Festival of Quilts

Linda and I had another 'awayday', visiting the Festival of Quilts at the NEC, Birmingham. Here are some photos of pieces that caught my eye. I can't remember all of the names of the makers.











This one is interesting as it is made using the same lamp from IKEA that I used for my panel!







The last five photos are of work by Janice Gunner. I particularly liked these ones that have been done on the embellisher, with stitching added to highlight areas.

The Panel is finally finished

Many moons ago I embarked on making a panel for the City and Guilds Embroidery course. It was the final piece I had to make for the colour module. The idea started from a photo that I took on the Creative Computing summer school last year. The photo was of a cow parsley flower silhouetted against the sky. A bit of Photoshopping transformed the colours and the design. After further design work I came up with the idea of inserting a panel into the shade of an IKEA floor lamp. The panel was to be made from transparent fabrics such as voiles, organzas etc, but one of the design pieces was made from tissue paper and following my Art Holiday in France where we used tissue for batik, I decided to use laminated tissue paper for the background.



The above photos show the various stages of laminating the tissue paper:

Top: Gluing strips of tissue onto a sheet of tissue. A sheet of tissue was then glued on top
Middle: When the glue was dry hot wax was printed onto the tissue with various implements, such as a flattened toilet roll, sponges and brushes.
Bottom: Blobs and swirls of wax can be seen in this photo.

The wax was ironed off and the tissue torn into strips, re-assembled and glued back together. Some sections were highlighted with zig-zag stitch using metallic thread.

This shows the panel before it has been stitched. I have printed the cow parsley design onto acetate so that I could get an idea of how the finished piece would look and where to position them on the tissue paper.


















I then had to make the cow parsley flower heads and stalks. Various techniques were tried: free-machining onto the acetate prints, free-machining onto water soluble film; free-machining onto scrim and, the one that I chose, free-machining onto dress net.





















This photo shows a finished cow parsley attached to its stem (the stems were made separately) and some extra vegetation that was made to go at the bottom of the panel.





















As I wanted to the flowers to be as dark as possible so that they would stand out against the tissue background, I painted them using a very dark aubergine purple acrylic colour.

Everything was now in place, but somehow actually inserting the panel seemed rather daunting as I had to cut an aperture in a tissue paper lamp shade and then glue my panel in place. Several weeks went by and eventually I had a go. Luckily everything went smoothly. I first glued lengths of dowel into the four corners of the shade to give it support. The edges of the shade that would be cut had already been PVAd to give strength. I cut the panel to size and then glued the flowers on. The aperture was cut out and then the panel was glued in place. It was quite difficult pressing the panel onto the inside of the aperture but a metre long metal ruler pressed inside helped.





























These photos show the aperture cut out of the lamp shade and the panel cut to size with the flowers and vegetation glued on.



















Here are some photos of the finished piece:

At Last

Well everyone - at last I have added myself as an official blogger!
No photos yet - I am not doing any stitching until I have sorted my room out.
Every basket and every drawer is being sifted through and I am being 'ruthless'
It may be that we can actually have a meal at our dining room table.
Rosie

This is a test

Now that I have been added as a 'blogger', just thought I'd do a little test and add a photo of the sample I've done today. I've been stitching on to one of my 'photoshopped' photos of shells.

The Four Loose Threads are off on another Grand Day Out tomorrow! We're off to Saltaire and then Texere Yarns - hoping for a lovely sunny day and to find somewhere good to have lunch!!

Silk painting was next on the agenda and we tried out various techniques: using gutta, wet on wet, wet on dry, torn paper as a resist, salting the wet paint, painting whilst drying at the same time with a hair dryer to prevent the different colours running into one another. My particular favourite was tie-dye.

Above is a silk scarf that I tie-dyed. I am hoping to define the flower shapes with free-machining.

This hanging (using a long silk scarf) was tie-dyed to try and re-create the Love in a Mist and Californinan Poppies that were growing outside the studio. I also want to free-machine onto this.

The next technique that we tried was batik on fabric. I seemed to struggle a bit with this. Everything has to be planned out and I couldn't seem to cope with that. However, this is one of the pieces that I did. It is based on the chives and is done on cotton fabric stretched in a large embroidery hoop. I have embellished the flower heads with straight stitches in groups of three to try and re-create the shapes found on the real flowers.

Here are some examples of batik on tissue. These two of trees are ones that I did near the end of the holiday. The one on the left is done on black tissue which has had nearly almost all the colour bleached out of it. The trees were painted in first using drawing inks and then they were covered in wax, with some small areas left unwaxed. The different areas were coloured with inks and more wax was added in various places. Some areas I didn't like so they were bleached again to take away the colour. Then the wax was removed with an iron. The right hand picture has free-machine stitching to create the tree trunks, branches and roots. This was done on dark red tissue with a strip of black (the greenish area). Originally it was an A3 piece, but I didn't like the bottom section, so cut it down.

These flower pictures were done about half-way through the holiday. This one is done on black tissue. I coloured the bleached tissue - pinkish colours at the top and greens at the bottom and waxed flower shapes at the top using a brush and the stems were created with the edge of a piece of stiff card dipped in wax. The flowers didn't come out well, so I have covered them over with free-machined flowers. These were done by free-machine zig-zag on muslin, which was then painted with ink and cut out. The flowers were sewn onto the picture using a straight hand stitch to create the centre of the flower. The stems were free-machined in straight stitch.

This picture of aliums was done on blue tissue with the bottom half being bleached more so that it could be painted with greens. The flowers were created by blobbing wax on through a circular stencil. The flower heads and stems have been defined with free-machining.

This picture, below left, is based on the photograph of poppies. This was done on black tissue. The area to the right of the poppies has been re-covered with strips of green and yellow tissue to hide the mess that was there! The sky got a bit soggy and the tissue disintegrated but I quite like the stormy effect it gives, even if the reality was a glorious cloud free sky. The poppies and stems have been free-machined on. The trees in the background caused a few problems and I didn't like the free-machine zig-zag that I did, so I did some hand stitching over the top and then darkened it with oil pastels.