Joseph Alanen (1885-1920)

All images via A Polar Bears Tale

I can see these as woven picture, I think they would look absolutely beautiful.

Awesomeness and Project 6 Reflections

SUPAKITCH & KORALIE - VÄRLDSKULTUR MUSEET GÖTEBORG from elr°y on Vimeo.

I've really enjoyed this way of working with fabric.  I find it hard to compare it to working with stitch because they seem to be one thing to me rather than an either or.  I do enjoy this way of manipulating fabric directly because it achieves such immediate results and for someone as impatient as me that is always going to be a good thing.

The shapes and movement created with these techniques of manipulating fabric in different ways were really interesting to me.  Applique gives so much control whereas the other methods of manipulation were far less predictable to me.  Perhaps that comes with practise though, I'd like to be able to take some time and go back through the book trying out all of the manipulations it mentions.

I like the way that my pieces work in relation to the drawings that inspired them for the most part, but I think that the techniques you choose to employ in any given piece give it a whole new feel and takes it beyond any result that can be achieved using two dimensional techniques.

In the applique exercises I liked working with my drawings and found them to be a good leaping off point, but when it came to trying to recreate a picture I found it a bit frustrating, perhaps I was restricting myself to much, trying to recreate things exactly as I saw them instead of interpreting them in a new way.

I feel incredibly positive and excited working in this area.  Its such a huge area, full of possibility and potential to create in so many different ways.  I can't wait to pursue it in more depth and far from feeling restricted by its boundaries I feel like the opportunities are boundless.

Project 6 - Manipulating

 For this section, all of my experiments were based on some drawings I did during our  May French trip of a bulb of new seasons garlic.  Most of my reading was from the Colette Wolff book, Manipulating Fabric, which I really loved, it's so incredibly useful.   I tried out some quilting, slashing, tearing, tucking, padding, furrowing, gathering, moulding and pleating.  I apologise for the incredibly bad photos, they were taken in a huge rush while I was trying to pack up my kids and I for coming back over to France a couple of weeks ago and I didn't realise quite how bad they were until I saw them now!

My first experiment was with quilting, combined with slashing and tearing, through layers of purple sheer, green cotton and white felt  stitched in a grid and then slashed and cut and torn to expose the layers beneath.  Next I tried out stitching some shapes and them stuffing them with wool roving to pad them.  I liked this effect but found it very difficult to not end up with all the fabric puckered around the edges of the stitching.
I experimented with tearing strips from different sorts of green fabric and then some of them were couched and some threaded through some holey hessian.  I really like the texture that tearing fabric leaves, the rough edges and the loose threads.

Below are some machine stitched tucks, almost in straight lines!

Following the instructions for furrowing from the Colette Wolff book I made this sample stitching a larger piece of scrim to a smaller piece of calico to create interesting dips and bumps.  I really do love this, the depth of texture that is achievable is wonderful, I can see myself using this method a lot in the future.

Some manipulations using the moulding technique of shaping a synthetic fabric around a former and then steaming or heating it.  I found this technique a bit hit and miss and wasn't overly happy with the results.  i had my most success from using a marble as a former.

I tried out many gathering techniques on different kinds of fabric.  The most interesting result, I believe, was using a synthetic turquoise velvet, the end result was so smooth it really brings to mind a liquid.

 For my final Project 6 sample I stuck with my garlic bulb drawings as inspiration and chose to interpret one fairly literally.  The drawing that I liked the best was that of the end of the garlic bulb and looking through the Colette Wolff book gave me lots of ideas about how I could recreate this sort of shape in fabric.  My initial idea was to use graduated tucks in a circular pattern but as I read on I realised that I was perhaps being a bit over ambitious, especially as I struggle to machine straight lines most of the time!  The technique I settled on in the end was gathering.  It seemed to offer all I needed while at the same time not being too fiercely complicated for me to execute well.  I thought that perhaps I would make the gathered shape and then mount it into a piece of calico with a window cut out so that both sides were visible like some of the examples I saw in the book but once I had finished sewing the garlic shape I felt that this step was going to be unnecessary and so I left it as a free standing piece.

