Felt and pheasant

Featured above is the finished tonal piece that I made for the Tonal Challenge on the previous post. This piece is the size of a postcard and is made purely from needle made felt on an embellisher. These challenges are part of the Challenge Site that I run, anyone can join just by clicking on the Challenge button to the left of this post.

Shown below is the weather we have been having in Kent recently, this was almost like a blizzard at some points. The Uk has predicted A Winter Storm later today and early tomorrow. What a contrast it is compared to the awful situation in Australia. My heartfelt wishes go out to all those who found themselves in the path or such terrifying fires. I will wish for rain and cooler weather for Australia and hope that the situation soon passes.



The picture below is another brooch that I made recently to give to the very kind person who gave me such wonderful Embroidery Magazines. Thanks again Patricia.

I thought that you might like to see what opportunists we have visiting our garden this winter. This pheasant decided that he was just as entitled to the fall from our bird table, infact at times he thought it fun to chase away the blackbirds, cheeky thing, it's such a good thing our dog wasn't out there!

Woodland Watercolours

Ok, now I know why I specialised in Textiles at art college.

Yes, I am quite rusty with the watercolours and I am working from photos, albeit my own. I have never liked working from anything but nature itself but needs must. I am hoping that once I begin to translate some images into felt the pictures will lose some of that stilted look that only working from photos gives you.

The main reason why I am making these studies is to find a formula for working with felt. I am exploring light and layers. I have made this decision in order to discover what is possible.

When I began to look at my woodland photos again today I realised that there are so many different ways I could work. Landscape is a very daunting subject, there is just so much of it. Choice is the hardest thing, when faced with such a subject, it's just so overwhelming.
You wouldn't expect that there could be so many

views in one woodland, I have nearly 100 photos that I took, well, some I probably won't find of use but I need to get a feel for the subject matter before I launch into felt.

Watercolour is the hardest medium of all to master. I have always known this, so why do I choose it. Well, it's a medium that you usually work in layers. In the next view I have taken a photo after the first layer, I waited for this layer to dry. When I work in felt I hope to work in a similar way. To put some abstract colours down as a background and then work on top with more felt. I hope to use all the different aspects of perspective such as those found in watercolours. Intensity of colour, more detail in the foreground, things becoming larger. All of these methods and more can be used in any landscape to provide perspective.

Well, after all this I think I am beginning to loosen up a bit. Here below is the finished work from the one above. I am beginning to really get a feel but it isn't easy. It takes a lot of concentration and I also find that I have to let things happen with watercolour, that's what I mean about loosening up. You need to have control over any medium but with watercolour it is a fine balance between being in control and allowing the medium to do what it needs to do to make the picture natural.

I have some more photos arriving next week but these I believe will offer me something else again. Must keep working. Lots to do. I'll be back soon.

From Little Acorns.

From little acorns, I have been meaning to do this for some time, since I first heard that pure wool sweaters could be felted in a washing machine. So I have machine felted 4 sweaters. These are all plain colours so I decided to add some colour with some multicoloured merino wool that I've had for some time. This is not going to be finished that quickly, as I have set myself a labour of love.

This will eventually become a large patchwork blanket. In the past I have knitted and crocheted blankets but this time I just get to join the pieces and decorate, I call this fun. I have sort of invented my own method of joining. I have done this by making a simple chain stitch around each square. Then I weave in and out of the sides of each chain stitch and this becomes a decorative stitch in itself but is also very strong. It also means that you don't have to turn the edges or worry about it fraying because the weaving stitch covers it all nicely. I am doing this weaving on the back too. When I have finished I will show the final piece on here and then I will wrap my self in it because it looks as though this year, we might be in for a bad winter! It's got oh so cold this week.

On that note, I have also been busy making my grand daughter a scarf. She did ask if I could make her a baby blue one. It's lately become her most favourite colour. I've done some blending of merino and some of my own dyed fleece from local sheep and it has worked really well. I wet felted it and then I realised that the shape of it didn't quite work because it was a too wide for such a little neck. Then I considered cutting it in half length ways and I didn't like the idea of having a join.

The final design then came to me. I did cut it up the middle but I left a section at the end which acts like a collar and sits flat on the back of the wearer, similar to a sailors collar. It worked better than I had imagined.

I tried to keep the designs simple as she is growing up, she doesn't want it to be over the top. The stitching around the edge is made up of blanket stitch, running stitch with a weaving stitch between the two. This is becoming a feature of my sewing, and although time consuming I do enjoy the rhythm of this kind of sewing. To finish it off I made some simple braids from thin rovings and slipped them under the embellisher to secure them. It's in the post to her and I do hope it will help to keep her warm because it is a lot colder up the North East of England.

