Reading

I am currently reading two books, one is ‘Playing with Sketches’ by Whitney Sherman; it flew into my inbox in one of those cleverly timed emails, those that come before you are thoroughly awake, from Amazon which are so hard to resist. I am pleased I did not, as it is a book full of ‘drawing callisthenics’, new ideas and links to the work of those who have contributed to the book. I thoroughly enjoy books like this which are so packed with ideas that they are an exciting read.

The other book is ‘Mark-making in Textile Art’ by Helen Parrott; I managed to get this book by ordering from my local library, although it involved a long wait. It is a well presented book, with some pages showing textures and colours which are lovely. On the whole I would recommend it as an interesting read, but am pleased not to have bought it as I don’t think it is a book that I would keep going back to, but it may be a good one if you are starting to gather ideas for how to collect and use marks in your textile art. I liked some of her ideas for using straight stitch and reef knots as marks. I am working on finishing a few pieces which have literally been hanging around and I tried out her idea for radiant stitch and knots on my black and white waxed and discharged piece.

I have been taking some square photos to make some new cards using Moo.

I hope you have a few good books to read, a pleasure hard to outdo; perhaps leave a note with your suggestions, textile or fiction.

'Fragments from a Life'

As promised some time ago I am posting more details of the pieces I exhibited earlier this year for the exhibition ‘HerStory’. I made two pieces. The first was a fabric book. I used pieces of rusted fabric together with various fibres and scanned notes bonded with cocoon stripping. I also incorporated pieces of waxed paper which had been distressed with a wood burning tool. I wanted the book to look and feel very fragile and used ‘fuseFX’ a gossamer bonding mesh which was helpful to get the effect I was after. I was given a pair of rusty scissors the builder found in our garden which came at just the right time. I also added some pine needles which came from the road in Bournemouth where my mother lived.

Here are the notes for my submission for the exhibition:

‘Fragments from a Life’
When someone dies one can wish that, like the great diarists, they had left fulsome accounts of their life, telling all, answering all the unasked questions; however, most often we have only the odd fragments of fragile lives from which to try to piece together a story.

‘Fragments from a Life’ One and Two are based on this theme.
One piece is an artist’ book and the other is a small wall hanging.
Scraps of recipes, misspelled notes about how to manage a pension, very little is left, yet saying so much.

The second piece was a hanging loosely based on an open book. The pleated spine is padded. Some of the added elements use sheer fabric printed using a foam block. You may recognize the woman from my drawings of people in Dubrovnik last year; which shows that sketchbooks are really useful.

I thought I would post these here as now the excitement of the exhibition is well over it seems unlikely that they will see the light of day again for some time.

Collage and Stitch

At the start of the month I went to the first session of the Contemporary Textile Workshop I am attending twice a term. I went on the train and got thoroughly soaked before I found the college, but apart from that it was a good start.

We were asked to take a colourful object and then to draw and paint a still life from the grouped objects. We went through the process again from a different angle and added one colour to each piece of work by the other participants before joining and cutting up our collages into four six inch pieces.

I printed out two of the ‘designs’ using ink aid and added some hand and machine stitch.

On the second one I added some pieces from old book pages using gel medium.

A while ago I was given some T-shirt transfer paper and as I had never used it thought I would have a go using the other two ‘designs’. The outcome was not so good as the colours are not true and the texture strange, but I have used them to make a small book. I sewed the pages onto cable ties using the method I learned for medieval binding.

E-Motive

I am really pleased this year to have my book accepted for the’ We Love Your Books Exhibition’; this is especially so as my book on the closure of Woolworths theme last year was not selected. I felt quite daunted having another go this year, but it made it more special to be selected.

You can go to the website to find the books which will be in the exhibition and the full range of sketchbook spreads which will also be in the catalogue. Each year the organizers,Melaini Bush  and Dr Emma Powell lecturers from the University of Northampton and De Montfort University, ask for an additional element to the artists’ book and this year it was a photo of a landscape sketchbook spread.

The theme is E-motive and I worked on the idea of the colours linked with emotions. I used a series of collagraph prints printed onto cotton with the help of ink aid. I used an actual embossed ie colourless collagraph for the final spread.I made the prints on a Sunday printing course at City Lit. in London. As I now had the prints on fabric I could add some stitching.

It’s unlikely that I will get to the final exhibition but if you live in the area here are the details.

It’s worth having a look at the photos on Flickr as some of the books are really fascinating.

