Contemplating layers

Which is a theme appropriate to working with transparents, which can evoke ...

Layers of landscape - the view from my bedroom in coloured organza cut with a soldering iron and fused to a base layer of calico. Two layers of machine stitching done, just the foreground to work out now. It is intimidating me!

Layers of history in the landscape,

Layers of habitation, evoked by fragile remains; wondering which of  the recent experiments might be useful ...

Layers of stitch to add colour and texture, perhaps that of excavated soil

And maybe reveal those layers of habitation

A bit of a test run, to see how the transparents I have been working with might evoke the levels that are concealed, revealed, during an archaeological dig. Still thinking how to do this. I may need to cut the voile into less regular shapes to create a sense of the unfolding of layer upon layer.

My stitching and thinking today accompanied by Low

And the Oni Wytars Ensemble being Byzantine. There’s variety for you

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

transparents again

I am thinking around ideas of Mesopotamia, layers of time and habitation. 

These pieces of sheer, blogged about here might just begin to express this by using both layers of colour on the voile - here quite light in tone, and also layering the fabrics one over the other. 

So, having applied one layer of colour to the sheer poly voile, walnut ink and Quink on one, acrylic ink on the other, they have now been weighed down in trays with rusty bits

and wetted with either white vinegar and a splash of acrylic ink on the hummocks

Or walknut ink and tea, with trickles of Quink.

The same colorants as the first layer, with added rust textures hopefully, where the random bits of iron will oxidise with the tea/vinegar. 

I wonder what will happen. They are "cooking" overnight under a sheet of damp newsprint.

Transparents

We have been working with Christine on the next online Studio 11 workshop, this time looking at transparent fabrics and how to get colour onto them. Christine has uploaded several tutorials and we all meet via Zoom once a week for updates and discussions. In the absence of a real one, I am improvising a "design wall" by pinning bits together and suspending them from a picture in the sitting room, hence the ghostly radiator! Tis way I can get some idea of how the colours are, or are not visible from a distance.

The first section here are all coloured using transfer inks, which have a gloopy consistency. Once painted onto a paper support of some sort they can then be ironed onto synthetic fibres, here sheer polyester voile. These were my first attempts, just playing with the colours to see how they came out. Some of them will get another layer, investigating how the colours mix when layered onto the fabric. Some of the patterns were painted directly onto the paper, some are monoprints. I have painted a few more papers since, which are awaiting my next slow ironing session. You do have to move the hot iron very very veery slowly. Appropriate music helps -  ranging from Faure's Requiem to Leonard Cohen. I have eclectic tastes

Then I played with walnut ink and Quink, and acrylic inks, scrumpling the fabric into a plastic pot of appropriate size and allowing the thing to "mulch" for a bit before taking it out and allowing to dry. The textures are really interesting, even more so when the fabric is layered over itself. At the bottom I have layered a piece from each technique, hence the colour ghosting behind the dark fabric. The acrylic ink gives a slight stiffness to the voile, but that might be because I've not washed the fabric yet - a vigorous rinse in cold water to get the excess pigment out. I have given it a hot press to set/cure the inks. 

More walnut ink experiments, this time smoothed over a piece of plastic wetted with ink. The fabric was then pushed about so it bubbled up in places, the colour pools around the ripples in the fabric. I really like this, but it is very subtle, I need to experiment more.

And the same technique with acrylic inks, which cure and will stay on the fabric, unlike the walnut ink which is likely to wash out. They looked incredibly vibrant when still wet and on the plastic, more subdued once dry but I think I like that better

The more neutral colours have potential for my Mesopotamia theme and I have been working towards appropriate textures in my experiments. They might provide an interesting base for some paper lamination, which is the next technique to work with. 

I have such admiration for Christine for keeping Studio 11 going despite the difficulties of the past year, not just Covid, but her loss of her previous Studio and consequent stress and upheval. Our little creative community is still thriving under her generous tutelage, and lockdown has become the catalyst for her developing a series of online courses which can now be found on her website. 

We are very lucky.

A week of finishing

I have been busy this week getting up to date with a couple of projects. First a quilt I have been making as part of the online Studio11 workshops which Christine is running, having been rather scuppered by Covid. I blogged earlier about the project with Coronavirus as a theme; that is still ongoing as I've been doing too much thinking and not enough doing, which is often a failing of mine. However her "Potato Chip Quilt" project was straightforward, and took much less thinking about to achieve. There seem to be several variants with this name: one is a series of blocks with a square at the centre and a different coloured border on each square; another, similar to the one we made, consists of strips joined with a diagonal seam. The one Christine teaches comprises a pile of fabric strips of a consistent width but differing lengths and a pile of squares the same dimension as the width of strips. You make a long, long, looooooooong strip by alternately stitching strip, square, strip, square at random. The strip is then seamed and trimmed several times until you have a rectangle. Sounds very simple, but you have to get the maths right in order to know how big your quilt will be, and to make one that has sensible dimensions. 

