A trip to Sydney

During the summer break I had a short trip to Sydney to catch up with the committee of ATASDA for some strategic planning. There is a new Travelling suitcase exhibition planned for this year tentatively named “Frida and Flowers” which should be very exciting. I stayed with the very hospitable Miriam (Airbnb) in a beautiful terrace home in the very hip suburb of Newtown, lots of great restaurants to choose from. There was also a quite amazing exhibition on at Carriageworks by Katharina Grosse where huge amounts of canvas had been draped and painted.

Luckily this trip coincided with the Embroiderers’ Guild NSW Summer School and there was a weekend workshop available with Mirjam Agner called ‘A splash and a dash’ which was great fun. The Sydney Guild had just celebrated the opening of their newly renovated building and had a wonderful array of works exhibited. The Sydney Guild were very welcoming to an inter-stater, one of the things I love about being a member of the Guild.

Mirjam is a qualified teacher as well as a textile artist and she had lots of great design techniques to teach us. My favourite piece from the week was the dropcloth! I have started to stitch this piece in which I thought I saw a fisherman! I will take some photos of the other pieces I painted and printed and put them in another post.

While wandering around Sydney I ate some delicious food, took photos of the architecture and viewed a great exhibition at the S.H Ervin Gallery (National Trust building) called Intrepid women , which has inspired some pages in the book of women’s art I am constructing for our GeeTAG exhibition in March.

 

Goldwork finished

I have been very busy over the last 3 months working on samplers and pieces for the Intermediate course in Goldwork with Alison Cole for Embroiderer’s Guild Victoria.

First piece was to be an initial (very little gold thread in there!)

Second piece was to be based on a traditional form of design-I chose Art Deco style and decorated this very cute round bag I found in an Op Shop (lots of gold, black and purple-Art Deco colours). The dodgy cotton padding was fixed before the gold purl was added :

Art Deco bag

Final piece was to be a major study of A4 size (approx.). This is to be the cover of a Triptych, which will be completed for our EGV Geelong 50th anniversary exhibition in September. The piece was embroidered as a set of separate slips (technically mostly silver work), I hand painted the background silk:

Peacock