Challenges again

Remember back when we did two challenges in rapid succession? We wanted to shake things up a bit and try some new things. Not everyone took it as far as finished pieces of work, but we all played with different ideas.

Here's the bag Helen made from the letter challenge. It has a Japanese feel to it and we think it's just lovely!

Cindy made this design from the designs she made in the drawing challenge. It may find its way into a work one day - for now, it was fun just to play around with shapes and colours.















Maz also created a design from the drawing challenge.

It's interesting to see how she got to this point, from the earlier designs!

Nola had also created some line  drawings from the drawing challenge but they weren't photographed on the day She says they'll probably turn up as postcards shortly!

The challenges were fun to do, because they gave us a chance to play, with no real investment in the outcome. Often we're so busy doing the next thing, learning, making something for a specific purpose, we don't stop and try different things and just play around with them, with no special expectations. Hopefully ,we'll make some time to do this kind of thing again.

Letter challenge part 2

This challenge was the one we did back in August - remember? Helen got us to cut apart letters and rearrange the pieces in new and interesting ways into a collage.

Maz created this design from her letters at our meeting in August.
She used it as her inspiration for an embroidery. She machine embroidered onto 300gsm paper, which she had pre-soaked. She declared, "Never again," as it was quite tedious to do! The paper was still quite firm and the needle tended to collect shreds of white paper on the way back up, which had to be over-stitched over to cover it up. Still, you have to try these things!





She had no particular theme in mind but we joked that it was the spirit of aviation. She was the only one of us to finish a challenge piece by the deadline.












Nola was making two different things from her finished collage, which looked like this:





The first work was a book of images based on the collage. She found the challenge difficult as the colours she was given were so dark and the shapes so spiky. She scanned the collage into her computer and played around with the images in Corel Photo-Paint, using different filters. Then she printed the images as pages of a book and added pencil sketching and some everyday expressions that relate to horses.

Nola's book cover with words meaning horse

 

She also printed the last image above onto cartridge paper and used cut elements of the image to make this bird collage. It will become a postcard to swap.

So from alphabet letters to horse to bird...

Cindy's original design used these elements...



So she had turned it into this design, printed and stitched on panne velvet.







She says it's a work in progress.


You'll probably see more of these challenge pieces, as time goes by!

Challenge No 3: Drawing inspiration

After our break in September, we're back refreshed and raring to go! It was Maz's turn to supply us with a challenge, a drawing exercise. Like most people who work in textiles without a fine art background, we're not proud of our drawing skills! But this wasn't about producing beautiful works of art or even recognisable images; the aim was to create a set of lines from which we could create work.

Maz set up an amazing conglomeration of unrelated objects for us to draw. We each had an A3 sheet of cartridge paper, which we divided into 16 rectangles. And we were off! We were instructed to draw a section of something into any rectangle on our page, as quickly as possible. Then another... and another. By the end of the allotted time, we had pages filled with squiggles like this:


Nola's drawings

 

Maz's drawings


Amazing, huh? Nothing any of us were terribly proud of! Then we started to play with the drawings.




One strategy was to use  a pair of small mirrors to generate reflections. These are from Nola's master drawing.

 

We also traced interesting sections of the master drawing or isolated small parts and enlarged them.

Carol's drawings

Carol traced main lines on her master drawing with black felt tip pen and connected them.

 

When we found sections we thought were promising, we worked on them some more, sometimes even adding colour.




Helen's drawings

Cindy's drawing


















Nola's drawing

Nola's drawing

Nola's drawing



Nola's drawing (she says it looks like a fat ballerina!)

Our challenge is to make at least a postcard from our drawings, for our second meeting in November.

More Ruby and other works

Carol and Yvonne were both working on their Ruby challenge works in August.

Yvonne was making some of her signature tapestry weaving.

Can't wait to see where she goes with this!
Carol decided to make a ruby slipper, fit for Cinderella to wear. Here's what she did so far...