It is all finished, 

quilted with a design I based on some of the fabric, 

 

with some hand dyed fabric as backing

 

I am really pleased with it, and have enough strips left (my poor maths!!) to make another of a similar size, though perhaps with less random and more deliberation.

Then there was my Noro jacket, started back in 2018. It too is finished, though currently awaiting a decision on buttons. 

 

You will see that I ignored the Noro "just make it random" philosophy (be "charmed by the non-uniformity, unevenness, & coarseness of nature"), I prefer to mirror the colour changes. This did involve quite a bit of reeling off from the start of the ball to get a match, but I used those bits in the back to vary the changes where no matching was needed. The yarn feels lovely knitted up and this jacket will get a lot of wear I hope, but I'll probably steer clear of any future Noro temptations. Beautiful as they are, with such a high price I don't like feeling that they are using a bit of marketing BS to cover flaws in both the yarn (which did sometimes fall apart in my hands as I was knitting) and the multiple knots and joins per ball (presumably because the yarn fell apart as it was being spun).

And yes, I am decidedly less sylphlike than the model in the pattern, but hey ho, I am somewhat older than her as well, and did once have my sylphlike moments!! The cat chaps don't mind, so long as they provide biscuits their humans can be any size they like!

More sparkle

Well my first attempt at Or Nue is completed. I am pretty pleased with it, despite the slightly suggestive bulge at top left where I tacked down the thread on the back at an angle rather than across the back of the border threads - just don't think of Mick Jagger in tight trousers and you'll be fine!

It has now been tucked into a small box frame and sits on the good man's mantlepiece in his study where it catches the light coming through the bay windows and reminds him that I love him every day, not just on our anniversary. And yes, I did manage to get it finished for the special day and, yes, I did have enough of the gold thread to finish, so didn't have to investigate the scrambled muddle of "less gold" gold thread.

I really enjoyed stitching this, though I'd probably work any future projects in slightly slower time: all that peering through an illuminated magnifier and stitching for long periods resulted in a migraine and very stiff neck and shoulders once it was done. The combination of simple stitching with attention to the finer detail felt very mindful, and listening to my playlist of medieval music provided a lovely and appropriate background. However, enough stitching for now. I have returned to a knitting project that I started more than two years ago - remember that lovely Noro yarn? I lost confidence when I got to the sleeves; the increases in combination with a lace pattern, not something I've done before, so it got tucked away. But I needed something big for my eyes to focus on so out it has come again and I have promised a friend and fellow knitter that I will finish it in time for our next meeting for tea and cake, whenever Coronavirus allows.

I was right though, the increases on the sleeves are rather tricky, but I won't be beat this time!

A little bit of sparkle

The pleasure of watching Rachel's patient stitching on her Dreams of Amarna project has revived my interest in goldwork. She is now up to episode 7, so if you'd like to spend a gentle 20 minutes or so listening to her thoughts on embroidery and watching her design take shape you can find her here.

Yes, I do have far too many other projects on the go that need my attention - in fact an overwhelming amount, but I found myself going back to a deserted piece that was begun in a lovely workshop we had with Becky Hogg four years ago. I had abandoned it because it was not as well stitched as I would have liked, but when I got back to it I thought, "hmmmm, that's really not too bad" and having finished it I am rather happy with the result. You have to understand that this woodpecker has not preened his wing feathers recently, which is why they are a bit askew! He has also failed to peck the hole in his bit of tree trunk, I assume he is a lazy woodpecker! You can see how he really should look here.

Rachel's current project uses a technique called Or Nue, a very old technique using rich gold and silver threads couched down with fine silks to create pictures that glitter seductively in the light. Mary Corbet has a rather nice piece about it here. Rachel is using a spiral thread, where the gold begins at the heart of Akhenaten and spirals out from there. Having decided that I would really enjoy this meditative stitching, and having a wedding anniversary approaching, I thought I might devise my own, very simple design, and work it in time to give to my dear heart.

Spiraling looked a bit too scary, so I am running the gold thread from side to side on the fabric. This came from a rather louche bundle that was part of Cecil's stash - definitely not the way one should store goldwork supplies. This is the tidier bit, and I am hoping there will be enough because the untidy bit (for which read something that looks like a large bundle of knitting wool that a kitten has been over enthusiastic with) is a slightly different gold.

So, I set to yesterday with much enthusiasm and little understanding and have got this far by this morning.

I am using embroidery floss rather than silk, because my dry skin turns any length of flat silk thread into something resembling Gonk hair. The eagle eyed among you will notice my basic error; I am running the gold thread across in singles rather than in pairs. This means twice the stitching so it will go slowly; unhelpful since our anniversary is in three days time! It is only our second anniversary, though we have known each other 22 years now. Traditionally gifts are cotton, but I think the linen ground fabric is an acceptable substitute.

Wish me luck