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Some beginnings and a finish, maybe!
Many events this year have been cancelled or postponed and many more have sprung up. There are so many virtual and online offerings it can be overwhelming. However, I have chosen a couple, such as India Flint’s ‘In Place, Voyage of the Armchair’ which has been delightful and meditative. I continue to dip in and out of her wonderful offerings when I need a break from working online. I am also working away on a piece for an exhibition with India resulting from this online adventure.
It has been inspiring following textile artists’ blogs during this time. I have been using my Armchair voyage journal to respond to the many ideas and thoughts flowing from so much wonderful inspiration.
Rita from Gone Rustic Studio & Gallery in St Mary’s Tasmania has an exhibition happening in October called ‘Marking Time’. I have started an entry for that based on phases of the moon:
The base is from an indigo dyeing class a few years ago. The moon is beautiful silk velvet natural dyed by Arlee Barr. Just waiting for a selection of blue threads from Wafu Works in Tasmania, hopefully it won’t take too long to arrive, though the post is very erratic at the moment. Yah, Threads have arrived and this piece is now finished (maybe)! It is a little more picturesque than I was going for. Now I am thinking I might need to break down the strong vertical with some short scraps of horizontal red, any thoughts?
Another one I have just signed up to is the Blarney Books and Art Biblio Art Prize. Blarney Books is a Port Fairy institution and the Art prize is where artists create a piece of work in response to a book, this year all Australian authors published in the last 12 months. My book title is picked from a hat and emailed. Still waiting for this one. Covid-19 has taught me patience!
Lucky me – I have received my book title- The Labyrinth by Amanda Lohrey. Now ordered from the bookshop and I will pick up later in the week. Now how to create an interesting labyrinth!
Indigo dyeing results
After many rinses these are my indigo dyed pieces from the weekend, what a huge learning curve!
Our first day was spent making up our individual vats and preparing fabric so that it could dry overnight.
On the second day we began by dyeing a gradation. My pieces had 1 dip (+soda ash dip), 1 dip indigo vat, 5 dips indigo vat, 8 dips indigo vat. It is amazing how much these lightened after all the rinses, however my ipad photos are not showing them as dark as they actually are.
We then worked on our own projects using fabric we brought with us. I stitched up some curved lines using running stitch and overhand stitch:
I also stitched a circle which was pulled up tightly and secured then covered with plastic to give a beautiful moon:
And a silk ombre scarf with one dip all over and 2 or 3 extra dips on the ends:
I am looking forward to the arrival of the portable heating element so I can do more indigo dyeing. Next up will be some Bengal muslin (bought to support the stitching project in India from Ballarat Fibre Forum) for a Traveller’s Blanket with Dijanne Cevaal.
Indigo Dyeing in the forest
After a circuitous route via Monsalvat (amazing buildings and interesting art), Kuranga Native nursery (for some Eucalyptus cineria) and a beautiful drive through the Dandenongs I arrived at Marty & Jude’s wonderfully historic house for an indigo dyeing workshop. The house was originally used in the 1940’s as a sewing factory and then in the 50’s as a school annexe while the secondary school was extended. Jude kindly allowed me to rent her guest room for a totally immersive weekend. I woke this morning to see the resident sheep and goats quietly munching away (lawn movers and pruners).
She has a spacious room for classes, opening out onto a courtyard for messy work. Throughout the house her naturally dyed artwork sets a beautiful ambiance and her deck has the most magnificent views down to the creek. If you ever get the chance to attend a workshop at her home studio grab it. Postscript-she has space in November for a 2 day Indigo dyeing workshop.
This is preparing the indigo, with the lime and fructose ready to be added.
I will post some photos of my results tomorrow when I have finished rinsing.
This is a wonderful kimono made from workshops with the local secondary school:
Thank you Jude, I had a wonderful weekend immersed in a beautiful place.
Memory workshop with Sandy Webster
Sandy Webster is visiting Australia (she is a big fan of this country) at the moment for Grampians Texture and I was lucky enough to attend a 2 day workshop at our local Studio 54.
There was not requirements list (“bring the materials you like to work with”). Sandy began with some inspirational photos and talk on her personal work on memory. She then individually tutored each person to find their oeurve (the group size of 6 was perfect). I have been working on memory pieces on my maternal grandmother over the last few years as she was my mentor, teacher and inspiration for embroidery and textile work.
A while back I developed a ‘deep map’ for an exhibition in Sydney so I have decided to continue this with a series of ‘pictorial maps’ on the women in my family whose stories have influenced and inspired me.
It took a while for me to crystallise a direction for this and start but I now have a clear vision for the development of this piece and will continue to work slowly, writing down the oral stories from my mother in a journal as I go. I am hoping the memories and stories from my mother will help with the details.
Sandy does sometimes teach a travel journal workshop and had an example with her, I think a hand made bound journal to record the ‘woman’s perspective’ of their historical story would be perfect.
