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visiting Scotland

I only live about 60 miles from the Scottish border but I don’t often cross it. Last week, however, I went twice! Tuesday was a visit to the Gracefield Arts Centre in Dumfries to review Ruth Lee‘s exhibition, Reading Between the Lines, for the next issue of Workshop on the Web. It’s an excellent show of Ruth’s work and well worth seeing, if you are anywhere nearby before 3 November. There was also a preview copy of Ruth’s new book Contemporary Knitting for Textile Artists, which has gone on my wish list! I’ll post a link to the exhibition review when it’s published in December.

Then on Saturday I caught the train up to Edinburgh to visit my friend Lee and her husband Andy. Lee is a fibre artist who creates wonderfully vivid images in felt, like this "Sheep Number 12".

Lee took me on an eclectic tour of the city. First to the Elephant House – not the zoo, but the coffee house where JK Rowling wrote the Harry Potter books. I have a passion for elephants so I was overwhelmed by the sight of so many in one place – models, photos, books, hangings, furniture… this one was given to the Elephant House by “Linda Greer, on behalf of her brothers and sisters, in memory of her father Jimmy Ferguson”.

After delicious coffee and cake we took a circuitous route through the city, via the delightful Dean Village and along the Water of Leith to the Museum of Modern Art. In front of the museum is the stunning ‘Landform‘ by Charles Jencks – a landscape of banks and curved pools that you can walk on and around.

(The tall slender shadow is Lee and the small round one is me.)

We ended up sitting in Lee and Andy’s pretty garden, drinking more coffee and enjoying the late afternoon sunshine. A beautiful day in a beautiful city.

appliquÃ© in progress

I made good progress today with the appliquÃ© wall hanging which is my first assessment piece for City & Guilds 7822. I got all the shapes laid out ready to shadow quilt. On the left of the pic is the overall design; on the right, how it will change with painted silk organza pieces laid over it. After it’s quilted I’ll be cutting back into it to reveal some of the coloured shapes and the felt batting again. I’m sure I’ll be tweaking the composition but this is about it. I’m going to treat myself to some variegated machine threads at the Festival of Quilts, so I won’t stitch it till after that, but I can get the pieces fused to the felt and think about the quilting for a few days. Now that I see the appliquÃ© pieces on the felt, I’m not sure that I’d go on to add the top layer if it wasn’t for a quilting assessment, but I think if I’m careful with placing the stitching I can cut back effectively to get some interesting contrasts.

I tried a technique from Tray Dyeing yesterday – not with Procion MX dyes (as used in the book), because I don’t have everything I need for that yet; but I dyed some strips of silk with Javana silk paints. These bits were torn off the edge of one of them to put in my sketchbook – I sent the piece off to my daughter with some other bits, and forgot to take a photo. I used lemon, magenta, and cyan together – I love the resulting zingy colours. The silk was dry and loosely scrumpled in a small box before squeezing the colours on with a pipette.

I was reading a very interesting entry a couple of days ago on Karren Brito’s blog Entwinements – What people will do to wear red – about the effects of dyes on the skin – in clothing, not just while you’re using them. Food for thought, especially as I hope some of my dyeing experiments will end up in my wardobe. If you’re interested in dyeing there is some wonderful shibori including wearables on Entwinements.

catching up

Some time seems to have gone by since I last posted. We had a weekend away in Cornwall, and visited the Eden Project for the first time. They currently have a very interesting exhibition of recycled products from all over the world – kNOwtrash. I can’t find it on their web site, but it includes textiles, furniture, accessories and jewellery, and is on till 12 September. I came away with some ideas for my craft session at youth club – braiding with newspaper, jewellery with bottle tops, and flowers from plastic bottles. Many of the items were from groups and collectives overseas, plus some by individual artists including Michelle Brand’s beautiful and eyecatching work using plastic bottles and shop tags. I hope the Eden Project will archive some images from the exhibition on their web site – it was very inspiring.

My daughter Esther is borrowing a few of my samples for an exhibition at her church, so I’ve photographed them before sending them off. These were from a batik workshop with Nell Dale and a feltmaking workshop with Jenny Scott.

batik
batik

felt
felt and washboard

The Glass Queen is a lovely old washboard I found on eBay, she’s perfect for fulling felt.

book cover I had an exciting delivery this week – I’d ordered Tray Dyeing by Leslie Morgan and Claire Benn (Committed to Cloth) from the Embroiderers’ Guild bookshop. Wowowowow!!! It’s only a short book but packs in a huge amount of information and although I’ve done some tray dyeing before I was astonished at the amount of control that can be achieved and can’t wait to try.

I’ve been working really hard this week to try and clear a couple of days to do art as I haven’t been doing much at all with being away and having visitors. I was having fun experimenting with colour mixing on paper, but I’ve lost my impetus and I need to get back to it and back into it.

Only a couple of photos in Cornwall – I’m hoping to get a new small camera soon. This jaunty little seabird by the starry water, at Polkerris, near St Austell, and a random lobsterpot decorating the wall of the inn there.

seabird lobsterpot

felt again

well, I now have three felts that I can use for the appliquÃ© hanging – I don’t like the green as much as the first one I made, it lacks some shades of turquoise and some acidy greens that I didn’t have in the merino, but I’m trying not to be perfectionist about this. A layer of coloured silk chiffon is going over it, after all, and everything will be different in the end. Today it has rained endlessly but just about the time I finished there was a lull and I ran out to take a picture.

I can hardly bear to stop making felt now and get on with quilting and drawing and work and those kinds of things.