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.



More fun stuff

How on earth did it get to be May already? I'm sure those Time Monks have been stealing our time!

Here at Fibrecircle, we've added a new member; well, not so much a new member, as a regular visitor who's come Down Under for a while longer than usual. Jan brought along a piece she's working on for her home guild. She began with  some pieces of fabric she dyed earlier. She painted primary colours of fibre reactive dyes onto dry fabric to give the lovely rainbow shapes. Then she scrunched the dried fabric around a pole, in the style called "arashi" in shibori , and dyed with activator in a cold black dye bath. You'd think that the pieces would end up very dark, but instead she had these wonderful patterned fabrics with lots of the original colour.

This one looks like palm leaves, doesn't it? She took two of the fabrics and laid them so that they made a symmetrical pattern. It's going to be the background for an illuminated letter.

The letter will be cut from another fabric Jan created. First she did some rust-dyeing using various nails, brads and staples and then dyed it with used teabags.Then she took some fabric inks, thickened with guar gum and dripped them onto the fabric.

 

Can't wait to see how this progresses!

Some of the Fibrecircle girls are working on a collaborative piece at present. One design challenge is how to represent some large purple textured leaves so Jan and Nola used some of these rusted cloths to try some alternatives. They took some fabric inks and thickened them with DR33, a modified guar gum. First they tried laying down a little thickened ink on a Plexiglas plate and taking a monotype from it.

This piece was painted with rice flour and water and left to dry until the surface crackled. Then Jan took some of the fabric ink and worked it into the cracks in the dried flour surface. It made really nice crackle marks where there were large cracks in the surface but, because the ink was very runny and it was hard to work it down into the finer cracks, it simply spread out underneath in some places, so those lines became very blurry. Interesting, though?

Nola also tried painting fabric with rice flour. The second one was painted with rice flour painted over a net, to encourage the crackles to form in specific ways (they did).  When they had dried, they had thickened inks brushed over into the cracks that formed.

It looked promising but, unfortunately, there was no visible pattern on the fabric once the rice flour was removed. It's possible that there were delicate lines that were not visible on the pattern of the fabric, or that the ink colour was too close to the fabric colour. This brand of rice flour, from the health food shop, was much finer than the one from a Chinese grocery that Jan used, so the crackles were finer. The flour paste really didn't adhere to the fabric well and it was hard to keep it on the fabric long enough to get media into the crackles. It's an interesting technique but the product obviously varies a great deal. Some people have found that rice flour sets so solidly that it's difficult to remove, and that certainly wasn't our problem!

Here's a piece of work that Maz made. It's for a ATASDA mini exhibition of 25cm (10in) works at our stand at the Sydney Craft and Quilt Fair in June.

The theme is Little Fragment, in keeping with the Fragment theme of this year's main exhibition at the Palm House, Sydney Botanic Gardens in August. Maz hand-stitched Aramaic letters onto hand made paper and built them up into layers.

 

Meanwhile, Bev went to the ConTextArt Forum in the Blue Mountains near Sydney and took a workshop on Surface Design with Sue Dennis. In the class, she experimented with different media and various ways of putting pattern onto cloth.

 

This one used Shiva PaintStiks to make rubbings from different textured surfaces.

This time, she pleated the fabric randomly and took a monotype from a piece of tablecloth plastic, rollered with a brayer from the back, first in purple, then in yellow. She added a ghost print from the plastic afterwards.

This one is printed directly from feathers.

For this one, she was interested in anything that made a circular pattern - buttons, washers. drawer liner, bubble wrap...

The first layers of leaves on this one were created by sun printing, using actual leaves as the resist.  Then the same leaves were used to print directly on the cloth in two shades.

 Bev was really excited by the workshop, so she went on looking for interesting textures. This one is a dry roller brayed over the back of a platter that held sushi.

 The following two pieces are from the same piece of cloth. First she sun printed the fabric with Dynaflow and then stitched it. Finally it was dry brushed with Lumiere paints, which picked up just the high points.

This part was made into a journal cover.

We've also been swapping postcards. Here's one by Bev. You can probably guess at the techniques she used!

 This one is from Helen...

... and this one is from Nola.

This cloth has a story, which she's shared over on her own blog, Inch by Inch Textiles.

When we met, Helen was working on another rug canvas embroidery. It's part of a triptych she has in mind, so there'll be more to follow.

Maz was making a beadwork bracelet from these beads:

Nola was trying out monotypes for the collaborative work, as part of the background for her piece.

She laid down Permaset paints on a glass plate, laid the cloth down and ran a brayer over the back. It doesn't look like much yet!

Once she'd done a couple of monotypes, she began drawing on one of her "paint rags" with a black pen. It ended up like this:

It will probably be cut apart for postcards, so I guess it will appear here again in some form!

April 27 - own work

Today was a non-experimenting day, so we all brought our own work. We all seem to have been making books this month. Helen brought two she'd made. This one is a gift, to be used as an autograph book. I really like the touch of blue on the page edges. This one was harder to photograph but it has Helen's beautiful embroidery on rug canvas.

Carol also brought two books she'd made for the EWES sale of work last weekend. Aren't they gorgeous?

Nola shared a textile book she's been making this month, a page a day. This was the page for the last Fibrecircle day, based on the collage she made. We all went on with the various work we'd brought. Nola was making the edges for her book pages. Prue was beading a cardigan, adding gorgeous beads and sequins around the neck and on the front. Beverley was making samples, which will probably be book covers: They're really interesting - I can't wait to see what she does with them. Carol had to leave early, because today, though not a public holiday, was an extra school holiday. I can see we'll have to speak to the Department of Education most severely for denying her children this extra day in which to learn!

Beads etc

I hate ironing!! But, as a consequence, I seem to have too many plain long sleeved T-shirts at the moment. Yesterday, at Fibrecircle, I finished sewing beads around the neckline of a black one, and today I was able to wear my new creation. I found 2 packets of tiny, mixed metallic coloured beads in a discount shop and just sewed them around the front, about 3 or 4 'deep', following the line of the rib. I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself - the top looks good, and it feels great to get something finished.
Sorry I don't have a pic yet - need to sort out the camera next.

Beverley