space to work and play

In our new house my office and my art space are sharing the same room; it could also be an occasional dining room and we may sleep in here as well when we have lots of visitors – so I’ve spent the weekend creating that space and I think it will work.

Luckily we also have a walk-in cupboard where I can keep and deal with a lot of the essential but not very pretty stuff to do with accounts and correspondence, so there is space in ‘my’ room for more textiles. One set of shelves is for work and all the rest are for art!

I don’t have all my textile books here yet – we had to leave most of them in Kendal till the next trip back. But I’ve managed a shelf-full, even so! I’ve overflowed into a kitchen cupboard with dyeing equipment but otherwise most of my stash has fitted in here, as well as my beloved filing cabinet, a big table for artwork and the smaller one that serves as my desk. There’s just enough room around the big table to seat six friendly people, and it will also fold down to almost nothing when we need the floorspace for sleeping.

These are the four corners of my new space. Those who know me well will not expect this tidiness to last very long! I’m trying to take in how good it feels to walk into right now, to motivate myself to make a habit of putting away what I take out before it descends into chaos.

Fiona's room

Fiona's room

Fiona's room

Fiona's room

You can’t see it because it got dark before I finished, but the very best part is that when I look out of the window I can see the sea…

still here – just

September and October have flown silently by and it’s only just over a week till our move to Tiree. If I had time to think about it I’d be full of trepidation, but as I still have masses of packing to do, and there are a few other little chores like the quarterly VAT return to get out of the way meanwhile, I don’t suppose I will have any time to think at all.

Not content with my inability to keep up with one blog, I’ve started a second one as well, Tiree journal, (and I’ve been neglecting that one too). I don’t plan to separate life and art or anything like that, but I do want to keep the focus here mainly on textiles, and I know I’ll also want to keep a record of this adventure we’re setting out on, or I’ll forget.

Not much to report on the art front, but here is a little piece of silk, an experiment in ‘painting’ with stitch resist, made before I packed up the equipment. I am so looking forward to getting everything out of boxes at the other end and getting back to making.

stitched resist sample

Thank you to everyone who’s left a comment in the last month or two – if I didn’t reply, I apologise. It will be lovely to be able to catch up with you all soon. Just a few ferry journeys between now and then…

TIF Challenge August 3

At last I’ve started to get somewhere with Sharon’s August challenge – balance. I was looking at some pendant lights a couple of weeks ago and they made me think about tying two pieces of cloth with the same thread or yarn, dyeing them and then partially unwrapping them to end up with something joined like this.

sketchbook page

I woke up this morning thinking I could use this idea to express balance – between the two pieces of cloth, maybe, and between the still wrapped and unwrapped sections. Leaving the cloth partially tied also says something to me about the halfway mark (July’s challenge) – the unwrapped cloth reveals certain kinds of beauty – open, vivid, colourful, accessible; yet the wrapped cloth has its own beauties – in the interaction of the thread and the fabric, dimensional, potential, hidden. Like the past and the future, somehow. In a roundabout kind of way… When I thought about the halfway mark some of the most potent images for me were of journeying as circular or almost circular, crossing the same points but in a different way, or spiralling, like these.

journeys

Which just looks like wrapping, after all.

This weekend will be taken up with helping one daughter to move, and then the other is starting uni next week, so I won’t manage anything material before the end of August, but at least I know now where to go with this.

If you get the chance, check out this delightful World Beach project stone sculpture by my friend Helen; from this link, search for Broch of Gurness.

dyeing and unstitching the resists

On Saturday I finally got to dyeing the stitched samples I’ve been making as experiments with fabric manipulation and shibori patterns. I decided in the end to go with Procion dyes, because I have all the ingredients to hand already,  and I didn’t want to be experimenting with the dyeing part as well (although I ended up mixing methods in a bit of an ad hoc way, even so).

I soaked the stitched samples for half an hour in soda solution, then mixed up the dye – I was aiming for a rusty colour and I followed a suggestion in Tray Dyeing (by Claire Benn and Leslie Morgan) – 1 part Golden Yellow, 1 part Scarlet, 1/2 part Turquoise. It looked a bit brown so I added a little more of the red and yellow. I mixed it in a small bucket with salt solution and warm water and in went the samples. Then half an hour later I got cold feet about using a single colour and decided to tip the lot into a tray and splodge a bit of Marine Violet over it for good measure!

I wrapped it in towels as it’s a little chilly here and left it for about 6 hours before rinsing. At that point the samples looked so solidly dark I couldn’t believe that the stitching had actually resisted – I was quite prepared to open them up and find that the dye had seeped all the way through.

dyed resists before untying

But no, like magic, when the threads were snipped and unravelled there were patterns within!

removing the stitching and wrapping

dyed stitch resists

Unstitching the bundles took some time, and I’ve learned that it is not sensible to use a cotton thread that will end up the same colour as the fabric, and especially don’t do this when you have used overstitching and can’t just pull out the thread in one go! White (and even black) polyester thread was easy to see and much easier to remove.

I was glad of my small sketches of the original stitching – I knew I’d have forgotten by this time how I had made the different patterns. I like the wrapped effects, but I’m especially enchanted by the ghosts of stitches that are no longer there but have left their trace on the fabric.

embroidery stitch resists

I’ve uploaded more pics to Flickr, showing each of the samples on its own.