Fiona Dix, Author at loveFibre :: colour to touch

scarves galore

I ws only intending to make one wrap to wear to our nephew’s wedding last weekend, something to go with a particular dress that is cream with pink roses on it. But I’ve ended up with three!

I began as one should, making samples for size and colour, and thought I’d worked out how much fleece and silk to use, but something went awry between the sample stage and the finished item – which is big enough for a small winter neckscarf, but not by any means for a wrap!

As time was getting short, I decided just to plunge in and try again, no more time for sampling, so I laid out a lot of fleece, silk and fabric, and this is the result.

The size is right and it drapes beautifully, I really like its bright summery feel and could wear it as a wrap – or I may turn it into a skirt or a waistcoat later on. But I thought that it still wasn’t quite what I was after – too much sunshiny yellow and really too much personality for the dress it was supposed to be wrapping. It would have done, but as there were still a couple of days left, I decided to have another go…

This time I did nuno felting in rosy, leafy colours on a base of silk chiffon, and it turned out just how I wanted it! The last pic is me on the day of the wedding with our lovely daughters.

I’ll be at the Woolfest all day on Friday and would love to say hi to any bloggers who are there too.

International Day of Felt

October 3rd 2009 will be the first International Day of Felt, organised by Felt United, a non-profit group of felt artists, as 2009 is the United Nation’s Year of Natural Fibres.

The vision is that felters all over the world will join together to display their felt outside their homes, and the theme will be a slice of the colour wheel, from yellow through red. This sounds so exciting:

“People around the world will be surprised by finding yellow felt on doorsteps, orange felt birds in parks, children wearing red felt vests and husbands carrying bright felt bags to work. There will be felt in museums and felt in markets. There will be felt groups organizing open days and workshops. …felt in trees, on cars on bicycles and on mountaintops.”

Information about Felt United, the International Day of Felt and the call to artists is on the Felt United web site.

tagged

Penny over at Fibrefrolics has tagged me with this – the rules are to answer the questions, replacing one and adding another and then to tag 8 other bloggers to do the same. I’m feeling a bit shy about tagging anyone, but it was fun to do, so if you would like to join in, please consider yourself tagged forthwith!

What are your current obsessions? feltmaking, dyeing, breakfast

What are you currently reading? Shibori by Yoshiko Wada, Life without Bread by Allan and Lutz, Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliff

What’s for dinner? goulash with soured cream, salad, cauliflower gratin

Where do you plan to travel to next? Edinburgh, for my nephew’s wedding, then Cockermouth for the Woolfest

What is your favourite film ever? Some Kind of Wonderful

Care to share some wisdom? motivation follows action (I wish I know who said that, it’s so true)

Where would you rather be right now? there’s nowhere I’d rather be than here, on Tiree

If you could be an animal other than a human, what would it be? a dolphin

What is your favourite flower? columbine, though to choose just one sorely challenges my decision-making capacity

Favourite textile artist? no, one is just not possible – Jane McKeating, Heike Doll, Jae Maries, India Flint, ……

What’s your favourite word? (my addition) spindrift

I bought a rainbow!

Sorry about the shiny photo – I think it looks so pretty all packaged up I haven’t opened any of the bags yet!

Most of the fleece I’ve used up to now has been space dyed, which is wonderful for subtle colour changes but sometimes there’s only a scrap of a particular colour, and I’m always pulling little tufts out of the middle of the tops to get at the shade I want!

I’ve looked at various mixed packs of fleece recently, thinking they seem like a good way to acquire a bigger colour palette. In time I’m sure certain colours will be worth buying in bigger quantities but for now it’s more important to me to have a little of a lot of colours than large quantities of a few.

However, I hadn’t seen any packs with a range of colours that really excited me till I discovered the lovely rosiepink crafts. Believe it or not, I ordered these at about 11.30pm last Monday night and they arrived in Tiree on Wednesday all the way from the south coast of England.

The vibrant coloured fabrics at the bottom are some hand-dyed scrim that Annie and Lyn (aka rosiepink) also very kindly sent along with the fleece for me to experiment with, having looked at my blog and some of the things I’ve been trying out recently! Annie and Lyn’s own blog is very interesting with a number of felt-related tutorials and tips as well as examples of their work – well worth a visit.

As if this didn’t feel enough like Christmas, I had an email yesterday from The Book Depository, to say that this book, which I pre-ordered a few weeks ago, has just come into stock – more exciting post to look forward to. I should confess that I found out about the book by squandering my time watching their utterly fascinating (but ultimately expensive) live mashup of who’s buying what books and where. So much more fun than “Customers who bought the items in your Shopping Basket also bought…”…

keeping the blogging habit

I always seem to find it much easier to get out of a habit of doing something than to get into one, and even harder to get back into one after the habitualness has slipped away. I don’t really know why it should be nearly two months since I last posted, only that as each silent week goes by there’s more inertia to overcome; and more has happened – so what to write about becomes a bigger decision (decisive is not my middle name).

I’ve been doing a little of this and that, focusing on fabric manipulation as I get back into OCA Textiles 1, some stitched resists, some felt. One exercise was to develop a manipulated sample from a previous design, and I went back to these block prints that were inspired by a tulip and then scanned to try out designs on the computer.

I simplified the shapes and stitched a repeating pattern based on circles and the spaces between. I was thinking about bands of colour and bands of resist. It’s a 30cm square.

Pulling the stitches up was a bit fiddly, and then I’m always tempted to leave them gathered, loving the structures they make.

I dyed this with some other pieces (of which more in another post) and this was the end result.

I would have liked a bit more contrast – for some reason this calico didn’t take the dye as well as some of the other cottons in the same dyebath, but apart from that I was quite pleased with the overall effect.

I’d like to try other variations with colour, width of the stitching, etc. And I noticed that last time I dyed some stitched resist (when I soaked the bundles in the soda solution beforehand) the whites were very white, whereas here the ‘white’ is actually a very pale purple. These were soaked in water, then added to a dye bucket and the soda added after 30 minutes, and I used some urea, so either or both of those could have had an effect on the resist. The stitching itself was pulled up just as tightly as the earlier samples, more tightly if anything – I’ve been watching Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada‘s Arimatsu Narumi Shibori DVD, and learning how to use the needle to knot the pulled up thread without letting the stitches loosen. Not that I have mastered it – the Japanese artists make it look so easy – but I’m practising!