Umbellifers continue to intrigue me and I wanted to attempt something a little different. My inspiration was some pastel sketches I did of hogweed against the fields and sky. I glued down scraps of fabric with bondaweb and then stitched one layer of seed heads. I then added some pieces of transparent silk fabric to give some depth and stitched again. I added colour to the stems with Intense crayons.
A fourth scroll
I went to visit my son in Hove a couple of weeks ago and wanted to take some stitching with me so a scroll book seemed the perfect choice. I cut out the pieces before leaving, attaching them with a narrow length of bondaweb along the edges. I got quite a lot done there and finished it on returning home, adding beads and mother of pearl buttons, more hand stitching and some machine stitching. The buckle is also mother of pearl. I wish I could always take one of these to stitch while travelling, but it’s not possible to take needles when you only have hand luggage on a flight.
Continuing the theme of unbelief’s
I had some pieces of umbellifer printed Evelon remaining from the textile book based on these flowers, as well as sun printed fabric, so decided to make a quilt. The central background area is sun printed, the top and bottom are procaine dyed. I painted the binding with the same red paint I had used in the sun printing. I used free machine embroidery, some hand stitching and french knots on the appliquéd Evelon pieces before quilting the whole piece.
Ice dyeing
This is something I have been wanting to try for a long time and then I found an online workshop by Lynda Heines which gave me all the information I could possibly need. The principle requirement is to use mainly non-pure colours, because the whole idea of ice dyeing is to make the colours split in order to produce the wonderful pattern variations this method produces.
Experimental drawing for mono print
Last month I attend the above 5 day workshop with Caroline Wendling at West Dean. Caroline is very keen on allowing chance to play its part, so we started off by picking blind a one inch square cut from a larger image. We had to choose 5 mark making tools one of which had to be a rubber. A dice was thrown to choose which tool to use, another to give us what kind of mark to make. Great fun and we all produced totally different images. Each morning we went out drawing, focussing in turn on tonal values, line, colour, texture, using the dice and also maps to superimpose on where we were to guide us along paths suggested by the map. We then went on to try different methods of printing inspired by our drawings.