 After reading through the section on gathering I decided on a 'yo-yo'  I wanted to create the colour of the garlic as well as the shape and so on a base of a 30cm circle of calico I quilted down layers of sheers.. Firstly a layer of a white sheer that looked a little like a very thin seersucker, then a purple polyester and finally a green metallic organza.  On each layer I used a matching metallic machine thread to stitch 'rays' back and forward across the centre of the circle, not only to attach the fabric but also to enhance the texture and the feeling of the folds in the garlic bulb radiating out form the centre.  When all of the layers were in place I took my embroidery scissors to it and started slashing through some of the layers.  I've since thought that perhaps using a heat gun to zap away some of the green and purple fabric may have worked but I am quite happy with the result from the slashing.  Once the base was made I hand stitched a large loose running stitch around the perimeter of the circle and then gathered the whole lot with trepidation into a circular yoyo puff.  I was so relieved that it had worked!  I stitched a base for my garlic from wool felt with embroidery on it to create the details of the garlic bulb.  

Overall I am so pleased with the whole thing, I didn't really expect that it would turn out so pretty but I'm thrilled that it did. This is the project I have been most pleased with so far

This part of the course has been so enjoyable for me after the horror of assignment 2.  I feel filled with enthusiasm again and ready to race on to assignment 4, just as soon as I get home to all my supplies :)

Project 6 , Stage 3- Appliqueing

Stage 3 - Applied Fabric Techniques



 My first, tentative steps into applique.  I was almost a total novice, apart from some felt food I made for my sons' Christmas present, maybe I had a vague idea that applique was a bit twee, perhaps I had relegated it to the same drawer as cross stitching.  I have to admit that I was very pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it and also by the range of results I was able to achieve with such a straightforward technique.

 I began gently, just experimenting with different fabrics and stitches to see which I enjoyed the most.  I based all of these experiments on some drawings of a pineapple from my sketchbook.

First of all I tried out cut-back applique, using the shapes and colours of my pineapple, layering a sheer orange polyester, orange wool felt, a green interweave and a green cotton.  I stitched hexagons through all of the layers and then cut out some or all of the upper layers to let the others show through.  The combination of colours isn't particularly pleasing to me but I do like the different textures showing through, especially where the orange sheer was cut back and the rough surface of the orange felt was exposed.

 As the course notes suggest I then moved on to trying out some reverse applique using different layers.  This was my first attempt at machine applique.  I like the effect of the zig zag stitch, it brings an added dimension to the piece that i think would've been missing if I'd used a straight stitch.  The majority of my machining up to this point has involved trying to stay in a straight line and it was quite a steep learning curve to start doing curved shapes, I was improving a bit toward the end of the exercise I think!  I also felt it was important to use a patterned fabric here, as I am prone to avoiding them.  In my opinion it works well in tying all the other greens together.

 Moving on to something a bit more creative and challenging I created a sheer envelope to house some pinappley coloured fragments and snippets and then topped it all by hand appliqueing a leather cut out pineapple 'scale' to the top with the idea that the  unattached snippets behind would create movement and texture.  I'm quite pleased with this one, I like the depth of it and I think it would work really well with many of these hexagons en masse stitched together to create a patchwork pineapple wall.  Next to it is my inital experiment with zapping acrylic felt with a heat gun to create interesting pineapple shaped distortions.

 My idea was to use the acrylic felt to make a layered grid over cotton and then to zap so that the exciting textures would emerge just like when I'd practised on the green felt above.  It would've been really awesome, I'm sure of it, I'm also sure that the green and orange felts both came out of the same packet......   So here it is - orange felt, diligently stitched to green cotton background with a very neat grid in preparation for the exciting warping and texturing that was going to occur.  What actually occurred was some slight singeing and a stench of burnt sheep throughout my house! - I now know that checking whether your felt is acrylic or wool before you start stitching it is the best idea, also that acrylic felt causes coughing and wheezing when you heat it up, two important lessons:)

 Moving on from the felt disaster I decided to try out the same approach using Tyvek in place of the felt.  Being fairly certain that it would work this time I took the time to stitch a hexagonal grid.  I painted the Tyvek with yellow and green silk paint and then , because I couldn't resist it, I scattered it with glitter.  There was also a layer of orange sheer between Tyvek and cotton but it mostly vanished under the glare of the heat gun.  I'm really pleased with the results this time round, partly due to the disaster that went before I'm sure.  I love the big texture and the big effect, but most of all I love the back of the piece which ended up looking like a crinkly patchwork, sadly I seem to have neglected to photograph that!

