extraTexture exhibition

Our talented Cindy will be exhibiting with the extraTexture girls in August.
This time, their theme is Flight and you can see the process of some of their works over on their blog.

When? 15th - 23rd August 2015

Saturday-Sunday 10am - 4pm
Wednesday to Friday 11am - 3pm
Closing Sunday 23rd August at 2pm

Where?
Balmain Watch House
179 Darling St
Balmain NSW

This is always a fantastic show so make time to see it!

And the last of June...

Yesterday, four of us had a group outing to see Helen's exhibition at the Embroiderers Guild. We were blown away. We knew Helen was a very talented person but seeing her work on display together convinced us that she's been hiding her light under a bushel! Some were works we'd seen her making; others were completely new to us, coming from ten, twenty and even forty years ago. It's an amazing body of work. If you get a chance, go and have a look before it closes on Wednesday.

After Helen had given us a guided tour of the works and told us the stories associated with them, we took ourselves next door to the Love Life Store for lunch. I can really recommend this place for lunch - friendly staff, very tasty pies and delicious cakes.

We swapped postcards as usual. Here's Helen's, with her signature rug canvas:

She painted over the rug canvas grid and the background, and then added gold to the stitched area.

Maz's postcard comes from a series of works celebrating her years of travelling the world.

Tricia's postcard was a cheerful collection of buttons with a beach mood.

She coloured the background and then added buttons and beads to emphasise the flow of the colours.

Nola embroidered on one of her painted cloths for her postcard.

We also shared the work we'd done in our sketchbooks for the Fish theme.

Maz drew some fish shapes in her book:

Here's a detail of the fish at the top.

The technique is called sgraffito. She laid down a thick layer of water pencil on the piece of film negative and then scratched back through it to form the fish. It looks very sea monsterish!
Helen had been manipulating images in Photoshop.

She also drew a design, a fish made of fish, in unwetted water colour pencil, with a collection of fish names. She insisted, "the best fish in the world - Arbroath smokies."

Nola drew fish too, but her first pair of fish were based on the shape of a set of unusual pegs she bought from one of the local Chinese shops. She also wanted to play with repeat shapes.

Her next fish was made from fabric.

She built up the background pages with layers of watercolour and Inktense pencils and watercolour crayons, using the page wet and dry.  She cut out the fish shape and layers were cut from a commercial patterned fabric and attached to the fish with fusible web. The whole fish was trimmed and attached to the page with fusible web. Then she drew in the shadow fish in the water, so the brilliant fish is surrounded by shadowy echoes.

Her last fish was stencilled through a simple shape, using different  1/2in square stamps and watercolour pencils.

Our next theme is Circle. As our group is called Fibrecircle, that seems very appropriate!

May and June

As you probably guessed, we've been a bit occupied with stuff to do with the Craft and Quilt Fair at Darling Harbour lately. So I'll just do a general catch up for May and June.

First, the Craft and Quilt Fair: As always the quilts in the show were fantastic. Such a high standard of work and so many beautiful quilts. The prizewinning quilts can be seen here on the NSW Quilters Guild website. They are always very efficient about putting images up. The number of quilts was up but the number of visitors seemed to be down. It certainly wasn't as crowded as in past years.

The ATASDA stand was a great experience. We had a large space, 12m x 8m and it looked fantastic, filled with members' art works. We had a lot of good comments about the edgy industrial theme, which you can see here on the ATASDA NSW blog, FibreTribe. It was interesting chatting to people as they came through, too. There are those who would love to try some non-traditional textile skills and those who say, a little wistfully, "I could never do that!" We handed out lots of bookmarks and workshop sheets, and most artists sold some things.

Meanwhile, we've all been busy doing and making. Way back in April, Maz took this workshop at Primrose Paperworks with Peta Lloyd and made this beautiful shrine.



The aim of the workshop was to create a collection of objects and images in a physical structure, in a way that was meaningful to the participants. In the class, Maz learnt how to construct the shrine in in a deep-sided canvas with foam core, covered in paper and fabric, and put together words and items to express her various travels around the world in her younger days. It's really beautiful.

In early May, we spent a day working together to make journal covers for everyone in the group. We all worked on each journal cover, and then we drew lots to determine who received which one.
Here's images of some of the covers:


 

Tricia's book

Each month, we'll take turns to choose a theme for everyone to work on in their journals. The first theme, from Nola, was Leaf. Here are Tricia's pages:

The apple leaf was sent to her by a family friend in Queensland, and the gum leaf comes from her own garden. She did leaf rubbings with crayons.

 

Nola coloured on a damp hand-made polystyrene stamp with watercolour pencils and stamped on the page.

She also picked up a rose leaf which had black spot fungus, because the patterns were pretty. She traced the leaf shape and drew some of the patterns with black drawing pen, choosing different colours to emphasise. She thinks they may make interesting stamps.

She also did a rubbing from a hollyhock leaf and was drawing around the leaf margins when the photo was taken.

 Maz drew a leaf with watercolours on watercolour paper.

 She attached leaves and a leaf set in resin to a page and felted leaf shapes with her embellishing machine.

 She made these leaves by free machine stitching leaf shapes on two layers of net.

 

Helen attached some ginkgo leaves, coated in clear nail polish for longevity, and a verse. It says,

                                      Temple bells ring out

                                      The fragrant blossoms render..

