Debbie Lyddon Workshop

I was fortunate to be able to attend a Waxed and Stitched Collage workshop given by Debbie Lyddon at InStitches. My work on the two days was based on one of my Summer School 2016 designs (see blog posted 24th July 2016).

Starting with a base of three colours (Image 202) we painted papers and fabrics and produced three collages - one paper (Image 203), one paper and fabric (Images 204 and 205) and one fabric (Image 206).  These were machine and hand stitched and waxed using paraffin wax.

Bearing in mind my research theme is 'gulls, with an emphasis on shadows' I was particularly please with the result of the fabric and paper collage (Images 204 and 205).

P.S. Yes, I'm still twining 'pods'.  Regard this as an early Easter Egg - one you don't have to search a DVD for!

Diploma Module 1 Chapter 5 - Colour Study continued

This section contains further work from my sketchbook related to a range of coloured papers.  As many of the pages in my sketchbook could be expanded to produce interesting papers for design exercises I have only worked on a few additional ideas for papers here, some of which expand the use of textured plates made for earlier sketchbook pages.

Images 194 and 195 are papers washed with blue black Quink ink and then discharged with thin bleach using variously a cocktail stick, cotton wool bud. Text from Joni Mitchell's Song to a Seagull and an appropriate quote from Debbie Lyddon's blog were also added.

Images 196 and 197 show various papers.

Images 198 - 201 are pockets from my sketchbook made to hold rubbings taken from stitch samples. The texture was created using emulsion applied thickly to give texture and then rubbed with metallic rub-ons from Art Van Go.  I was rather aggressive in my rubbing and managed to remove a few layers of skin from my finger - Health and Safety warning!  It did produce a sense of movement on the page though.

A Little Diversion

Since the Summer School the minutiae of everyday life seems to have been getting in the way of progress on my Diploma so this section contains some of my recent course related work - just to show there has been some thought and work going on in the background...in fact, as you can't go far without seeing a gull, I find myself constantly thinking about them.

When my Foundation/Taster coursework was displayed at the Summer School I realised how blocky and disproportionate I found my second resolved sample, Foundation Module Image 70,

so I took it apart and reworked it as three pieces, each containing one of the pieces of paper yarn weaving and adding dense kantha stitching.  The result is more pleasing in many ways, primarily that you take one apart and get three better ones! (Foundation Images 75 -77, each approx. 23cmWx43cmH).

At the end of July after attending an inspirational talk on Fabulous Surfaces by Lynda Monk I returned home to find a space had become available that weekend (due to illness) on her two day Fabulous Surfaces workshop at the Craft Arena. Deciding it must be meant, I booked.  Three of the techniques sampled during the weekend used design work from my Diploma.

Diploma Image 56 - both positive an negative images from the design - used to make a sketchbook cover.

Images 187 and 188 - sketchbook covers in progress.  Procion dyed pelmet vilene, dressmaking pattern tissue paper (Vogue works best) and heat transfer foil. 29.5cmWx21cmH.

Image 189 shows a piece which is a development of Image 177 using heated Tyvek pieces on duck cotton canvas machine quilted on a base of thick blanket.  Gull patches, hand-stitching and needle weaving have also been applied.

This was then coated with gesso (Image 190),

and painted with Koh-i-Noor dyes (Image 191).

Big mistake, so I gave it a coat of household emulsion to hide the error of my ways and then carefully rubbed it with an Deep Indigo 1100 Inktense Pencil.  The mistakes are coming thick and fast, as in hindsight I should have used a Markal Paintstik as, so far, after trying many products I have been unable to make the Inktense pencil permanent.  Once Inktense has been wet and then dried again it is permanent but if I wet this piece it will spoil the look of it as I love texture the dry Inktense is giving me and the marks it is making on the surface.  Each time I touch it I get blue fingers...so I'm trying not to touch it.

Returning to Image 51 which used distressed muslin, another technique bonded muslin on to Tyvek which provides textural distorted muslin.  This was applied to a background as described for Image 189, plus gesso, and gives wonderful surface texture. Image 193 shows the surface of the piece.

Summer School 2016 - Personal Cloths - Jan Beaney and Jean Littlejohn

What a wonderful time we had celebrating 25 years of Distant Stitch with Sian - including cake and late night sparklers in the wildflower meadow - and under the expert tutelage of Jan Beaney and Jean Littlejohn, Double Trouble.  If it hadn't been for Jan Beaney's book Art of the Needle I probably wouldn't have been there at all...or getting so much pleasure from textiles.  I used to spend many hours on my visits to the Isle of Man pouring over my Mum's copy and thinking 'I'd like to be able to do that'.  So this was a double treat for me.

These are the worked samples.  They are based on my diploma work on gulls - Image 12, a gull monoprint and Image 167, part of the development work based on Japanese Boro textiles.

Handstitched on double layer of Solufleece, embellished on Babylock Embellisher 12 and then further handstitched.
5cmWx13cmH.

Design exercises in black and white using 'gloop', firstly with threads and scrim and then with tissue.

Free machine stitched structure on Solufleece, over stitched with hand stitching.  Free machine embroidery and hand needlefelting on 'eggs'. Free cross stitch in brown paper yarn from George Weil.
13cmWx11.5cmH.
Notes:

• when laying the structure consider what will be placed on top and match colours.  I painted these afterwards to conceal.
• as you work, keep the edges clean and free from ends. After dissolving, in places I did a narrow zigzag line to tidy up.  Where this wasn't possible I used PVA (all my secrets!).
• I was unsure if the structure under the initial hand stitching would hold the piece together so I free machined over the hand stitching to be sure.  In hindsight, I should have placed fine net behind before I started hand stitching.