Just before I go, I must share this next picture with you. This was the view this morning down one of our nearby Kentish lanes. The colour is still on the trees, and hedgerows, it was bitterly cold, the frost can be seen on the grass to the left. The sky was a beautiful clear blue. A picture worth recording, even from the car window. Snow is forecast, so here comes winter...

A Round Robin, Some dye work and a walk in the woods.

Ok, I'm tryng to catch up. This is only a fraction of what I have been doing lately but it's all I've got pictures of as yet.
This picture below, is a felt background which has been made as a base for a Round Robin that is taking place on my challenge site. The idea was to make a felt background based upon the theme of Landscape. Once we have made the background we will post it to the first person on the list. Eventually our background will make it's way back to us after everyone has added their own bit of stitching etc.. I am looking forward to seeing how this works, it is the first time I have held one of these, if it goes well we will probably repeat it on another theme.


This next picture shows, not very well because of the light, apologies, but this is the big bag of fleece I have been dying. This wool is all from local sheep, infact some of them are in the field behind my garden right now. You wouldn't guess the dye is from a drink powder, Koolaid. I experimented and mixed the colours,
The reason why the colours work so well is because of all the citric acid in the powder, it helps it to cling to the wool fibres. Sorry the picture doesn't do the colours justice, as it was taken in artificial light. I've still more to do, but I have some silk to spin first.

It's been a really funny time lately for our family, we had some wonderful things happening with my Grand daughter but we also had some pretty awful times too. This has made it all rather stressful and tiring so today I decided it was time to take some time out. I went for a short but beautiful walk in the woods.

The colour is just starting to turn here in the South of England.

The light through the trees was so beautiful.
I took loads of pictures, I haven't had the time to go through them all properly, but I am hoping to use some of them for inspiration on my landscape work. That'll be on the next blog. Bye for now Tricia

Struggling with my direction and some landscape work.

Even the title shows my muse has vacated. I just replied to a blog and this is what I wrote:

I have been reading your blog for some time now, I felt I had to reply to today's entry because I feel I am having similar feelings about my own art work.
The trouble with textiles is that there is the functional which is the everyday utility that everyone recognises. Then there is the conceptual. As well as this I have a real problem within my own art work in that I love decoration but always feel hesitant to use it.

Whilst I was studying towards my art degree in textiles we theorised on the use of borrowed images from other cultures and times. It always puts a big full stop in my mind to anything I would like to do; Gosh Art college has a lot to answer for.

Anyway, I also haven't been able to focus for some time, I flit from one idea to the other and I really don't feel that I am allowing myself the freedom I need. I am not sure whether any of this is the same or similar to the way you feel but I just felt I had to write and let you know, that if it does ring any bells with you, then you are not alone. Good Luck with your directions in the future. Tricia

As I said, I am struggling at the moment. I am wanting to make some meaningful artwork but the only direction that pulls me at all is landscape, I get so far and then I feel lost.

To that end I have been doing a lot of photography. Then I thought, why, it will cost a fortune to print all these pictures off in colour, even on a small scale. That made me think about something that I did learn to some use at college. We were taught that true sketching should be just that, sketching should just mean capturing the essence of a subject. We were always pushed to this end by making 2 minute studies of the life model. The model would pose and in 2 minutes the model would be told to change the pose. This way you were never able to get more than the essential down on paper. So I adopted that idea with my digital camera. After a couple of minutes it turns itself off when I am studying a scene. Below are my very early attempts at capturing the essence of some landscape photos I took recently. I know what the scribbles represent, and that's all that matters, I suppose.

It's the shape of the landscape I am trying to capture, not the detail.

It is harder than you think when you are on a self imposed time limit. Yes, I am rusty, I admit that.

Well, enough of that, here is a drawing I made of a photo I took sometime ago, not sure if I even know where the photo is. Anyway, the drawing was made in Oil crayons, perhaps I should move on to colour with the above drawings next.

I decided to try to make a small piece in felt from this piece of work. Here is the result:

I am not entirely satisfied with the result. I do feel my landscape work needs much more exploration and experiment before I will be happy with it.

The Beauty of Silk

As well as all my landscape photography I have been working with some silk again. I spun and dyed some a little while ago. I just love the results that I get with this.. When you think that I start off with this:

Raw silk, It is actually a lovely pale cream/golden colour, it almost looks white until you look a little closer. The sheen on it is exquisite. As I say you start off with this and then after spinning and dyeing it you end up with this:

I wish the pictures were better. I love rainbow dyeing. I love working with colour in this way and it is true, silk does take dye ever so easily. These skeins were done in the microwave, a 3 minute zap and they are done.

