Blogtoberfest 14

This was a group exercise we did at college in third year called I Can See Through You.  We all had to produce something simple using sheer fabrics - an applique or something - and then we all collaborated with [inning them on to a very compliant dress model.  It was good fun.  I think the pink bit at the top was my piece but I can't really remember after all this time, though I am pretty sure I did something pink.  It took about an hour to pin everything onto the model in a pleasing way.  There was never any intention of sewing it together or doing anything permanent but it was a fun exercise in collaboration and doing something a bit different.

Madeiran textiles

An unusual form of textile art

While visiting the Melbourne Museum last week to see the Pompeii exhibition (VERY interesting and worthwhile, by the way) I happened across this little curiosity in the museum section devoted to the workings of the mind, which includes some stuff about the treatment of the mentally ill over the last couple of centuries. A quick Internet search reveals nothing more about this item other than the fact that the mental hospital referred to closed down in 1995 and is now leased by Latrobe University.

I was fascinated by the idea that this woman created textile art out of a desire to order her mind and sooth her anxieties. And she 'gleaned' the materials in order to do so. (Should I be surprised that a mentally ill patient was allowed a needle and, presumably, scissors? Maybe she was surpervised, or was not considered a threat to herself or others). I would love to know what happened to her, what was wrong with her, whether an effective treatment was ever found, where she went after the hospital closed down (if she was still alive - I have no idea how old she was in the 1970s) and if she made more of these objects. And if they really did bring some sort of peace to her.

Why do we create art, of any sort? Most people who do, feel 'driven' to do it. Not necessarily in a high-faluting, 'genius' sort of way, but as a compulsion. And that goes for the person who is slightly obsessed with knitting socks as much for the person who creates internationally famous works of art. I cannot spend a day without doing something with textiles or I start to feel anxious and restless. And yes, knitting socks counts!!!

I love this worn out little jumper with its delicate stitching, and all that it stands for. It makes me want to include the ideas in a body of work and it makes me sit still and think about why I do what I do.

A Bit of an Anti-Climax

Emptying out the exhibition of Saturday afternoon felt a bit anticlimactic. Rather like cleaning up after a party. But the drinks in the pub afterwards were nice !

My grand total of six months work above: A framed bead embroidery mounted in ultrasuede and framed, inspired by the Shakespeare poem 'Full Fathom Five', including a carved bone skull (handmade but not by me) and coral-like patterns and colours; another framed bead embroidery, this time inspired by the film 'The Cabinet of Dr Caligari', again mounted on ultrasuede, using ceramic faces (again handmade but not by me) and colours and patterns inspired by the colours and motifs in the film; a bead embroidery sewn onto the back of a repurposed denim jacket; and a peyote stitch vessel and a jewellery set all inspired agin by 'Full Fathom Five' (the necklace is a lariat made in chevron stitch with fringing, and earrings are just fringing and the brooch in bead embroidery with some fringing on the botton.

Nothing sold. I didn't really expect it to. What did sell was framed machine embroidery, plus a framed felted piece and a coiled felt bowl, plus framed 'patchwork' pieces with lots of screen printing and machine lettering on them. They were all exellent pieces well worthy of sale, but it was noticeable that the less convential styles did not sell at all. I also made a series of earrings in the same style as the green ones in the botton picture to sell separately, and I did sell one of them. The rest are going in the Etsy shop when I have a chance to photograph them individually.

Would the selling pattern have been different if the exhibition had been properly promoted and with more sensible opening hours? Who knows.

The Passion of Christ - full-length

Two full-length photos. It currently hangs in the family room and spooks people who brush up against it.

Hearts and Thorns - The Passion of Christ

My first soft sculpture mobile - an art form I have been fascinated by for years (soft sculpture AND mobiles - though I have only recently considered combining them).

The brief was to produce a textile piece using symbols (we had done a unit on symbolism) which incorporated three of the same symbol, and using only fabric, paint and stitch.

I have learnt, among other things, some valuable lessons in construction, and also just how difficult it is to photograph the silly things! I will also post a full length picture of the whole thing, but these are the components. There are three stuffed hearts of various sizes, each with stitching on both sides. The fabric is cream homespun that I sprayed fabric paint onto through lace and then added some gold paint - in drips, by painting the outline of one of the flower shapes, and then using a toothbrush to do a fine spatter over most of it.

