flickr Archives - loveFibre :: colour to touch

drawing breath

Life always gets away from me in the summer when time away (lovely as it is) means twice as much work to fit into the weeks afterwards – and it’s not long before we set off again, this time heading down to Cornwall. In between, a little space to draw breath and share what I’m up to.

Our visit to Tiree was momentous, to say the least. Alan’s on sabbatical next year and we’ve decided to seize the day and do something we’ve been thinking about for years – to live and work in a small community on a remote and windswept island. So we went there looking for a home – and found one! We’re now jubilant and terrified in about equal measure. The move won’t be till November but there’s going to be plenty to do before then. We have two daughters starting uni this autumn too, one moving from Cornwall to Liverpool, and one just moving round the corner in Birmingham, but both will need help with their stuff. I’ll need to work hard to keep time for art among all this excitement!

While we were on Tiree I at last joined in with the World Beach Project.

And I did a bit more sampling of gathered fabrics while I was away. The ones in the middle will end up being dyed, I think.

I got fascinated by the effect of visible stitching…

and tying…

Tomorrow I’m going to a short workshop with the intriguing title “Kendal Green meets Shibori Dyeing”. I think I’ve mentioned before that Kendal’s town motto is Pannus mihi Panis – “Cloth is my Bread”; and the arts centre is having a festival to celebrate the town’s heritage with lots of textile events. Kendal Green is an old dye colour mentioned in Shakespeare, but I think we’re going to use a modern version! It should be fun, anyway. I’m just wondering if I can take my gathered samples along and throw them in too!

And these are some pics of Tiree I’ve put on Flickr, colours of sea and sky, rust and sand, light and water.

1. Gunna Sound, 2. rocks at Caoles, 3. light and waves, 4. Balevullin, 5. light, waves and seaweed, 6. fences at Balevullin, 7. cows on the beach at Balevullin, 8. rust and lichen, 9. Crossapol beach, 10. oystercatchers, 11. rusty machinery on Crossapol beach, 12. sunset, 13. clear sea, Gunna Sound, 14. rusty metal at Hynish, 15. Crossapol beach, 16. Balevullin

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 tutorialÂ 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 tutorialÂ by Bob ComingsÂ Â 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 Â

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

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 appliquÃ© techniques.

beautiful and useful

Just some things to share that have caught my eye over the last few days…

Ann Wood’s birds (and ships and spiders and horses) are always a delight but something about this arrangement of birds in progress just made me catch my breath this morning.

Which reminds me, if you like arrangements you’ll love this Flickr pool (found via Ana Ventura’s Papéis por todo o lado).

I’m still finding my way around our new camera so I was grateful for a series of tutorials for point and shoot cameras by Ellie Won (Kitchen Wench) (thanks to Magpie Ima for sharing this). I now understand a lot more about white balance and exposure compensation than I did, and I’m looking forward to learning more!

Finally there’s lots of thought-provoking stuff at Greensleeves: Sustainability in the Fiber & Textile Arts by The Worsted Witch. A lot of the things I use for art (Procion dyes, for example) or am tempted to try (like Lutradur) are, I think, derived from petrochemicals. I worry about this. But then, how many air miles does cotton clock up to get to the UK? I really appreciate sites like this that make it easier to get information about environmental and ethical issues for the choices we have to make.

day out and colour mixing

Tuesday sounded as if it was going to be the last fine day for a while, so Alan suggested we went into the Lakes for a few hours. We drove up towards Keswick and over Honister Pass, then on to Whinlatter (a favourite haunt when our girls were children). I had fun taking pictures from the van window on the way, one or two turned out to be quite interesting combinations of blur and focus.

The range of autumn colours in the mountains is incredible.

This is the spectacular metal sculpture of an osprey outside the Visitor Centre at Whinlatter. (Real ospreys nest in the area). I’ve uploaded some more images to Flickr.

I have been working on colour mixing exercises with stitch for OCA Textiles 1, using dotty stitching – French knots in a pointillist style. This calls for good primary and secondary colours, and I soon discovered that I actually have very few of those in my stash – mostly variegated threads and random bits and bobs. I started a very small sample in some red and yellow threads I dyed a while back, and ran out of those, so today I went down to town and bought a small rainbow – well, two rainbows, one in stranded cotton and one in wool. That should keep me going for a while!

I was in the library too and saw this dramatic, enormous knitting installation in the foyer. They said I could take some pics to share with you. Kendal is a town whose history is intimately connected with wool production – its motto is ‘pannus mihi panis’ – ‘cloth is my bread’, or as people often interpret it ‘wool is my bread’. We even have our own breed of sheep – the Rough Fell. This project celebrates that heritage.

safe crafts and summer challenge

Today I finished the summer challenge I’m taking part in with the Embroiderers’ Guild – we have an online Members’ Forum and a few times a year there’s a swap or a challenge – this summer it was both, as we had to make a mixed media piece for our gallery, and an ATC along the same lines to swap. This was my piece for the gallery, it’s a collage of yarn, hand-dyed scrim, silk paper and buttons on the sponge printed background I mentioned in a recent post. It was inspired by the sight of my dyeing experiments blowing on the washing line, and all the colour studies I’ve been doing for OCA Textiles 1.

A Good Dyeing Day

I also spent a lot of time (too much) today, trawling the web for safe, quick, funky crafts to use at the Youth Club where I run an art/craft session. Most of the kids who come spend every evening on the street, many have a short attention span, they’re boisterous and occasionally aggressive, they’re about 13-16, and most are boys. We don’t have a huge adult to child ratio – sometimes just me and one helper in the craft area, so anything that require needles or other sharp tools is too risky. Plus we can’t do anything too messy, both because of the limitations of our space, and because the kids are easily excited and prone to decorate each other with whatever is to hand! They love little kits from the excellent Yellow Moon – tiny boxes and picture frames to decorate, anything with funky foam, miniature mugs and candles to paint – and I’m always impressed by the way these bring out their creativity. But I do also like to offer them more open-ended activities sometimes (though they prefer the kits!). I’ve decided on rolled paper beads for this week – and while I was looking at paper crafts I found a great listing at Craftzine, linking to tutorials on Flickr and elsewhere. How generous so many people are with their skills on the Web.

One thing I really want to do more of with these kids is recycled crafts, but I need to train myself to plan ahead and get people at church to collect things for us. Alan does his best to amass a goodly number of beer bottle caps and lemonade bottles during the average fortnight, but I’m glad to say he doesn’t quite generate the amount we’d need, all by himself!

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