Secret Garden

Once upon a time there was this

Polyester voile with paper lamination 2015

and this

New cotton/silk mix. Mandala sample 2017

and this

Vintage cotton sheeting. Pole wrapped shibori 2017

Brought together, would they draw you across a room?

And when you got closer, would you want to see more?

Might they tell you a story?

Or should they be left to go their separate ways, being too much of a muddle all together?

The only stitched element so far is the butterfly, an earlier idea that was rejected. I have not the faintest notion of how I might combine these varied objects with stitch. It is for now, just a muse .....

sampling

Although no stitching was done while away, since coming home I have spent some time with my Mesopotamia layered piece, this time a proper sample. Christine's advice was to pin the layers together, rather than tacking, as with every stitch you make, the organza and the layer(s) below make a little adjustment with each other. Pins can be moved to accommodate this. It was very fine advice.

So here: the base of hand dyed fabric, with its layer of marks; a layer of poly organza coloured with walnut and India ink if I remember; a snippet of the paper laminated piece with more floor plan imagery and a layer of seed stitch suggesting another building.

The next layer of seeding, at larger scale, with a thread which matches the colours on the fabric, both responds to what is below, and secures the coloured organza

Here using Emily Jo Gibbs' technique of stitching around the edge of the layer below 

finding shadows of floor plans, hidden beneath, or impromptu patterns from the combined layers.

Here stitching moves away from the absolute randomness of seeding, responding to what lies beneath, just as archaeology does, searching for treasure 

Sampling really does allow for experiment and experiencing the way the layers interact, how stitching can bring to the surface what lies below. 

My larger piece has more detail, though the seeding needs to extend further around the remains; I like the way they flicker in and out, depending on the colour in the hand dyed fabric below.

Once the sampling is done, I can think more clearly about how to develop this further. For now it is good to just consider

auditioning layers

These pictures are of a test piece, a sample, much recommended by Christine to try things out. So here I am trying out layering the organza again, having cut it with the soldering iron to get a shape which wraps round the existing stitching, as though an archaeological dig were being revealed; playing too with the layers of marks.

I also wanted to see what happens if a darker fragment is layered below. Here the shapes from a portion of the paper lamination I did using the floor plan stencil, on already darkened transparent. I have aligned the "walls" with the voided shapes already there.

There will be at least one more layer over this, but first the stitching to secure this layer. Already I can see that the thread I have been using just won’t to. It works to pick out the voided shapes because it contrasts with the underlying colour of the fabric. But if subsequent stitch layers are to work, I think the thread needs to tone with this colour. All quite experimental for me, I am still thinking my way through the stitching, at a larger scale than the first seeding, but of a similar ilk I think.

Today’s musical companions were the Bénédictines du Sacré Coeur de Montmartre.

Assemblage

I very often have Mesopotamia in the back of my mind when exploring with Studio 11 experiments - currently in how transparent fabrics can ben coloured and the potential they hold. 

An assemblage is a group of objects brought together from a site which typify that site, or a particular period. 

This is an assemblage of things old and new which may help me say something about Mesopotamia and history with textiles.

Most recently I created a stencil which which I used with a lamination technique to apply paper to some organza I had coloured as part  of the transparent experiments we have been doing. The stencil was based the floor plans of several of the temple layouts at Eridu, the oldest of cities according to the Sumerians, where sweet water was discovered, site of the Abzu. The transparent is laid over some hand dyed fabric from an earlier class I took with Christine, sort of desert’ish. Though now I wonder if I should try something blue beneath it, for water. And whether I might not cut it up and use parts of it in different things, rather than as one piece.

The stenciling process - cutting out shapes from freezer paper and then ironing that paper onto the silk screen, has created all these negative shapes, which I shall keep and try to use in some other context.

I have been thinking about what skills were key to the development of civilisation in Mesopotamia, and one, of course, is weaving, without which we have neither baskets, nor linen shifts, nor tapestries. So I have been experimenting with the cordage technique, learnt on and Alice Fox workshop at Studio 11 using  grass from the  garden, fibres from yucca and phormium (New Zealand Flax), and some wool roving I bought, to create “thread” of sorts. The blue is the roving, twisted during a recent Studio 11 zoom session.

I like the way the colours work with this fabric, but the “thread” might also be useful with some of the other recent transparents experiments. Or perhaps I'll twist some more

The fabric is, again from an early workshop, using the wax resist technique to evoke the sort of patterns one finds in for example, pottery with scratched patterns, of rock carvings. Here assembled, to see how they might mingle with some linen thread I bought from “somewhere”. 

And here, another assembled group of transparents - fine voile coloured with acrylic inks, walnut ink and rust dyed  

They seem to fit together rather well

I at last have a stool workshop, so I can sit at my bench with music playing - Heligoland in this case (Massive Attack one day Pergolesi the next!) - look at the anemones by the fence, and muse. It is a great pleasure. I am tucked away down the side of the house, and have to duck past the well to get here. It somehow feels appropriate

Lamination results

So here's what happened. I had a bit of a rethink about the content when my dear heart suggested that the Venetian door might look interesting surrounded by flowers. My mind immediately jumped to my most favourite book in the world, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. For those of you who don't know it, it is the story of Mary, a lonely little girl, orphaned by cholera in Colonial India, who is sent "home" to her Uncle's house in England. Home is a forbidding Yorkshire mansion, Misselthwaite Manor, full of secrets and strange cryings in the night from behind closed doors. Here, another lonely little boy, Colin, is cooped up in an upstairs room because he is an "invalid". Mary discovers him, unbeknownst to the adults and, having been spoilt herself, has no truck with his spoilt ways, ignoring the tantrums and his determination that he is dying. She also discovers a walled garden in the grounds of the Manor house, locked away behind an old, ivy covered door, in which no one has been since the Colin's mother died. Mary finds her way into the garden, and takes Colin there because she is sure it holds a Magic, which will make him well. Gradually, with the help of local boy Dickon, who has a skill and instinct for all growing things, they weed and plant, prune and sow seeds, laugh and play and, as the garden comes back to life, so the children flourish. Eventually Mary's uncle, Colin's father, returns from abroad, where he has been wandering, deep in mourning for his lost wife. He walks out into the grounds of the Manor, to discover sounds of laughter from behind the high walls of the garden, and his son full of life and joy, racing through the door, with Mary not far behind him. 