Great Linford Arts Workshop, Parklands, Great Linford, Milton Keynes MK14 5D2


from 28th Aug – 25th Sept, with a preview on Thursday 26th August from 6-9pm.


http://www.artworks-mk.co.uk/

Coptic Bind

I went to a very special book shop in Alresford just before the visit to my friends and decided that a different present would be to make them each a Coptic Bound notebook. I was also keen not to lose the skill I acquired in making the previous ones; you may remember the basic bind learned form Keith Smiths’ book took some perseverance and lots of trying again. I now have two of his books and there are many versions of the bind, some involving more than one needle and sewing across the spine. I am content to try and master the basic version.

First chose an old book with an interesting cover. The red book was falling apart and I got it for a £1, a bargain. I had hoped to use the lovely end papers to cover some of the sections, but they were too brittle, however, the inside of the cover had the same marbled paper.

First take the book apart and clean the cover, I use a putty rubber and talc. I don’t know why I use the talc, it just came to hand one day and gives a nice clean smell.. I turned in the spine on the blue book and stuck it down. I sand papered some of the rough edges and touched up the edges with gold acrylic paint.

I then gave the covers a coat of Acrylic Wax. That is all very satisfying, but I find cutting the paper more taxing, as you need to have the grain of the paper parallel to the spine. Falkiners do a pack of special short grained book paper, but I still had to make it smaller to fit the covers. I have a deckle ruler which means I can tear the paper. My book cradle was v. useful once more for making the holes for sewing.

I used some ready waxed book binding thread for the red book, which made life much easier and waxed some pearle thread for the blue book. The blue book had some finger prints that I could not remove, so I added some thumb prints; perhaps they just look like smears.

Above is the stage at which you need courage and good luck, sewing on the cover.Taking Jane Dunnewolds's advice I took a deep breath and  the cover went on firmly.
I was pleased with the outcome, particularly the red book which is a nice size and felt good in the hand.
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Thank you to those people who have recently linked to my blog to keep me blogging. I hope you will  continue to find something to keep your interest

Cyrus' Cylinder Part 2

For my second piece for the ‘Made to Fit’ exhibition I made another version of Cyrus’ Cylinder, this time, influenced by my course with Louise Baldwin, I used various papers,including some very delicate Japanese papers, stitched into the seams around the cylinder. On some pieces of Vellum I printed either lines from the Bill of Rights, or some of the quotes from the actual cylinder.
On a trip to the British Museum I asked where I could see the cylinder but had a blank response. Fortunately in the Enlightenment Gallery, I found a number of incised cylinders and presumed one of them was the one I was looking for.

This is a piece I made in Louise Baldwin’s workshop which relates to the finished piece.

I stitched a piece of calico with a twin needle to get the shape of the cylinder. This is the inside, I stamped both sides with a handwriting stamp and added rolled beads made from book pages as in version one.

How to get the pieces to keep their shape; it was simple in the end, when I got the idea of using empty cardboard toilet rolls. I did paint them nicely with gesso.

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Here is a tip if you haven’t thought of it already.

When I went to throw away my old window cleaning spray, I thought how useful the spray attachment looked.

Cut down it works well should you want a sprayed background, especially on the days when you haven’t enough puff for the diffuser or the tiny spray bottle is too fiddly.

'Cyrus'Cylinder'

Dear Reader I hope you will find this interesting; it is interesting for me to track how ideas for these two pieces came together. There is a group on Flickr called The Persistent Thread which encourages thoughts of how certain ideas are always in the background, even if sometimes one tends to think there is neither rhyme nor reason to what one is doing.

I recently stitched a piece based on the shape of a book spine, using marks in the snow as symbols. Watching the TV I briefly saw an image of Cyrus’ Cylinder in the British Museum and it reminded me of the shape I had been stitching. Thanks to the internet I was able to research its fascinating history. It is a pottery cylinder incised with an edict made by a Persian King after he conquered Babylon. There is some controversy over the claim that it is the first declaration of Human Rights. I jumped up in bed one Saturday morning, having already made the two pieces, to hear it mentioned in the news, as the Iranian regime would like to borrow it from the BM but politics seem to have intervened. There is a lot more to say about it, have a look at the link if you are fascinated.

I used a photograph of an old book spine which you may have seen here before. Old accountant pages in Copperplate had been used to cover the spine of the book. I added text using lines from Cyrrus ,some from the Bill of Human Rights, and some that I used to use with people in my work i.e. ‘You Have the Right to Make Mistakes’, ‘You Have the Right to say No’, these contrasted nicely with ‘The Right to Conquer Discretely’. Calico was coated with Ink Aid to print out the image.
I shaped the material using twin needle stitching. The piece had to be made to a certain size and I ended up making two versions of this piece as I wanted the threads to hang loosely at the edges.

Beads were made from old book pages, and eventually stitched in place with Cretan Stitch and stitches looping into the machine stitches.

I will tell the' secrets 'of the cylinder shape and the second piece in the next instalment.