We really did have a delightful time with Christine yesterday. A select group, all enthusiastic, each with our own ideas and reasons for being there.
As you can see the workshop is a lovely place, full of light (much brighter than it appears in this picture), well set up and with plenty of space for being everything from very precise to making a mess. Rubber gloves are essential at least for some part of the day!
I had come with my
pre prepared Shibori as I knew what I wanted to do with some of my cloth - still
Harry and Connie's sheets by the way! (I really should get round to telling you about them). But I brought some along as well to play with as well.
One particularly contorted preparation took life,
Pygmalion like, and marched across the table! OK, it's not quite Burne Jones, but ... maybe, a
giraffe or two?
There were a number of other bits of tying, wrapping, rubber banding, kebab sticking and otherwise manipulating fabric. My final show of things ready for pots various looked like this
Because there were four of us and Christine there was room for more than two colours each, in fact there were a whole variety of dye colours to choose from once we'd all made our own colour decisions
And once brought home, rinsed, rinsed again, then run through a hot but not boil wash, all these varied colours and patterns emerged from the washing machine.
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Kebab sticks folded randomly into fabric
purple in the pot, it has washed to a rather pleasant blue |
I've included all my bits there, with apologies for the odd layout. I find Blogger a bit eccentric about where it puts stuff sometimes!
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| The stitched Shibori |
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folded, rolled then alternately
knotted and rubber banded |
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| The linen took up very little colour |
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The silk, on the other hand, was delightful. These bits
were wrapped around the bit of blue pipe above |
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| goldfish or autumn leaves |
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round acetate pieces each side of folded cloth,
elastic banded, not clamped |
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| detail |
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| a faint hint of moon |
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| crumple wrapped in a stocking |
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| can you see the face peering out at the top? |
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layered whirligigs twisted and bundled into a fruit next
if you enlarge you can see the mesh in the outer corners |
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lolly sticks and fan folding then the triangles of the
other stitched piece. The stitches didn't show |
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| and finally - the giraffe - explosions of green! |
What delights for a day of fun.
Oh, and in the last class, Christine emphasised how important it is to clean your machine between each project
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| a bit of fluff |
She was right
I've been doing a little stitching, quietly in the evenings and at our first Studio 11 class last week. This started as something I took with me to Birmingham so I'd have some bits of cloth to play with in the evenings after looking at all those lovely quilts during the day. The squares began life as a tea towel, lovely loose weave linen, worn with years of smoothing cups and plates dry in my grandmother's hands. I used it in my first year with Christine as something to experiment with, to learn from, and to see the different way in which linen took up colour. I wasn't happy with the inital results - eventually the linen was torn in two and treated slightly differently on each half, way back here, but cut into squares, rearranged on some dark blue linen, stitched down with little stitches that match the background colour, I hope perhaps it has some potential. I think I've managed to keep the squares reasonably ... well square ... two layers of soft woven linen can surely wriggle about a bit in the hand when they're being stitched together. I rigged up the giraffe (OK it's a craft stand really, but you can see what I mean) to hold my embroidery frame and that made the stitching go a lot easier. I'd like to add some embroidered stitch, perhaps a little sparkle, something to enhance what's already there, but not intrude or detract. Simple. Careful. Sympathetic.
