Challenge works - all together

I mentioned earlier that we've been working on individual challenge pieces. As a group, we're pretty wayward in our work patterns, so due dates are a work of fiction and works have come drifting in, at all different times. We thought you might like to see them all together.

Basically, we took turns to choose paint chip cards from the hardware shop, sight unseen. Each person chose four, but they could decide to use just three of them, if they preferred. Each person could throw back one card and choose again, mostly because paint colours tend towards the muted and it's pretty hard to make an interesting piece of art with four shades of grey brown!

Carol used three of her colours to knit this scarf. She found it very hard to match her colours in cloth, so yarns seemed a better bet.

Maz was working on a background she painted to match her paint chip cards. She decided to make a concertina book to hold the postcards we swap each month. She machine stitched over her painted fabric and a layer of fine net. The cloth wraps around the book pages. This is the front cover..

..and this is the back.

 

Here it is opened out, so you can see the whole image...

..and showing the postcard pockets.



It's a great way to display the group's work!

 

Helen made one of her bowls, using her signature rug canvas work.

It's hard to photograph it to do it justice. Suffice it to say that another Fibrecircle member promptly did a deal with Helen and the bowl went home with her instead!

Jan made a book cover using her paint chip colours. Here is is, with the colours, while she was working on it,

and here it is finished.

In many ways, Jan's colours were the hardest, because she had so many

similar ones. The result is a beautiful piece of work, though.

 

Nola decided to make a handbag in her paint chip colours. She used embroidery threads, as an easy way to match the colours, on fine pin wale cord, with some quilting cottons for contrast.

Her colours, in addition to the dull red and the turquoise, were a mid green and walnut brown.



I'm not sure what our next joint effort will be. We usually do at least one a year, as well as our own individual work.

Summer's end

Welcome back to the sixth year of our textile playdays! Doesn't time fly? It's interesting to look back on what we've done as a group since we first started meeting, way back then. From a group that was mostly experimenting with techniques we hadn't tried, we've become a group of people who make and exhibit work in very individual ways, work collaboratively and challenge each other. Some of us make work for sale. It seems to be that there's a message there, for anyone who's thinking they'd benefit from meeting with other like-minded people: Just try it and see where it leads you!

We've already met a few times this year, but members have been holidaying and travelling, marrying off children and hosting Significant Birthday parties for parents, so we haven't managed a full house yet. Here's some highlights from what we've been doing over the summer.

Helen embroidered these small works for an exhibition, "Two Eyes", later in the year. They look very exotic, don't they?

Here is Jan's Paint Chip Challenge piece. It's a journal cover, which you saw unfinished here at our dyeing day in November.

It's a fantastic use of her chip colours, don't you think? It's very subtle colouring.

 

Nola is working on her challenge too. Her colours were very different to Jan's, and very hard to match. She was able to match the colours in embroidery thread so she chose to embroider the fine pinwale corduroy in a Jacobean style.

This is one side of a bag.

Maz has painted a background for her challenge piece, another way of getting just the right colours.

She's about to start stitching. Should be good!

Meanwhile, she's been working on some beading.

It's incredibly complex and looks beautiful.

Helen has been reading a book by Ralph Steadman. He's a British cartoonist and artist who, among other things, likes to create bizarre animal figures  with whimsical Latin names. You can see examples of his work here. She was so taken with the idea of creating these fantasy animals that she experimented with making some of her own.

 Here is her Amazonian Carnivorous Butterfly...

... and her red Blunt-Eared Rabbit.

She's also been embroidering some more of these gorgeous three dimensional pieces. They come with their own little bag.



Stay tuned for more! We're all madly creating things for our display and sale of work at the NSW ATASDA meeting in March.



November

Another year is almost over – don’t you feel they go by faster these days? We Fibrecircle girls have just one more meeting for the year before we go our separate ways until January.

Meanwhile, we’re just as obsessed with colour and pattern as always. Our biggest event this month was a session of natural dyeing at Tricia’s. For simplicity, we decided to all use the same silk habutai scarves, so we spent one meeting preparing our scarves for dyeing in many different ways, like tying, stitching or clamping with blocks.

Our first pot was avocado skins and pits. We’d read about people taking the trouble to cut the pits in half beforehand, but that seemed like a bridge too far for us. In the end, we found they split open in the pot anyway, so we were quite glad we hadn’t struggled to cut them!

 Here are the results:

Maz tied red onion skins into her first scarf. Isn’t it amazing? 

Inspired by Maz, Tricia also clamped onion skins into her scarf, using both red and brown onions.

Bev tucked Eucalyptus cinerea leaves into the folds of her scarf.

The cinerea leaves give a reliable red quite easily and most of us tried that technique, in the various pots.

Nola tried machine stitching tiny pleats on her scarf with a long machine stitch, and pulling up the threads.

The results are interesting but perhaps don’t justify the amount of work. It was much faster than hand stitching, but still fairly fiddly.

