TAFTA Geelong Fibre Forum 2012

It was an absolute pleasure to spend a whole week with a group of lovely, generous and creative people in Hilary Peterson’s class ‘Dye, Print, Stitch’ at TAFTA’s Geelong Forum. Thankyou all and especially Hilary for your generosity in sharing your techniques and knowledge. and inspiring us all.

We began the week with lots of brewing of leaves, bark, pods and beetroot that happened to be in my crisper. I have since found this blog showing dyeing with purple carrots which I will have to try.

Into the brews went a multitude of bundles containing silk and wool fabric, doilies, wool, threads, papers of all description, leaves, flowers, blossoms, bark, sticks, fleece, silk rods, buttons and possibly much, much more.

The most exciting part was opening the bundles to see what had eventuated. My favourites were silk fabrics dyed with dark purple prunus leaves from an enormous and very old tree in my yard. Some beautiful results were also obtained from Eucalyptus cineria leaves with an iron mordant. I will be finding and planting this tree as soon as possible!!

After our dyeing had been unravelled and marvelled at we started carving and printing: meat trays, soft sculpt, lino, leaves, gumnuts and other objects. We experimented with texture using gesso, eggshells, sawdust and sand. We sponged and brushed and painted and resisted.

 

 

 

 

Finally we stitched, a lovely calming meditative end to the week.

You can see more photos on our group blog as I shared to the class with two of our group.