 

                                      The winds that blow

                                      Ask them which leaf on the tree

                                      Will be the next to go.







The second part is a haiku by Kyoshi Takahama.

 She also made monoprints, cut them apart and wove them into a background for the painted leaf shape. She liked the right hand monoprint because it looked like a cat, so she made a page with the cat playing among the leaves.

The next theme, from Carol, is Fish.

 

Tricia brought along her latest spinning to show. She has been plying the yarn..

 

  
Gorgeous!

Here are our latest postcards:
Helen's is made with Suffolk Puff flowers on painted rug canvas and silk paper, edged with satin stitch.

 Bev hand stitched on printed fabric and bound the postcard with zigzag in a variegated thread.

 Tricia pieced commercial fabrics and added a button and machine stitching. The edge was bound and stitched with a zigzag.

Nola's was made from a scrap of  graffiti fabric, hand painted, with a edging of a double row of satin stitch.

This week, we're going to look at Helen's one man exhibition at the Embroiderer's Guild in Concord. If you get the chance to see it, don't miss out! It closes on Jun 27th.

 

 



More dyeing and postcards

Finally spring is with us, and the weather is warming up. Look at these gorgeous orchids from Tricia’s plant.

It seems to be taking the whole flowering concept to heart, especially as these are only a fraction of the flowers it's producing.
Spring also means better weather for dyeing and other outdoor activities. Tricia and Nola have been doing yet more dyeing with Drimarene-K fibre reactive dyes, using the Four Minute Rapid Dyeing recipe from Batik Oetoro.

Tricia dyed these silk scraps, by folding and clamping and then pouring dye mixture over them. The one in the centre was string-tied.

This silk scarf was gathered randomly and tied with string before dyeing.

This piece of dupioni silk was folded and umbrella’d around a chopstick, and tied.

 The corners are folded in to make a square, and then the corners are folded back the other way to make another square. The chopstick is put in the middle and the folds are arranged evenly and then tied. Doesn’t it create interesting patterns?

 This wool voile was dyed originally with wattle to a pale yellow-beige.

When the yellow and weak turquoise fibre reactive dyes were poured over, the naturally-dyed areas acted as a resist, so those lines have stayed strong. 

Here’s a silk skein, also dyed with weak turquoise and yellow.

It has gorgeous colour variations!

 This piece of silk georgette was eco-dyed beige. When the red fibre reactive dye was poured over, the natural dyeing again acted as a resist.

That's something that has a lot of possibilities. If blocks are clamped on the fabric for eco-dyeing, causing a resist, then those areas will take up dye, if the cloth is later dyed with fibre reactive dyes.

Here’s another one that was originally dyed with natural plant dyes, after Shibori-style stitching.

You can see the pattern of stitching in stripes at the end of the scarf. It was over-dyed with turquoise and yellow fibre reactive dyes, which have picked up the neutral areas of the original dyeing. The colours look muted in the image but it will be a fabulously useful scarf. It looked great against black but it also looked wonderful with other colours, as it was passed around the group.

Nola dyed this silk georgette scarf but she’s not very keen on it. The green is beautiful but the other colours are muddy. She says it will probably be blocked and redyed, or perhaps discharged.

She’s much happier with this silk yarn, which is a gorgeous variegated purple, from pouring over blue and red dye.

This wool yarn is a gorgeous heathery blend of colours.

It was tied around tongue depressors, the ends were dipped into yellow and blue, and then green, blue and yellow dyes were poured over the laid-out skein, keeping the dipped ends out of the dye.

This wool scarf looks almost like it’s been eco-dyed. It's mostly red-brown but it has deep areas of red and blue.

It was loosely gathered up and tied with string, before the dyes were poured over. It really is quite stunning.

 So what did we learn from this process? If true variegation is wanted, dipping works better than pouring. Natural dyes seem to act as a resist to fibre reactive dyes. And, unsurprisingly, a moment's thought about colour theory is useful before dyeing with multiple colours.

As always, we swapped postcards this meeting. For what is probably the first time ever, everyone present had a postcard, and Helen had left one to swap, even though she wasn’t actually with us! Amazing!

Tricia’s postcard was made with transfer dyeing.

She used garden plants, ferns and clover, as the resist and moved them slightly before printing again in a second colour. She added beads and glitz as highlights.

Here’s Helen’s postcard.

She’s used her signature rug canvas, machine stitched, and built up layers with fabric and added a button.

Jan made her first postcard for the group this month.

She used a piece of her gorgeous Shibori-dyed cloth along with her rust-dyed fabric, which she’d used for her alphabet letter work for Pittsburgh. It’s embellished with spun tissue paper and buttons.

Nola made another of her Forest postcards.

It was hand painted in layers of transparent paints.

Maz made a postcard from one of her samples from the workshop she did recently with Effie Mitrofanis, which you saw here.

It really glows, doesn’t it?

Carol made her postcard from a base of painted fusible web.

She added appliqué, beads and other embellishments.

When you look at these postcards, you can really see the kind of work that interests each member of Fibrecircle. We’re all so different!

Last of all, here’s our collaborative work on display at the Fragment exhibition.

It looked great! We were all quite excited to see our work on display.