Interviewed!

Published today - an interview about me and my work on TextileArtist.org.

It's much more revealing than this blog's ever been - I'm glad you can't see my bright red face, it's not a pretty sight!

But thank you Joe and Sam, it's an honour to be part of this great textile art resource. The website is full of fascinating features and interviews - if you haven't visited before, grab a cuppa and make yourself comfy, you'll be there a while!   

Sample Project 2013 - October

Another five sample month!  My John Muir Trust Wild Nature Diary is getting nice and fat now, with textile samples sparked by the weekly photos.

Week 40: Bracken among heather

(Photo of Cumbrian fells)

Purple scrim embellished onto green felt. Bracken fronds made by free machining on dissolvable fabric.

 

Sample 41: Confluence of two streams

(Photo of two Cumbrian becks merging)

Built in machine embroidery pattern stitched on Kunin felt in two different shades of blue. Cut out then twisted together.

Sample 42: Kingfisher plumage

(Photo of kingfisher)

Orange and turquoise/blue wool fibres embellished onto white wool felt. Free machined spots.

Sample 43: Giant's Causeway polygonal columns

(Photo of Giant's Causeway)

Hand stitched on paper with stranded cottons.

Sample 44: Hedgehog spines

(Photo of hedgehog)

Kunin felt embellished with hand dyed scrim. Hand stitch with stranded cottons. 

Sample Project 2013 - September

A good exercise in rapid responses to the subjects this month, no time to dither or work as carefully and intensively as I usually do! Must be good for me, right?

Week 36: Pine marten tracks

(Photo of two pine martens)

Free machined paw prints on white Lutradur over black woolly fabric, then burned away with soldering iron.

Week 37: Moth wing pattern

(Photo of Merveille-de-jour moth)

Built in scallop pattern embroidered unevenly on Kunin felt. 



 

 Week 38: Channel cut through sand on beach

(Photo of Mellon Udrigle beach, Wester Ross)

Beige wool felt embellished through shiny patterned polyester fabric from the back.

  

Week 39: Beech leaf skeleton

(Photo of beech wood)

Free machined on brown Lutradur then zapped with heat gun.

 

 

  

Two Weeks Off

A long-awaited holiday… a lot to cram in! You'd best grab a cuppa if you're going to stay the distance...

It started with a week in one of our favourite places – the Isle of Skye. A relaxing week in a cottage right on the shore.

Amazingly, Emma of  A Little Bit of Everything had an exhibition in Plockton the very same week, so that was a must. Great to meet her and see her work in person, and we had a lovely long chat. She had a wonderful display of mixed media art and cuffs, brooches, purses etc. Really impressed with how she's developed her own unique style and created so much exhibition-quality work, without easy access to all the galleries, shows and suppliers those of us on the mainland can visit. And when I finally dragged myself away she gave me a pack of inspiring treasures – fabrics, threads and papers plus Skye “coral”, bark, a beautiful feather (owl?), sea glass and even vintage geological book pages (very me). Look!

 

Thank you Emma, hope to meet up again sometime!

Plenty more to see and do once we got home…

A trip to RHS Harlow Carr to stock up on plant images for future work:

Still plenty of flowers, plus gorgeous seed heads – especially loved the grasses, cardoons, alliums and eryngiums. Lots of butterflies and dragonflies still on the wing too.

Then there was Cloth and Memory 2 at Salt’s Mill - absolutely stunning. It’s not often you see such a vast, intriguing space filled with textile art on a scale to match.

 

I especially liked Reece Clement’s diptych of Saltaire architectural images very finely laser etched onto grey suiting fabric and then blurred by needle felting creamy wool through from the back. And Jeanette Appleton’s lengths of felt made to resemble books on shelves, fitted into the bobbin niches in the walls.

Peta Jacob’s huge, highly detailed panel developed from a 1950s photo of Bradford Wool Exhange members. It made brilliant use of devore on a fine silk/cotton fabric (rather than the usual velvet), leaving transparent areas with just the cotton warp remaining.

Many of the pieces showed extraordinary ambition and tenacity. Yoriko Yoneyama stuck thousands of individual rice grains onto fine threads, draped and reflected in mirrors. Astonishing, delicate work, but ultimately a bit disappointing – maybe it was the random collection of old mirrors, or that you couldn’t walk right round it. Karina Thompson ran the 168m length of the room and recorded her heart ECG and footprints in a 100m (!) digital embroidery.

I haven’t time to describe all 23 artists’ work, but do have a look at the Cloth and Memory website (plenty of good images), or better still go and see the exhibition – it’s on until 3 November. The accompanying book is a beautiful thing too.  

And there's more...

I’ve also had a first taste of a new craft – glass fusing. Oooh… could be addictive! In just 2 hours with Genevieve Thompson of Wicked Gen Crafts I made a little dish, a window hanger and a pendant, trying out all the different ways of decorating the glass. Great fun! Can’t wait to see how they turn out after firing. This is a “before” pic of my dish:

  

And then, in Skipton, there was the first Yarndale –“ a festival of creativity celebrating traditional and contemporary crafts using wool, cotton, linen and silk in an area which is still the home of many yarn based businesses.” The first, but so busy and successful it can’t be the last… I’m not much of a knitter or felter but it was great to see so many thriving craft businesses and enthusiastic crafters.

I thought there was plenty of yarn at the Knitting and Stitching Shows, but if that’s your thing Yarndale has far more to offer - stall after stall of delicious hand dyed wools, and everything else you could wish for. I succumbed to  some fun bits to play with on  the embellisher machine, and some bright cotton to crochet.

But what about my weekly samples for September? Um… there will be a slight delay!