Some of the photos seem to lose the brilliance of that shine, I don't know why.

The way I have been exploring colour with these skeins is through the use of the primaries. Difficult to beleive but I just have three colours, yes, red, blue and yellow. That way the colours that I am trying to find whilst experimenting are either the secondary: greens, purples and oranges. Also I mixed up some browns, in the picture below, I wanted to go from a warm chocolate brown to a tan, then a golden right through to a colder almost green/brown, it worked.

Here are the four skeins ready to use. I will be embroidering on to my felt with these. I love the contrast between the flat/matt colour of the felt against the shiny silk thread.

Inspirational Landscape Artists and my experiments in felt.

My inspirations come from all sorts of sources but there are two artists one of whom I met when working as a teacher in a secondary, the other a very well known artist, they both give me a taste of what I would like to create as landscape.

The first is a Russian Born artist who I met after she had been working in Ireland, having never been to see my own roots from Irish Grandparents I was fascinated by her take on a landscape that has always held a mystery for me. Her name is Varvara Shavrova, if you visit her website here and go to the past work, the work I was introduced to in a slide show held at the school was entitled Inscriptions. So was I taken with the work I rushed down to the Gallery where her work had been, even though I missed the exhibition itself, I managed to buy a copy of the exhibition catalogue. During the workshop which she managed with my students she showed techniques that would change the way I looked at how I work and what landscape is all about. We did some large scale mono printing directly from the art room desks/tables, they were fantastic. She described how she made some of her work with graphite and her descriptions fascinated me for a long while afterwards. She managed to create landscapes which for me were both abstract and yet real. A fine balance between in order to succeed with this.

This leads me on to my other favourite landscape artist. Ivon Hitchins. His work is also abstract and yet he painted in such a way that you feel you could walk into it. He often used elongated canvasses for example one entitled 'Garden Cove' measures 44 x 108. He said he often used this long shape because he found a square-shaped painting unsatisfactory because the horizontals are cut short. Garden Cove fascinates me, it is a landscape and yet there is a suggestion of a door in the image. When I say a suggestion, I mean just that. You could almost miss it. You scan his work visually and are looking for the tangible, it is there but you can't say for sure where. If you get the chance then take a look at his work, there are a few pictures on the web at certain galleries.

Now this all brings me on to a body of work I have been trying to create with my embellisher. I have been creating a series of samples in Postcard and ATC size from a larger piece which was made from scraps of wet felt that have been in a bag for sometime from larger projects. I joined all these scraps on the embellisher, my idea was to randomise the colours and shapes to see what is possible in the abstract. The only control I had over this process was when I was cutting the small rectangles from the larger piece. I tried very hard not to look at where the colours and shapes fell when I cut these out. My idea was to take it to the extreme, I therefore told myself to use all the fabric I had made and tried to fit in as many as I could from the large piece I had created. The results you can see below. As a series of rectangles which can be seen as abstract landscapes I hope. I am trying to work into these by adding some texture with stitch, either following the lines within the piece or by infilling the shapes.


the first few I have not sewn into yet.



Some of the rectangles work better in portrait than in the landscape format, purely because of the horizontal lines within.


The picture below shows how a scrap was embellished into the piece, this scrap was originally a little leaf that I had sewn around, it seems to work for me, but I can't say why, can you?




The piece below reminds me of geology and rock formations, where rocks have made abstract patterns where the different kinds of rock have been laid in layers and then moved and squeezed together.



This is where I start to add texture, in the form of seed stitches.



The stitches on the left hand corner of this were already in the felt before I embellished it together.





The texture, or should I say small motif in the piece below was just a scrap I had experimented on long ago before I put this together.


I was thinking of framing these, rather like I had framed all my atc's. I am now very unhappy with the result of doing this and I won't be continuing as I do not feel it adds anything to the work.




Below following the line of the shapes this time with a little seed stitching added.


Atc size below, again following the line of the shapes.


Before I finish this post I am showing some other felt pieces I have been experimenting with. Felt with machine embroidery below:





Below is some reverse pattern felting, well that's what I am going to call it. Working from the reverse, the first one is the front and the second shows the back and how the little circles of linen have come through from behind.



Some further scrap paintings as I think I will call them. Just putting scraps of felt together on the embellisher in order to see what can be made from them

Here to finish off this rather long post is a traditional landscape that I made last month, this is slightly larger than the other landscapes I have shown on my blog, it is nearly A4 in size.