So, I took some text from the book, my worn Venetian door and some images of flowers from our garden and combined them to produce this - with apologes for the poor quality of the images - the iPad just isn't as good as a proper camera.

Here it is shown laid against white fabric, and below, some of the spare bits put together without much thought just to see what happened. Because the matte medium goes on through a textured screen you end up with a broken image, hence the white showing through the voile.

I think I may be able to work with these, adding embroidery and embellishment to enhance the images. However, I do prefer the lamination laid over some of my previously dyed fabrics, the white shining though the voile is too stark a contrast, dark fabric underneath makes the image look ghostly, whereas here the colours blend together and might become something rather nice. I might try dying a piece of fabric specifcally to get the right colours behind the differing elements of the image but, as a trial, this gives me some ideas.

I've taken elements of the text in the book to give a hint of the story, focusing on the key points. The broken nature of the image means that some of the text is lost, but I think I can reinstate it with stitch to make the story clear.

We also did some laminating onto solid fabric - a similar technique, except you apply the matte medium to the fabric and the surface of the image, rather than through a screen and the layer of voile. This was a hurried amalgam of a picture of a beautiful diamond leaded window in a church in Suffolk, and some images taken from old herbals. I cut the images up and recombined to make a patchwork of stained glass, plants and words. Very fiddly as the individual bits of paper have to be taped together on the back to hold them all as one piece. Once dried and heat set, as with the voile, you soak the whole thing in a bucket of water, then rub away at the back of the paper until only the images from the front are left. Obviously I had to reverse anything with words on them so they came out the right way round. 

Perhaps a grid of black ribbon and some additional stitch might give me a rather nice panel for a cushion cover or some such. It may take a while though, back to work on Monday, so don't expect a fininshed article for a while, or perhaps several whiles!

The danger of blogs

I love wandering round other people's blogs, there are just so many creative people out there, doing their thing, making beauty in the world and sharing it generously with the rest of us.

BUT, they are dangerous. Having returned home from a lovely workshop with Christine today, I came to my computer to add an album to my digital collection, by the band Rising Appalachia, discovered in one of Terri's always inspiring series of posts Tunes for a Monday Morning. I thought I'd "just browse" for a bit while waiting for the CD to add itself to my PC. Seven or eight blogs later, having met Els's wonderful sheep, caught up with Jude and Judy, admired some lovely stitched forget - me - nots, dropped by Penny's daily scratchings and drifted though several other creative places, I realise that I have wandered around the world, but also have run out of natural light to photograph my experiments from today, so they will have to wait I'm afraid. I also haven't confessed to my purchases at the Knitting and Stitching Show yesterday, for how could I go all that way to London and come back without something to add to the creativity store? It was a lovely day, always a delight to spend some time with darling daughter.And now I must run off to watch the latest Battles on The Voice - a pleasure I can't resist - more people sharing the beauty they make with the world, or at least with those of us who love the programme :-)

A workshop to look forward to

I'm going to a workshop at Studio 11 at the end of this week, another try at paper lamination. I had a go in 2013 but was a bit dubious about the results. You can click on them to see a bigger version

The technique involves placing coloured magazine or toner printed images under fine poly/silk voile, then screening acrylic matte medium onto the top of the voile through a patterned screen. Where the medium comes through the screen it penetrates the voile to the images below. You set the medium by ironing, immerse the whole lot in water so that the back of the paper gets soggy, turn over the voile and peel all of the back of the paper off so you are just left with the coloured image; the texture reflecting whatever pattern was in the screen. Looking back at these now I can see that I left far too much space between the images. I've seen other students working with this technique during my Friday sessions - one of the many pleasures of going there, as you get to see people using all sorts of techniques.

So, this time I am a bit forewarned. I'm hoping to do something with some of the pictures I took in Venice when my dear heart and I visited 11 years ago this month. It is a wonderful place, so full of light, texture, rich colours and a myriad of interesting things to look at. I'll print out some of my photos and, using the image below as a focal point, see if I can create something that echoes both the worn and historic textures I saw there and the marvellous byzantine enamels and mosaics in St Mark's.

I was entranced by the special atmosphere there, the richly decorated churches, the colours of the walls reflected in the canals. In particular, we were struck by the complete absence of traffic noise because, of course, there is no road traffic at all.

Here are some of the images I hope to use, somehow. All very experimental, but at least I have a vague idea of what I'm doing this time.

I might also take a copy of this along

Dad as a young boy of around 12 - and this

Mum and Dad together in happy times during a family picnic.
My darling Dad died when I was seven; he was only 44. It would be good to do something with these images, but I have no idea what. Christine might help though, as she has done a series of works about her father and his loss of memory, so has experience of working with personal imagery like this. This one is particularly lovely I think.

However, before all this happens, my lovely girl and I are going here - on Friday. There may be have to be confessons of a retail nature!