I'd done a whole lot of research on hearts and flowers and ended up doing the Passion of Christ - interesting where symbolism can take you!

Sheeprustling Brooch

I bought this today from a third year student at TAFE. She claims it was an abstract piece (as all hero thers were) but to me it immediately looked like sheep - so appropriate for the Sheeprustler! Funny thing is, no-one else can see sheep in it until I mention it. It's hand needlefelted.

And guess what - I got an embellisher today! I may not have much time to play with it for a couple of weeks - I have to write a plan for a 12 hour workshop to be finished by next week (for assessment purposes - I won't actually be teaching the workshop, though I do think I have come up with an excellent idea, but I'm a lousy teacher) and the next week there will probably be tons of homework too, but after June 15 I am free as a bird for several weeks until Semester Two - expect to see some embellished pieces in that time!

Hundertwasser

This was an interesting exercise we did in class over the past couple of weeks.
1) We studied the Hundertwasser picture The Houses are Hanging Underneath the Meadows and analysed it in terms of design - colour, balance, repetition, motifs, etc. We were also asked to think about in terms of maps (an obsession of our current teacher, but a worthy one for this exercise).
2) We were told to produce a series of coloured papers using inks and oil pastels in various ways (there was a list of about six or eight ideas of what to do with them - including painting ink of wet paper, doing pastel rubbings and then inking over, etc.
3) We were each given a photocopied portion of a Melbourne street map and told to design something based on our study of the Hundertwasser piece, using all or a portion of the map to create the design.
4) Then we used the papers we had created to produce a collage based on our design. We were allowed to add small bits of extra drawing on top - I drew grass with green oil pastel on top of the centre section of mine, and then outlined it with black texta to make it show up better. (This was when I discovered that fine line pen, which is my favorite, doesn't work on top of oil pastel - derr!!)
5) The next week we had to produce coloured cloths to recreate (approximately) the paper collage, using fabric paints, fabric crayons and transfer dyes and crayons. I have never had much luck with transfer dyes (I know others who swear by them, though) and got rather frustrated trying to get the right magenta for the right hand section of my piece, giving up in the end and settling for the more red-pink which was all I could mix with the available fabric dyes. I still liked the ultimate effect.
6) Then it was just a case of vliesofixing the relevant bits of fabric down and doing some stitching. The funny thing is, in class I was saying that I was going to do hand stitching only, and resist my usual urge to put beads on everything, and how I had sworn off machine embroidery - and look what I did, machine stitch and beads!!
Ultimately I am pleased with this piece. It may not be great art but it was an excellent example of structuring a series of classes (which is what we are actually studying at the moment, Strategies for the Artist/Teacher, doing a textile piece was just a bonus way of demonstrating the process to us!) and I enjoyed the process.

Wendy Hicks, Textile Artist

Wendy Hicks has been teaching us Arts Business Practices at TAFE for the last few weeks, and has done her utmost of make a boring subject interesting and relevant. She took us on a tour of her gallery and studio yesterday in Eltham and I took these pictures of some of her gorgeous machine embroidered textile works. If you are ever around Eltham please pop in and visit her gallery and see if you can get away without spending money! (I actually didn't spend money, but I am hanging on to my cash for the Stitches and Craft Fair this morning!)

The 1940's - War and Austerity

More lovely costumes from the Costume Gallery in Bulleen. This was the 1940's room. For all the talk of war and austerity these clothes were, mostly, quite obviously good ones. The women's dresses are either of wool or silk crepe, the little girls' dresses of cotton, and the baby is in a smocked Viyella gown. It amused me that the blue smocked dress was almost identical to ones I made Baby Bear when she was that age - the only real difference being that I piped my collars and cuffs with the dress fabric, and these are edged with buttonhole stitch in red thread. The baby is wrapped in a mchine knitted shawl that is identical to some I have seen George's aunt knit on her machine (she was a leading light in the Machine Knitters' Guild for many, many years, though since having a stroke cannot manage the machine any more).

Edwardian Blouses

From a trip to a Costume Gallery in Bulleen, crammed full of wonderful things. I have always loved these ornate Edwardian blouses (though I am sure they were intensely hot and uncomfortable and restricting).

