Today I want to work on my storyboard/design for assignment 1, which is an appliqué piece. I’m planning to do a wall hanging in sections, to hang between two windows overlooking a garden. So far it’s just an idea and a few pictures.
I chose images that I’ve collected over the years – I’m imagining it in a house painted and repainted in shades of turquoise, ochre and dull reds, inhabited by a woman in a dusky green embroidered velvet dress. The hanging will be inspired by the colours and forms of the dried flowers which echo the colours of the house and the dress, with some additional faded pinks. lavenders and papery yellows. I don’t think (for copyright reasons) I can post the images that are inspiring this because they’re torn from Country Living and other magazines whose names I don’t even remember.
At the moment I am thinking about something fairly light and floaty that would move slightly when the windows are open, maybe using several layers of dyed silk with some ‘flowers’ in shadow appliqué and some on the surface. It could be quite abstract. Also using quilting lines to reflect the strong lines of stems in the flower image, but in quite a delicate way if I can achieve that. The colours are rich and faded at the same time. It might be interesting to explore the contrasts between papery dried petals and the soft velvety live petals that would be seen through the windows.
The next steps are to do more drawings of how the piece will look in situ, maybe with collage and painting too. The idea is to prepare a design for the (imaginary) client, to show what the finished work will be like. That’s quite a challenge for me since most of my ideas come to me through the materials, and I often can’t tell what’s possible till I try it (I guess that comes with experience) so I’m sure that the design will evolve as I go through that process. But I’ll do my best to stick to the order I’m supposed to be following and produce a design first that bears some relation to the finished article…
For Textiles 1, today I want to: write my introduction about me for my tutor, and look through the course materials to get an overview and see if I need anything specific to get started (though being a bit of a magpie, I probably have it already!).
