My textile life

Today I thought I would share a little bit of my textiles inspired life with you. As many of you know, I enrolled on a Creative Textiles course last year with the aim of gaining a City & Guilds qualification. I loved it so much that I am currently working on level 2. This year is not quite as structured as the course last year which has it's good points as well as a down side. On the good side, it leaves loads of opportunity for exploring and experimenting but on the down side.....I have no idea if I am on the right track.....might need to have another chat with my lovely tutor Jane. Anyways, I'm loving it all the same and here's a few things that I've been working on.

A few weeks ago, I went to a textiles exhibition called Textiles in Focus  with the lovely Karen and we had the great pleasure of watching Lynda Monk work her magic during a short demonstration. Lynda is a textile artist that I have admired for some time, I now own two books written by this very talented lady and long to be able to create finished pieces that look as professional as Lynda's. She showed me her Xpandaprint technique and I couldn't wait to go home and try it. I made four different pieces using different stencils and silk screens and I think you'll agree that this definitely warrants further investigation.

Here's another piece that I've painted and beaded.

I also had a play with my Gelli Plate, I used the same techniques that I use on paper with the addition of a little bit of fabric medium mixed in with my paint to print on some Egyptian Cotton. Loved the results!!!

The lovely Karen is taking a course at The Bramble Patch at the moment with Angie Hughes and I was lucky enough to find a copy of her book "Stitch, Cloth, Paper & Paint" when we were at the show and the next piece has been truly inspired by Angie. My piece started life as a collage of textured fabrics..........

 

........after painting

 

....it sure is bright and to begin with I was a little disappointed as it looked so pretty in it's unpainted form but you know what? It's only paint......I need to listen to my own advice, I tell students this in my own class, I can paint over it. I have decided to look at it for a day or two. I'm sure I will tweak it but maybe only with additional highlights....we'll see.

One of the most exciting things on my course has been procion dyeing......oh my giddy aunts....it doesn't get more exciting than this. we were a class of giddy kippers that's for sure.

We did an experiment and made all these colour swatches using just turquoise, magenta, yellow and black dye....how cool is that?????

 

Now I guess this may not appeal to all of you but it was definitely excitement overload when we used some dyes to create a multi coloured piece of fabric called parfait dyeing. Basically, fabric is stuffed into a jam jar and a colour of dye poured in to fill 1/3 of the jar. After waiting 10 mins, feed more of the fabric in and add a second colour. Repeat again for a third colour and leave well alone for 24 hours. The result is this....

 

....now whilst I was hoping that my magenta mixed with the yellow would create an orange area and sadly, this didn't happen, I am pretty pleased with the effect.....again, more experiments on the horizon I feel.

 

So that's what I've been up to of late. I hope to be back later in the week with another flower tutorial.

 

Lin