The Night Garden fabric piece is now beautifully framed by Craftworks on Gloucester Road, Bristol and on sale at Artigo also on Gloucester Road.
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Night Garden in frame
Tag: fabric art
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Spring garden
Another machine embroidery and embellish piece, scraps of fabric, mostly natural cotton and silk but with some poly for the shine, this is rather more whimsical than most of my offerings, the bee seems to be popular but the wings need a bit more work.
I’ve been finding the dust from the machine embellishing process to be annoying, even using a mask it seems to get in the throat. I now have a small air filter machine that sits on the desk, it seems to help. I also vacuum every few minutes and make sure to wash hands often. The dust is very fine, it gathers around the embellishing needles and guard but also manages to spread around the work area.
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More cold fusion
A bit of work-in-progress, embellishing a piece of nuno-felt made long ago onto a slightly quilted white base with strips of variously coloured fabrics sandwiched in between, some stitch next. I suppose I could just as easily call it tornado or cyclone.
I rarely use more than two needles in the embellisher, if all five are used they seem to interact with each other and quickly break, perhaps I am impatient. These needles are currently £2 each or more and they do break easily, practice does help.
This piece is also using a piece of old nuno-felt work, overlayed with scraps and lots of stitch, embellished, cut away – repeatedly.
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More meltdown
Sorting through piles of old fabric scraps I came across these pieces of nunofelt, made many years ago on my kitchen table. These are left over from some other half-forgotten project, party clothing for a friend. Now to be reworked as Meltdown Cold Fusion (lol), the blue piece …
..and a table runner for the red piece.
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Oil quilt detail
The Oil quilt consists of four panels made up of about 80 squares of 20 x 20 cm, printed, painted, drawn, embellished, stitched and embroidered in various ways. I’m finding it hard to finish, the desire to add more detail is strong but almost certainly misguided. Better to work on another piece I think.
This detail is from the upper left of the second panel, it feels topical. The quilt as a whole seems to be a polemic.
This second detail is from same panel, lower right.
After a busy few days in London, several art galleries as well as street actions culminating in the gigantic – 800,000 peaceful folk – Palestine demo I’m doing some sewing, revising some old ideas. Meltdown, a series of fabric pieces, embellished, embroidered and heavily stitched, begun in 2015 as a response to the disaster at Fukushima (2011 on-going).
The subtlety of colour and stitch is rather lost in these photos.
I enjoy creating something – maybe not beautiful but hopefully of interest – using the tiniest of scraps picked up from the studio floor or stuffed away in waste bags.
Most of the thread I use for larger pieces or clothes (rare now) is organic cotton which is a little heavier than ordinary cotton, but for this work rayon, made from wood pulp is perfectly good. Not a plug just that these are widely available, Marathon rayon threads are very low cost and although they can be a little weak for some work they have a pleasant lustre and strength isn’t an issue here.
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.
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Blue Moon, Kind of Blue or Moonflowers
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.
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