Amazing! You should see more of this later too.

Maz was working on some knitting. She finished the jacket she was making with the Noro yarn...

... and had cast on again with more of the same yarn.

Isn't it pretty?

Cindy has been hard at work too. This piece was made as a gelliplate print and then stitched.

Beautiful!

Her second work is made from woven strips of prefelt, hand stitched.

She used scraps of the same woven prefelt, machine couched and backed, to make some additional elements, which haven't been stitched on yet. I'm sure you'll see it when it's all done!

Ruby Challenge

While we're on the topic of challenges, remember how Maz challenged us back here to make a work on the theme of Ruby, as part of our ongoing work on Birthstones?

Helen made a tiny Ruby basket with a red bead necklace.

 It's made of rug canvas covered with cloth.

Nola made a little book, inspired by a High Renaissance manuscript in the Walters Art Museum.



 

Maz's hand-embroidered work is still in progress, mostly because she decided it needed a lot of French knots, which have taken quite a lot of time.

It's looking really interesting, isn't it? More later...

Challenge No 2 - the mystery envelope!

Helen volunteered to create a challenge for us this month, and how interesting it was! This is where we began:

 

We each had our own envelope, and we soon found out why.

 



Each envelope contained a piece of black card, a 6in x 4in canvas, a small envelope and a sheet of coloured card in colours that began with the first three letters of our names. Helen had to be quite inventive in some cases... the green above is L for Lime and the brown is Nut Brown!

Each person had to draw the first three letters of her name, one on each piece of card, not necessarily matching the colour it represented.

Then we put everything back in the envelope and passed it along to the person next to us. She had to cut out the letters we'd drawn. That wasn't always easy, as we didn't all draw easy shapes like these ones, and we all groaned and laughed and generally carried on about it.

Then we put everything back into the envelope and passed it along to the next person. She had to cut the letters into sections, whichever way she wanted. Then we passed everything along to the next person.

By now the shapes bore little resemblance to letters. Helen asked us to make a face with the shapes we'd been given.

From left: faces from Nola, Helen, Carol, Maz and Cindy

This was harder than it sounds, which was the point of the exercise. It really makes the creative part of your brain work hard, even though it's quite easy to make something that is recognisable as a face. Humans are hard-wired to recognise faces.

 

Then we packed the pieces back into their envelopes and passed the loose pieces along to the next person. This time, we had to make something living in the natural world, a plant, an animal, an insect...

From left: Cindy's rose, Maz's insect, Carol's flower, Nola's caterpillar, Helen's flower

By now, we thought we were getting the hang of this!



The next time we passed the envelopes along, we had our own letters back. Now came the real challenge, to make something from our shapes that would be the basis of a creative work. And this time, we would glue down our design to the black card, so we'd have it for reference. We could add other shapes from our card sheets, but we had to use all the letter shapes. Hmm.

Off we went.

Cindy's patterns

 

 Carol leapt right in and made this bird...

.. and added pattern for the texture she planned to add later in the work.

 

Helen glued her shapes down and cut out the whole shape.

Then she flipped it and traced around the shape (she's done this before, hasn't she?)...

... and began to see what she could make from the shape. She said she's "good at seeing faces".





 
Maz had trouble with her shapes so, after a false start..

... she decided to try Helen's method.

We all decided it looked like someone waving around a very serious weapon!

Nola had trouble too, because she had very few shapes from her letters.

She added some other shapes from cardboard and made one called The Big Bang,

but then she moved on to this strange animal, which she decided was a horse. Or maybe a dog. Or a dinosaur?

And here is a book that Helen showed us afterwards, of a similar thing she did previously with another group.

 They had to use the letters of FLORA to make a design.

 The she traced the outline, as she did in our group.

She played about with the shape and eventually made a face, which she described as "a Ruritanian in a funny hat".

I can't wait to see what works eventuate from these designs! The finished works are due at our meeting on October 27.