Recycled fabrics including denim and plasterers' cotton scrim, placed on Aquabond and covered with Julietta.  Fine black net placed behind and hand stitched, darned and needledarned.
19.5cmWx25cmH.

and dissolved...

and the back!

Design transfer onto Solufleece using Lesley Riley's Transfer Artist Paper and Faber Castell Pitt Artist Pens.

Design transferred onto Whaley's A1447 coarse openweave cotton, as above, and hand stitched. After hand stitching 'pebbles', hand needlefelted and then Wingham Wool Work Grade A Mulberry Silk Noil added, again with single needlefelting needle.
14cmWx10cmH.

On my return this developed into my first small twined structure, the twined section representing the egg and the gulls flying from it on a cut and manipulated warp.

and leaving you with a panoramic view of the Vale of Evesham,

and a big thank you again Sian!

Diploma Module 1 Chapter 5 - Colour Study

To record the colours in my design, strips were cut from Image 2 and I attempted to reproduce the colours using different media.  Until I started I had been worried that there was too little colour...unfounded. I took two strips, one including the beak and the red spot (always good when your work has one: bonus if someone else puts it on).

Image 172 - Just as there are many shades of grey, there are also many shades of white.  The gull is definitely a bright white and almost shines.

Image 173 - For the second strip I made larger colour swatches which gave more surface area on which to build layers.  Note that there are two swatches for the wall. Initially I used a base of ochre on which to build up layers.  However, I felt a base of neutral grey replicated what happens in the real world.  The lichen grows on the wall and not vice versa.  This, I felt was more successful.  The eye is pretty scary. I'll leave that colour for the time being.

Image 174 - Rather than take strips along the whole photo I include some earlier studies which look at the greys and blacks of the gull feathers.  These are initial swatches, plus the red dot again.

I would like to have red and yellow in my colour scheme as these are the colours of the Manx flag, though they are both such dominant colours only one may be included in a final design. The pink from the legs doesn't work for me, but then pink rarely does.

From Image 172 and 173 I chose to work with seven coloured areas which I produced on paper, many as I had done in the observations:

• red - base - Koh-i-Noor Wax Aquarell red 6; layer - acrylic wax
• yellow - base - white matt vinyl emulsion; layer - Wax Aquarell yellow 4; light wash in places to spread colour
• blue - base - Inscribe acrylic Baltic Blue+snow acrylic; 1st layer - dry brush Baltic Blue; 2nd layer - dry brush Amsterdam Payne's Grey acrylic; 3rd layer - dry brush Windsor and Newton Phthalo blue acrylic - red shade
• wall - base - Daler Rowney neutral grey acrylic dabbed on with children's brush; 1st layer - Payne's Grey acrylicdabbed on; 2nd layer - Reeves Yellow ochre acrylic dabbed on
• leg ring - base - Payne's Grey acrylic+neutral grey acrylic+Seawhite's Seacryl white acrylic; layer - neutral grey acrylic+white acrylic
• grey section of gull - base - white acrylic; Layer - dry sponge neutral grey acrylic
• white section of gull - white acrylic heavily applied with distinct brush strokes.

Image 178 - Colours:

• graded in order from warm to cold.  As black and white are not technically colours (black is all colours and white is the absence of colour) black was included as warm and white as cool.
• placed in order, top to bottom, of the proportion of the colour that appeared on the strips.

Image 179 - Pieces of each of the colours were placed on strips of each of the colours. From these samples my preferred backgrounds are the blue and the grey as they peacefully set off all the other colours rather than fighting with them.  For impact I'd go with the red or yellow.

Image 180 - Random colour weaving with coloured papers.  The background is one of the papers. 

Observation: as I suspected, the red and yellow are very dominant colours and they will need to be used individually/carefully or they will overwhelm the design. 

Image 181 - A little tweak which came from the previous work on boro-type samples. As the colour of the sea (the blue colour) is changeable depending on the weather, I used paper printed from an indigo sample I had made and produced this image. I prefer this blue and it is more in keeping with my designs, so if there are no objections I'll use it.

Image 182 - Colour circle - one I prepared earlier!

Image 183 - The chosen colours were placed on six painted backgrounds.  They are in the sketchbook with my least favourite first.  On analysis, the reason for this choice is probably based on several factors.  When you look at my chosen 'colours', there are actually only three true colours - red, yellow and blue (in these samples the ochre on the wall colour swatch is not pronounced) and the colours on which they sit most agreeably are those that are either complementary of harmonious with these three colours.  The colour I prefer is a shade of the blue already present. The green background is harmonious with the 'scary' eye colour - nature knows best.

Images 184 - 186 - each colour on 'theme related' backgrounds.

Image 184 from left to right - denim, shelf lining silicon and magazine.

Observations: all work well.  The denim ties in with the boro theme, the silicon could imply work on a knotted structure and would work well and complement the shadow theme.  The water, with the shimmer from the light on the surface, also has design possibilities.

Image 185 from left to right - wallpaper, tissue coated with acrylic wax, magazine coated with acrylic wax and baking parchment coated with acrylic wax (hole cut through page).

Observations: Of all the backgrounds, the wallpaper is the least successful due to the sparkle.  The translucent/opaque nature of the acrylic coated tissue and baking parchment also have shadow design possibilities.

Image 186 from left to right - baking parchment coated with acrylic wax, crepe paper, calico, dish cloth, wallpaper, heavy cotton with chevron pattern.

Observations: all work well.  The dishcloth cotton has a look of feathers.  This could be useful when making the papers ready for design work.  The texture of the crepe paper is also pleasing, though the colour is a little brash for the theme.