 I was still interested in the idea of making a sheer envelope with trapped fragments and the hexagonal grids suggested by my studies of the pineapple seemed to me to be a really interesting way to create sheer 'windows'.  Freehand machine stitching hexagons proved to be much harder than I'd imagined so some of them are more like squashed circles but I don't think that this matters too much.  I like the overall effect and think that its an interesting technique that offers many opportunities to explore it further.

When it came to my large applique sample I very nearly carried on working with the pineapple but by then I was running out of quite a lot of orange and green things!  I also contemplated working with the fabric collage of new season garlic from earlier in this project because I am crazy about the colour combinations in those garlic bulbs.  In the end I went with a sgraffito painting/scraping of a fishermans bucket of rope that came from a postcard sent to me by my mum from Greece.  Using an image created with the sgraffito technique seemed to me to offer so many textural possibilities I thought that it's be perfect for this stage. 

Working on to an old remnant of my Mums' calico curtains I machined down a black sheer and a dark blue metallic satin in strips.  Next I applied the bucket shape cut from some hessian with Bondaweb, this fabric provided the exact texture and structure that I was looking for but not the colour and so on top I hand stitched the coloured stripes of the bucket with sheers in the hope that the texture of the hessian would still show through.  I decided to leave the rough edges to create texture ion the picture and also to try and draw the eye away from the background which I wasn't terribly happy with.  The ropes inside the bucket were created by making a pocket from a really open weave scrim and stuffing it with lots of different neutral yarns from a texture sample pack.  I stitched it down here and there to create the lumps and bumps.  I believe that this is the most successful part of the applique, i am really pleased with hiw it works and how it echoes the rope like texture of the original painting.  The rest of the picture was completed by hand stitching felt shapes and some sheer to finish it off.  Overall I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out, although I would very much like to start embroidering details on to it but I understand that that is not what this exercise is about so I will save that for another day!

Project 6 , Stage 1 and 2- Collaging

Wool felt, polyester sheers and some sort of interweave stuff, based on drawings of new seasons garlic from the spring time in Aquitaine.

Top - layers of black cotton and white felt with holes cut into it and more shapes cut from a black sheer stuck on top, based on a sketch of tree bark in our park.

Bottom - Polyester sheer sandwich with trapped snippets, based on the colours of a pineapple painting.

Cotton collage based on a sketch from looking at Ernst Haeckls book of nature forms.

Collaged picture of African violets from Country Living magazine, using satin, polyester, interweave, hessian and velvet.

Stage 1 - Preparation

I did my best to follow the suggestion to lay out and organize my fabrics but living in a very small house with another adult and two children meant that the best I managed was taking it all out of my wardrobe and stacking it in piles in my living room, where at least I could see it every day!

Stage 2 - Developing Ideas

I've found it quite difficult so far in this course to work in my sketchbook in quite the right way.  I've felt that the drawing habits I've developed over the years aren't quite right for this kind of arts practice and I've struggled to get in to the swing of things, using my drawings as a jumping off point rather than a finished article.  Embarking on this project I decided that i would work with some completely new images to try and explore them in depth in the required manner.

I ended up really enjoying creating the above collages.  I very quickly began to see methods of recreating my images in fabric popping up all over the place, and  began to find the whole process pretty exciting.  I also realised near the beginning that these exercises were designed to lead on to applique projects and so some of them were created with this focus in mind.

It was most interesting to me to use different textures and weights of fabrics together and see how they worked in conjunction.  In particular \I really like the contrasts of using a heavy textured fabric, like a hessian, alongside a very light sheer.

Something that I didn't enjoy was trying to recreate exact matches for colours and shapes in the original drawing.  I prefer to work far more loosely and organically, but in retrospect I think I was trying to be too specific, getting hung up matching things too precisely instead of using the materials I had available to me in a more creative way to suggest the same sort of drawing rather than a copy of it.

Sketchbook 4

Time in France, a daytrip to Llandudno, Inuit mythology and a Pineapple have been inspiring me recently.  I've been terribly lax at keeping up with this blog but I have been working my way through assignment 3 and managed to complete it and post it before we hopped back to France for some decent sunshine :)