developing designs

I’ve been in a hiatus for months as far as my OCA Textiles course is concerned – stuck at the beginning of a module I really want to spend time on and enjoy – applied and manipulated fabrics. The exercise starts by asking you to select half a dozen previous drawings and develop them before interpreting them in fabric, and that’s the part I baulk at. I don’t know why I find it so daunting. Anyway, over the last couple of days, I’ve done it – six sets of design developments to inspire the fabric manipulation. I used the computer, and that helped, as did some suggestions my tutor had made about design methods in her feedback on the last assignment. I took ‘drawings’ to include photos and fabric printing as well as paint and pen.

sketchbook mosaic

1 2 3 4 5 6

The numbers link to the images on Flickr.

Mechanical Drawing – the Schiffli Project

That’s the title of an exhibition I’ve just been to see at Farfield Mill. The last working Schiffli embroidery machine in the UK is at Manchester School of Art, and for this exhibition fifteen artists worked with the machine, creating pieces that are both hand drawn and machine embroidered.

While I’d heard of the Schiffli machine, I had only a vague idea of the process – it’s actually a pantograph principle where the artist draws the line large using a hand-held device, moving across their design and clicking wherever they want the needle to enter the fabric; and the machine, which has 86 needles, reproduces the line in miniature many times across the fabric.

Each small movement of the artist’s hand is there in the stitched line, so it has a very human quality, a feeling of directness and immediacy. As each needle can hold a different coloured thread, or variations on one colour, or every thread can be the same, or some needles can be left unthreaded, there is potential for exploitation of tone, colour and pattern on a grand scale.

I was very impressed both by the impact and scale of the work, and by the quality of the exhibition. The textiles were well displayed with plenty of light and space; there were samples available to touch; and in the background there was the constant rhythmic sound of the machine at work (the sound was an element of one of the works – Kate Egan’s installation ‘Stack’), which added another sensory layer to the experience. It was a really engaging celebration of a fascinating machine that’s clearly cherished and enjoyed by those who work with it.

It’s difficult to pick out just a few pieces for a special mention… I loved the colour and movement of Rowena Ardern’s ‘Endangered’, which used the repeats created by the machine very effectively; I enjoyed Jill Boyes’ careful exploration of effects made possible by the Schiffli; I was moved by Jane McKeating’s poignant and humorous rag books, drawing on her sketchbooks from a period after she suddenly became single; and I would have loved to go home with Stephen Dixon and Alison Welsh’s ‘Armchair Politico’, which was both beautiful and thought-provoking.

The catalogue is excellent, with several essays, plenty of images and detailed text, and a DVD about the technical processes (which was also on show at the exhibition).

exhibition catalogue

Mechanical Drawing is at Farfield till 29 June and is also travelling to the Macclesfield Silk Museum and the Knitting and Stitching Show. Really worth seeing if you can; if not, all the pieces are represented online, along with excerpts from the catalogue, and a short video, at
http://www.miriad.mmu.ac.uk/craftdesign/schiffli/.

playing on the computer

I rarely use the computer for textile design work – as I spend all my working hours attached to one, I usually prefer to get up and do something physical – but I’ve been grappling with a creative low and just wanted to get some ideas out quickly and maybe get a kickstart as well. I’m not sure about the latter but it was fun learning a bit more about displacement maps and playing at the same time. I tried them once before but had forgotten what to do; happily Mags (Digital Gran) has a great tutorial that helped me get started. I don’t have Paint Shop Pro so I was using Photoshop and trying to translate, and I found a helpful Photoshop-specific tutorial by Bob Comings  via Dale Glaser’s page of links to displacement tutorials.

I used photos of various samples I’ve made – prints, patchwork, shibori, felt, stitch, sketchbook pages, paint and collage – and a photo of sunset over the sea, and displaced them using these five images:

displacement maps 

These were the results (mosaic thanks to Big Huge Labs). The numbers read across from top left and link to the images on Flickr:

displacements mosaic
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

Next I’ll be looking at these along with the rest of the design work I’ve done for OCA Textiles 1 to find some interesting aspects to develop with fabric collage and appliqué techniques.

thinking about cloth and limitation

The first task for starting work on manipulating fabrics was to sort the fabrics into colour groups, and the course suggests two hours to do that and cut samples from each type of fabric for a pinboard. I have too many fabrics, I think! I will take a little longer over it because it’s a good motivation to get them organised so I know just what I have to work with. I always find sorting anything a bit of a challenge because I see too much as borderline (it’s the same with my filing cabinet). I knew that aspect of it would be hard, so I designated a pile for patterns and mixtures as well as the clearer colours and just threw anything too complex on that pile instead of spending time trying to make small decisions.

I sorted about half the fabric yesterday, and today I made some sample sheets, using only my own dyed fabrics. I’ve done them loose-leaf so I can keep them in a folder and add to them, and I’ll just pin up the whole sheets for reference. These are all cottons and silks, so tomorrow I’ll make some more sheets with other types of fabrics from the sorted colour boxes.

The idea is to make it easier to pick out the ‘right’ fabrics for collages to interpret some of my design work – it will certainly be more systematic than my usual method of just diving into an amorphous mass of colour and texture and pulling something out. I got out my copy of Jean Littlejohn’s Fabrics for Embroidery, as I thought it would be good background reading for this section of the course, and this kind of recording of fabric is the first thing she suggests – every time you get a new one, stick a little piece in your notebook… I should obviously have taken more notice when I first read it many moons ago!

fabric samples

On the subject of having too much fabric, Littlejohn points out that before the expansion of the fabric trade, people were limited to the materials in their local environment,

These limitations encouraged people to be endlessly inventive with the materials at their disposal.

I know I have a tendency to collect more, rather than using up what I have, not just new fabrics but new ‘must have’ products and new techniques as well. There’s a place for these, of course, but I think it’s also an important challenge for me to learn how to practise the traditional skills that my grandmother would have recognised, and to be inventive with the stuff I already have (some of which once belonged to her, in fact).

I was thinking about limitations and about the way people would use and reuse fabric in the past, and I did a mindstorm on the words wear/worn as the first step towards constructing a garment (or part of one) which comes a bit later in the course. That piece has to relate to and grow visually from the design work I’ve done so far, as well as what I’m about to do, but I think I also need to anchor it in some way, otherwise I’ll flounder. The work I did in January for Sharon’s Take it Further Challenge gave me a new sense of the power of limiting and channelling ideas, and it also showed me how much strength I personally can gain by playing with words and thoughts as part of the design process.

mindstorm

TIF challenge January 2

I’ve got my first ideas down in my sketchbook.

January mindmap

One of the images that’s playing in my mind is tendrils, and serendipitously we were tidying up a mass of clematis this afternoon so I rescued some to draw later. The next step is to do some painting and drawing and think about what aspects to focus on and what textile techniques will lend themselves to expressing them. The only thing I’ve decided on so far is to knit something dark, maybe with wire, and see how introducing colour/light will transform it. I want to end up with a series of related samples in a visual journal format that is integrated and ‘designed’, at least more so than my usual messy random sketchbook work.