It Glows

 Came back from Ullapool late Sunday evening after a long exhausting drive. Today I feel recovered enough energy wise to finish off my 'vessel' which as you can see has turned into a lampshade. I wanted to preserve the warmth of the colours but lining it with two layers of sheer fabric took away some of the glow. It was when I held it up to the light  I realised it needed back lighting to show it at it's best. I only needed to lose an inch of the piece for it to fit an existing lamp base. I have used seven thin strips of wood under the lining to keep it's shape. I was going to use pelmet vylene but this would have cut down on light passing through the piece.

An energy saving bulb which keeps nice and cool has worked really well for this piece just looking at it makes me feel warm and cosy.

I bought some beautiful pieces of vintage fabric in Cromarty last week. I made sure that they were torn and worn so I wouldn't feel guilty at cutting them up. The next project will be a memory quilt using some of things I have bought in Ullapool and surrounding places over the past few years.

Eye Candy 1

You know all those samples you acquire from all those ideas and latest products you just have to try. All the little pieces of work from courses that just seem to mount up. Well I'm trying to put mine into a  series of work that I'm calling my eye candy pieces. These are quite difficult to produce as all the elements that I'm bringing together were never intended to be part of a 'whole'. For instance this piece has dyed velvets,paper clay, foils,weaving, machine embroidery, handmade cords, painted bondaweb, crochet and beadwork amongst other elements. This first piece doesn't work as well as I hoped mainly because the design has ended up quite dumpy looking - the canvas is too small, elongating the design would have made it more elegant looking but I love the colours and the way they bounce off of each other.

This is me resting my hands and not sewing ( never going to happen).

Films and Foils Finished

Stitched and mounted, a little glitzty piece of about 10"x 8". Angelina films, silver foil, acrylic paint and machine stitched with a variety of threads. Not a road I'm interested in going down but good to keep up with new products and techniques and enjoyable as a one off.

I'm working at ideas for using my lovely velvets - quite difficult to come up with something contemporary where velvet is concerned, all my ideas end up with a retro hippy/70's vibe to them (perhaps because I've been there the first time round it puts me off a bit).

I hope the weather here is going to be as good as they say it will be by the end of the week - I'm longing to be in the garden.

Display of Little Objects

Very often when you you buy a tiny piece of craft from a shop it looks kind of lost or out of place when you bring it home  away from the backdrop of a shop display. For me it's the same when you produce a little gem of your own - it needs company to 'big' it up. It becomes part of a cohesive art piece in company rather than a collection of stuff.

My embroidered beads are an ongoing theme that I return to in between larger projects and when energy levels are low. They give me a sense of achievement whilst waiting for the creative part of my brain to drag me into the next obsession.

I've used entemology pins to display each 'bead' as I was thinking of those scientific trays of pinned insects or butterflies whilst making this. Each individual specimen is part of my need to ask myself about how to look and feel and make something beautiful. My curiosity with colour, texture and pattern drives me to constantly refine each little bead or button I produce, looking for some kind of perfection. This can be seen in the technical ability of this piece - my early beads were quite crude but had a vitality about them that my increasing skills find harder to capture  - this case is almost a personal history of my journey in colour and embroidery and technique. The wonderful thing is that there is still a long way to travel.

I'm teaching the making of my embroidered beads at the Peterborough branch of the  Embroiderers Guild on the 25th of Feb.

I may do one more class after that but I am am not intending to become a teacher  I much prefer the role of student.

Resistance is Futile.

That show of resistance lasted at least an hour  - my excuse being that I'm... darn it  I can't think of one.

I really do need to come up with ways of using the million miles of cord I have made and this is a good start, so not a totally wasted day.

Blogger/Internet/PC seem to be playing up today I can't use the zoom function on my last post so I will publish my quilt pic again in case anyone is bored enough to want to look at it closely.

Quilt in the Snow

Second quilt finished!   18" x 15"indigo cottons, hand dyed and printed cottons, coloured kid leather, machine quilted and stitched. Looks better than the photo suggests, certainly better than my first effort. Not sure where this is leading but I will go with the flow and hope to impress myself a bit more than I am currently doing. I really just want to be making beads and buttons at the moment - I am resisting!

Derivative but pleasing.

This was the first piece of resolved work using  the Pfaff embellisher that I acquired last year - I had seen so many pieces like this that I just had to get my version out of my system before I could start on anything original. It measures 18" x 30" and made of  squares of merino tops, scraps of hand dyed fabrics, commercial threads, all lightly felted using the embellishing machine.

I then hand embroidered  and blanket stitched round each square. This gave me a foundation to crochet all the squares together using some wonderful space dyed Japanese Noro wool. the whole thing was the sewn onto a canvas backing  and by cutting into the canvas I was able to stuff each square  thus giving the hanging more form and depth which is not obvious from a photo.

Sadly that was the first and last finished piece of work that I did using the machine that I had lusted after for so long. However in two weeks time I am going on a course at Artvango with Pauline Verrinder entitled  'Embellisher - Moving On'.

I'm sure this will deal with the mental block I have with this machine. 

My wonderful family who are very adept at keeping me grounded have christened this piece 'Is It Cold' I will leave the explanation to your imaginations.