Treasures from the Embroiderers' Guild, Part 2

The Guild also buys representative modern embroidery. Going clockwise from top left : a piece from the 1990s by Pat Langford, Waving Grass at Jabaroo. You can't see it in the photo (BIG problems getting decent photos of textiles behind glass or in plastic sleeves!) by the tree trunks each have a line of tiny beads to make them look like bark. It is hand stitched in the main photo but there is a little ghost of machine embroidery around the edges and going into the mount (which is also fabric) of tree0like shapes; a pieve of beaded Berlin woolwork from the Victorian era, done with the most exquisite Czech glass seed beads of a type and qyality that you just can't get these days; a piece of cutwork table linen in beige done by Thelma Crawford, who was well known for using Australian designs in her embroideries (she sold kits as well, from a shop in the BLock Arcade) in the 1950s; a detail from a Victorian tea apron done with the new aniline dyed threads that were much brighter than older, natural dyed threads had been, done on fine black silk, and edged with machine made black lace.

Treasures from the Embroiderers' Guild, Part 1

Our class went on a 'field trip' (as Wombat always calls them - too much American TV!) to the Embroiderers' Guild (Vic) last week to view some of their 2,000 pieces of embroidery, lace, etc. These are pictures of an Ayrshire christening robe which was the first ever acquisition for the collection. It was exquisite. The pointed insertion on the bodice was recycled from an earlier garment, as it is a totally different style from the rest of the whiteework. It is early nineteenth century, from Ayrshire in Scotland, where unemployed hand weavers who had been superceded by machines taught themselves these new skills to earn an income. Sadly this only lasted for about fifty years until someone invented a machine that could do whitework! The gown was a pristine white - the first photo looks yellow because it is hard photographing textiles without a flash and for some reason my software fiddling either didn't work on that one, or I plain forgot.

I'm so excited!!!

Today I enrolled in the Box Hill TAFE Diploma of Arts - Studio Textiles/Stitch. I've been wanting to do this for about three years, ever since I realised the art potential of fibre beyond knitting other people's patterns.

I was initially slightly put off because at first glance it seemed to be heavily biased towards embroidery. I don't have anything against embroidery but I am not a natural at it. I've done lots of cross stitch over the years but always following other people's patterns, and never had the desire to design in it. But having checked out graduate exhibitions from this course on the web I have come to realise that there were all sorts of textile arts being used by the students and today confirmed my feelings - I was told that they had 'lots of fibre people' and that I could use any textile media I wanted to, so long as I experimented! I got really excited when they said that there are always some students who want to explore 3D work in greater detail and that they had studio facilities for that - I do want to do this, very much indeed!

It's every Friday during term time, for three years, plus lots of homework, about the equivalent of another full day a week. Some of the subjects sound boring - OHS, that sort of thing, but being a TAFE I would expect subjects like that, and the bulk of the course is design theory and practice. Dyeing is apparently a big favorite, so my eyes lit up when they mentioned that!

I'd forgotten the delights of enrolling at tertiary institutions - fill in this form, get it signed, go downstairs to the cashier, be redirected by the cashier to another room, go back to cashier, go back upstairs to give in my receipt number, wait while they find the form I filled in half an hour ago... but it's all done and dusted and I am officially a student for 2006! It felt very odd indeed getting a student card - the last time I had one of those was in 1987, and prior to that was my very first uni one in 1979!! Baby Bear was with me, it being her curriculum day, and she rudely laughed at the photo and said 'Mum, why are photos of you always so awful?' Well, she was certainly right!

Then we went to the Box Hill S'n'B. Baby Bear has been aching to go all year but I was afraid she would be bored. She was, though very polite and well behaved. In the end I gave her some money and sent her off to Diva (cool jewellery shop) to buy a birthday present for one of her friends and to spend some of her pocket money. By the time she had thoroughly done over Diva (and found a pair of earrings that she said would be perfect for me - I went back there on the way home and bought a pair of diamante skull earrings, how could I resist!) it was lunchtime so we ate and then went home - to be greeted by an answerphone message from Wombat's teaching aide saying that he had run out of medication. At that stage it was a good hour and a half after he should have taken his lunchtime dose so I had to hare over the school. Fortunately he was OK, we are trialling a new medication and it really seems to have worked so far.

I asked if I should do any preparation over the summer before the course starts in February, and was told to read everything inspirational I could find in the textile/fibre field and maybe start keeping a scrapbook of ideas. So I shall spend happy hours reading some of my many books!!