Having decided to try and sell separately the nine Hare Masks I made at the end of last year I found suitable but utilitarian cardboard boxes and have been dithering about how to dress them to make a more attractive appearance for eBay and for the purchaser when opening the box. Tissue paper, crumpled, some shredded?
The masks are meant primarily as decorative objects but can be worn, The straps are non-curl 6cm elastic. The inner surface is cotton and the main surface mixed textiles but mainly natural fabrics, some organic. I often source fabric from charity shops but it is hard to avoid acrylic and poly. Rayon (viscose) – made from wood pulp – is common in women’s clothes often with a useful shiny finish.
Hare (Green Man) Mask, about 43 x 30 cm, mixed textiles and wire frame.
Embellishing was invented before the sewing machine as a way of joining fabrics without having to stitch, the textile fibres are pulled together by the action of the – very sharp – needles being forced back and forth through the materials.
I’m working here with silk, bamboo and cotton scraps, some of these are tiny or little swatches. The process is fairly quick, an hour or two is enough to create a piece suitable for the hare masks I have been making. The primary aim here is texture and the small amount of colours other than cream or white should help with that. The silk is making my hands feel er, silky which I guess is an effect of the way these materials have been treated in the finishing process.
The embellishing machine can have a maximum of five needles but I usually don’t have that many as I want more control of the appearance.
I’m waiting for the post to bring some 18g (1mm) aluminium wire to make the supporting frame for these masks, the embellished fabric in this first pic is a bit heavier than usual (lower pic) and so needs a slightly stiffer wire.
Once the fabric versions are complete, maybe five or six, I’m going to start on some leather ones, with a somewhat different set of tools although the sewing machine will still play a part.
Hare Mask 2, mostly finished
Mostly finished and mostly a trial for the shaping and finishing.
Now and then the UK charity shops are just amazing. I was browsing them this rainy morning in Bristol and found, in one shop four huge cotton scarfs in plain colours for just £2 each. Another one was just demanding to be used for doll-making, plaits and braids ready-made. All in good condition, as new. Now I’m reluctant to cut them!
I have been working on a new quilt for the last few weeks, until the weather became too good to stay home.
Work in progress – Oil quilt, 2023
This is a (low-res) pic of my sewing bench, work in progress. The quilt will consist of 72 printed, stitched and embellished fabric squares which are then quilted, stitched together and printed/overstitched again, until done. Most of the squares were inkjet printed, some printed with stamps cut from rubber or lino, some were also stencilled or hand drawn and painted. There are also other forms of printing such as collagraph.
Still sorting out work from a year or two ago, this quilt was made in 2018, there was also an artist’s book using similar mask images. The animals are all British Isles native apart from the grey squirrel, although that has been here for quite some time now. I haven’t done much work for the last two months and sorting out old pieces, repairing or completing them feels like a way back in to making some art. These are sketches of some of the mask images, drawn on a tablet, or drawn on paper and scanned and manipulated in Affinity Photo. The bamboo silk fabric was digitally printed and I also screen printed some tiles but the results were messy.
Many people have reported how the early part of the Covid crisis was a period of stimulus and creativity, I felt that but in the second UK lockdown I felt quite depressed, especially with our government incompetence and found work difficult. I did start work on a fairly large piece – another art quilt – but progress was slow and I have put it aside for a while.
Animal Masquerade, quilted bamboo silk, 120 x 90 cm, 2018
The next and final step is to make a border, this will need to be a dark material and quite wide I think. The quilt was to be a practical piece for a child’s bed but didn’t get finished and so wasn’t used that way. I try to use organic fabrics, usually from the Organic Fabric Co. in Wales but this isn’t always possible; I like bamboo because it is grown without herbicides or pesticides and is really versatile, takes dye and print beautifully and is widely available. The quilting (wadding) is also bamboo.
I am having a clear up and out, and I came across these small pieces from a few years back when I was pursuing an MA in Multidisciplinary Printmaking at Bower Ashton in Bristol. I made them with the Fukushima fiasco in mind, knowing that would be a topical issue all my remaining life and beyond. Fukushima is in the news again as the authorities want to release a million tons of radioactive water into the sea, Uproar Over Japan’s Decision to Disperse Radioactive Fukushima Waste Water and the situation at the site remains dire. I made about ten, gave some away.
I’m thinking of re-framing them perhaps as a single piece, but undecided about the type of frame, a black painted board? These scanned images are fuzzy, the originals have a lot more detail.
Meltdown, 1,2,3,4, approx A4, mixed textiles and embroidery
This little fabric print was made with a simple stencil, I made lots but didn’t use them. Came across it this morning and thought I would add a border. The impression of a face was entirely accidental.
This patchwork and machine embroidery quilt was made from a piece of patchwork originally destined to be dolls clothes, but I had so much that it had been put aside and forgotten. The quilting lines show in this picture but the metallic threads do not. There are a lot of shiny silver and blue metallics here and many of them and vaguly flower shaped.
The quilting lines are mainly broad curves, often inspired half or quarter moons or those slivers of the new moon.
Using Kind of Blue as a title feels very cheeky, but the Miles Davis masterpiece is often playing in my studio and the dreamy, sensuous curves of the music are always in my mind.
Moonflowers would reflect my hippy youth, back when work of this kind was unknown, or just consigned to ‘women’s work’ and ignored by the art world. Now there is a wealth of fabulous textile art, many examples may be found on the web.
I don’t make many art pieces but I was sorting through my fabric and came across this forgotten piece of work that I had put aside for some reason, possibly a left-over from a double-sided cape of some years back. It was patchwork blues, slightly embellished and overstitched, looked quite attractive so I thought why not quilt it.
I found a length of black cotton just the right size, then a layer of wadding and finally some thin cotton from a sheet. There is a lot of silver thread used in the embroidery and the quilting but it doesn’t show in this pic.
I’m using a free motion embroidery foot to quilt circles and flower patterns, takes practice but gives me a distinctive style.
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