Our second pot used Eucalyptus pilularis Blackbutt shavings from Nola’s husband’s workshop. We hadn’t tried dyeing with them before, but we’ve had good results with sawdust from other trees. We were slightly disappointed but unsurprised to see we were able to achieve… beige. This colour seems to be the basic colour for Australia plants and it’s very easy to achieve!

However, dyeing isn’t just about the colour; it’s also about the pattern. Maz stitched her scarf by hand down the length, which gave an interesting pattern.

Carol pulled up small sections and tied hers randomly.

Bev clamped red onion skins in between square wooden blocks on her first one...

… and prunus leaves between triangle wooden blocks in her second one.

This one from Tricia was an experiment. She clamped toothpicks between Perspex blocks along the length of the scarf and it’s give her some beautiful patterns.

Nola stitched by machine along the ends of this scarf, just to see what would happen.

She thought the result was pretty ordinary on this one too, so she later overdyed it with fibre reactive dye with washers clamped in the folds.

Looks a lot better and the stitched stripes have become a lot stronger. The interesting thing is that the tiny holes where the needle went in have been emphasised too.

Nola’s second one in this pot was tied around tongue depressors with green twine.

Some of the colour of the twine transferred to the scarf in interesting ways.
       
The third pot was Eucalyptus cinerea leaves. Although the leaves give a red colour when clamped in the folds, they give a different colour when boiled in the pot. The colour is a strong orange on wool but it’s much milder on silk.

Jan created eccentric folds on her scarf, with red cabbage inside, and tied it with some of the green twine.

The eccentric folds are certainly effective, aren’t they?

Nola tied this one onto triangular blocks.

Maz tied hers onto marbles…

… and so did Bev.

You can see that the kind of tying makes a big difference. Maz has some traces of colour from the twine, while Bev’s thread was finer and firmer, which gave a much tighter resist.

The fourth pot was Helichrysum petiolare, a grey-leafed garden plant which yields a pretty yellow.

Maz clamped grevillea leaves between wooden blocks. Grevillea doesn’t add much colour but it does add pattern, and her scarf has a lovely delicate pattern between the bars of colour.

Nola clamped cinerea leaves in the folds of her scarf with parallelogram Perspex blocks.

Tricia tied blue wooden beads into her scarf. Some colour came off the beads during the process.

Bev used rectangular wooden blocks to clamp her scarf.

Our fifth pot was the bark of Eucalyptus sideroxylon Ironbark.  Maz clamped cinerea leaves into her scarf with wood blocks… 

…and so did Nola.

Tricia did the same but added loose tea leaves, which gave even more texture.

Maz tried a cone fold with interesting results…

… and Carol tied hers in the same way as her other one, in irregular bundles.

This one from Bev had red onion skins in a triangle fold, which gave an interesting radial pattern.

Jan used onion skins, nails and tea leaves in this one…

.. and in this one, she tied onion skins, red cabbage and unknown plants.

Wasn’t that an interesting day’s dyeing? Eco-dyeing is a slow process so while we were doing it, Maz was stitching on this piece of painted background fabric.

Jan was working on her Paint Chip Challenge piece.

It’s going to be a book cover. I’m sure we’ll see more of this to come!

Later, Nola boiled up the ironbark bark again, with fresh water, and dyed this scarf, which she’d pinch pleated and tied along the length with green twine.

It looks rather like Arashi, the pleating done on a pole.

Tricia had a couple of scarves in the cinerea pot that she wasn’t happy with. She had a dyeing day with Nola later in the month and overdyed this one with orange and red fibre reactive dye…

… and this one with turquoise.

She had another one from the avocado pot also dyed with brown onion skins, but she felt it needed a lift, so she over-dyed it with yellow fibre reactive dye.

It really looks great!

 This scarf is crinkle chiffon with a silver thread through it. Tricia dyed it originally in ironbark and then over-dyed it with orange to lift it.

 

She folded this one in triangles and dipped the corners into fibre reactive dye.

This makes a wonderful radial pattern.

Nola plaited three lengths of tissue silk together quite tightly and dyed them with pale turquoise and red fibre reactive dye. When she took them apart, they all had a similar pattern.

She twisted another scarf until it twisted back on itself and dyed it with pale yellow, pale turquoise and a few drops of red and rubinole.

She also space-dyed a child’s cotton tee-shirt…

 … some socks…

…and an apron.

Jan has also been doing some dyeing at home, but on paper.  She wet the paper and clamped the plant materials between two layers. She dyed the papers with red cabbage, some leaves from her neighbour’s red plant and an unknown hedge plant. Others were dyed with dried eucalypt leaves.

 

 

 

 

 The colours are delicate and the papers are highly textured.

As usual, we swapped postcards this month. This one from Nola was called Summer Breeze. The background fabric was sun dyed, and she added hand embroidery.

Helen used some fabric that Nola brought back from Aatuti Art in Norfolk Island. The shop has a blog here. The background fabric is a commercial print.

Here’s the fabric Maz was embroidering during our dyeing play day, made into a postcard!

Jan’s was made from some of her eco-dyed paper, and sun-dyed cloth.

Our next meeting will be small, as some members head off for the holidays. But you can be sure we’ll still be creating stuff!