lively. We used the lace angel as a focal point for the design.

I was very taken with another photo that Catherina took on the walk of a view through the colonnade. We used this photo as a guide and then Designed by audition. We tried a number of different natural dyed fabrics together by pinning them up to a large cork board. The photo above shows our first efforts. As you can see we all gave our opinions. Between us we had lots ideas and the discussions were passionate but not heated, I really enjoyed it.

 Marian and Catherina are trying out some more ideas.

This is the final piece. Its about 5 feet high by four feet wide, you can't see the details but it has some of the flowers that Marian found on it and also some photoshop images of stone passion flowers that Judith has composed. These add texture and interest when you get close. Its only pinned to a board at the moment and I will be doing a little more dyeing as some pieces of cloth were not big enough. The pale grey section on the left hand side will run from top to bottom.

The next workshop will be putting the pieces together, and stitching them.

In the Churchyard

Yesterday I took some of our dyed fabrics to my nearest Victorian Churchyard. I am particularly fond of the angel above, she has on Jackie's fabric dyed in a jam jar and some of my four paste resist.
The colours and textures in the grave stone below are also very interesting.

Ice and snow disrupts everything

I thought it best to postpone our designing workshop yesterday, the minor roads were very snowy and icy and some people were coming a distance. During the morning I put some hot water out for the birds, by lunch time it was frozen.

Its is the ice and snow that causes stone to crack and break up, disrupting it.

Here is a recent flour paste resist piece, it does look like cracking stone, its on my patio, I hope the patio isn't beginning to crumble, some of the roads are around here are.

For the last dyeing workshop I bought some flour for the flour paste resist from the Co-op, the results were not very good, the paste was slimy and difficult to spread. This fabric had a flour paste resist made with Sainsbury's, flour, they do two own brands, this is the more expensive. Jo Budd had the same trouble with flour from the Happy Shoper!! on the work shop I went on with her in the summer.

Happy New Year

I couldn't resist, in more ways than one, doing some more dyeing over the break. So I have been working on these three pieces for the next Prism Exhibition.

The work above is the first piece, its quite small, its flour paste resist. I have capped a few areas, these show as white, then I dyed it with indigo followed by weld, this produced a green in some areas and yellow in others. I capped some of the these patches and then dyed it all again with tannic acid and ferrous sulphate. I have added some silk carrier rods to try to evoke the peeling nature of the stone. 

This one above on the right is flour paste resist again with some areas capped, its based on a green stone angel that had lichen growing on it.

The one on the left is the largest about 3 feet by 18 inches. Its based on the peeling marble angel at Kensal Green Cemetery.
Its a flour paste resist like the others.
I really seem to be addicted to flour paste resist, it gives such a textural finish.

Now I have got to think of a way of linking these pieces with the theme of the Exhibition, Evolve, Evoke, Expand. I'm thinking about saying in my artists statemment  how disintegration is part of the process of evolution. Things need to break down in order   to reform into something new and then to expand. Any ideas?