The Workshop

Prequel:

At the fair on Friday I had also met up with another ‘cyber’ friend, Doreen from Canberra. Doreen is a prolific and talented textile artist and blogger and it was wonderful to meet up at last. We had lunch together and then Doreen went off to a workshop to make this sensational little needlecase. Her stitching is just beautiful.

A very interesting exhibit at the fair encompassed works from all the branches of the Embroiderer’s Guilds of WA in celebration of 40 years. Linda Stokes, another talented textile artist and blogger from WA had a beautiful book on display. I didn’t ask Linda’s permission to photograph it but I’m sure she wouldn’t mind me showing the cover. I spent at least fifteen minutes enjoying the beautiful pages within (with gloves on of course).

After whetting our appetite at the fair, Linda, Doreen and I, along with 17 other enthusiastic ladies gathered on the Tuesday for some personal tuition from the ‘master’ of textile art, Maggie Grey.

I was lucky enough to be loaned a new Janome by Wendy Gager’s Janome sewing Centres.

It was a dream to sew with after the clunking of my 25 year old Janome!!

Maggie taught her techniques with massive doses of inspiration, thoughtfulness and clarity and with her help we all created some lovely pieces. I will blog a picture when I have finished putting it together!

This piece of Maggie’s shows how it should look.

Here is a photo of the two “Grey’s” : Doreen and Maggie.

A photo of the ladies hard at work, except for Linda enjoying a cuppa there on the right!!!

That is also Dorothy on the right, another “Holey Moley“.

And a photo of Maggie showing us one of her amazing examples as she explains a technique:

Thankyou Maggie for a wonderful time, and thankyou Dale for your fantastic organisation.

Final instalment, at a later date, will be my great final day in Perth, spent at King’s Park, surely the best public park in Australia.

Cheers.

Workshop fun and games

Firstly here are some exquisite embroidered ATC’s Claudia and I received from Anne in France. Anne must have extremely good eyes as the stitches are tiny!! Our return ATC’s have been posted to France but I won’t put them on the blog until they arrive.

This week began with Claudia off the to National Wool Museum for a workshop called Raggety rugs, where she enjoyed weaving strips of fabric onto a loom. All the kids had great fun using all sorts of colour combinations. We might make a loom at home for Claudia, just some strips of wood screwed together with screws at each end to hold the warp. It would be a great winter activity she could come and go at and use up some of my fabric scraps.

The next day I had a ring to say there was a vacancy for the ‘Buttons’ workshop. I was booked in for the one on the 18th July, but I’m off to Sydney for a conference that weekend. This workshop was based on Margaret Beal’s technique (which is probably in her book) but is also in the Dec08/Jan09 issue of Stitch magazine.

This workshop was great fun and doesn’t require much in the way of equipment. Just a 30 w soldering iron with a fine tip and various bits of synthetic materials. We began with a piece of synthetic felt and polyester fabric and traced around a 20 cent piece with the soldering iron to make our first button. Everything from then on was a variation of this: different layers, different metal shapes to trace around, adding acetate sheet, trapping sequins and beads. The soldering iron can also be used to make marks and different shaped holes in the buttons for variety, which I have yet to experiment with.

The last workshop for me this week was felting.

Leah came down from Euroa to teach a series of workshops (there is a felted jacket one on today and tomorrow) but the one I did was a cobweb scarf.

We began by making a felted square. As I was the last one there I ended up with the boring black wool, but I managed to find some little bits of colour to add. This was two layers of a wool silk mix layed on bubblewrap. We then put netting on top and wetted down and added soap. It was then rolled up in the bubblewrap and a towel and rolled 100 rolls in each direction until felted.

And then using just one layer of wool, we layed out a scarf on bubblewrap: 30cm x 220cm. Once again I was using the black wool. I very rarely wear black near my face as it doesn’t suit my fair skin but Leah let me have some lime green to add, and then I swapped some of my black for the purpley blend. This one was just sprayed with tepid water with a bit of liquid soap added as it was layed out and rolled up. I gave this one 1000 rolls just rolling in the lengthwise direction, changing ends each 100 rolls.

I’d like to try this again so I bought some nicer wool/silk from leah to make another one. Hopefully my technique and results will improve!!

Finally, this week I have been entertaining myself reading the Yahoo discussions of the Holey Moley clubbers. This group has been set up by Dale Rollerson as a workshop group, and if early indications are anything to go by it should be a fun conduit, riddled  and punctured with a honeycomb of burrowing fenestrations. (How’s that for getting as many puns as possible into one sentence?). The real fun begins this weekend so if you want to join in head to Dale’s blog (link above) for the info.

Cheers

Until next week.