‘The containing piece will consist of a map holder. Traditionally the explorers used leather containers of some sort, mine will be a cylindrical holder made using ‘paper leather’ on natural dyed cotton, more embellishment to come.
I have started my ‘deep map’ with the story beginning from the time my Grandmother married and moved from her family home to her husband’s family farm. She experienced both hardship and joyful times and I am looking forward to slowly recording these in word and picture. The next stage will be future maps to record my own mother’s story as the young family moved off the farm (leaving it to the two youngest, unmarried brothers) and into a big town for secondary and further education and employment to support the family.
The map so far includes the family farm (Wattle Lodge) and will include the buildings of this little country town that were important to my grandmother’s story, incorporating fragments of my grandmother’s embroideries and other handwork.
I look forward to continuing the storying. Thank you Sandy and Kerrie for a most inspiring weekend and the opportunity to meet up and spend time with a such a wonderful group of artists.
Some natural dyeing and printing results
After my experimentation with some old op shop cottons and linens which had been soy mordanted a while ago, I got some muddy colours and very little print.
The red flowered gum leaves, blossoms and nuts gave a good coloured dye after cooking for an hour and then leaving for 24 hours. I strained the plant material from the water, added some alum to the pot, soaked the cottons in water for an hour and then bundled up. The cottons and a couple of scrap pieces of bridal satin were used with the leaves from the pot, some melaleuca sprigs and some eucalyptus cineria that had been soaked in rainwater. Some of the cooked leaves were dipped in iron water, most of the bundles were tied with silk tape around bamboo sticks, two were bundled around iron rods.
After reading Irit Dulman’s latest blog post I will try a bit more experimentation this week-thank you Irit for sharing some of your processes, we would love to see you in Australia!
I am thinking now of dyeing my upcycled linen dress in onion skins first and then try the overprint with the leaves. I will do a few more samples and see how they turn out before committing to the dress.
Onions skins and bark cooking
I will pop a few pieces in the pot tomorrow.
Printing, marbling, felting & more-a catch up
We have had some great plays on fabric recently at our GeeTAG group. Our fifth Saturday play day at Shearer’s Arms studio has enabled us to spend extended time on messy play. At our April messy day we tried lino and meat tray prints, stencilling using brusho, printing with a variety of materials, marbling on fabric, flour paste resist and a technique using textas and methylated spirits to colour fabric.
Printing, stencilling & colouring
My marbled fabric, centre bottom, was a little grainy as it was the first pull of the ink off the carrageenan. After a couple of prints the clarity improved. The flour paste resist is something I will experiment with more (right top) and the top left was our regular Saturday meeting, topic: Stitch on paper, where we made paper fabric using a variety of papers pasted onto calico. I also aged my paper with a few dabs of walnut ink when I got home.
Nuno felting
Our March meeting was nuno felting and I made the piece above for the front cover of my book, the 2017 “Choose your own adventure’ project for GeeTAG. I have just dyed some more fleece in walnut ink to make another piece for the back cover.
Auditioning threads
Above you can see a glimpse of the gum nut panel I have been working on for Dijanne Cevaal’s ‘Aussie Bush’ project. I have added some organza over the design, framed it with some of my natural dyed, printed silk, FME’d and will add some hand stitch elements. I dyed some silk in walnut ink for the binding but it is not as dark as I would like so I may re-immerse that again to get a nice dark frame for the work.
Messy printing day
This year in our GeeTAG group we decided to take advantage of the months which had 5 Saturdays and designate them as messy offsite days. Earlier in the year Kerrie mentored a group in a wonderful eco dyeing and printing day and on the 5th Saturday in October we offered a messy printing day at the Shearer’s Arms Gallery studio. This is a fabulous space to ‘get down and dirty’ with paints, something we cannot do in the pristine room we normally use for our monthly meetings.
Many of our group lugged numerous items along for a day of experimenting and playing with prints. It was great to have a day to print uninterrupted by the normal duties of family life and be inspired by my fellow printers, who shared and discussed all ideas freely. There is a write up and photos of many of our results n the GeeTAG blog.
I experimented with the Gelli plate and hot glue gun stencils, creating paper and fabric prints, experimented with circles of all types to create a ‘doodle cloth’ on a cotton cloth from the Op Shop (I may use this for embroidering TAST stitches), and trying out a few of the blocks from other participants.
Glue gun prints, a borrowed block print-printed twice to give the layered image, stencilled image using part of a plastic doily over a mop up cloth:
Backgrounds created from the gelli plate, various objects printed and stencilled, glue gun stencils used as resist with spray paints:
Overall a fun and successful day of printing.
Guess who we ran into at an exhibition
Yesterday I made the train trek to Melbourne, ran into a fellow traveller Rhonda at Flinders St station, then continued onward along the Sandringham line to Middle Brighton. After a sustaining coffee and raw brownie/banana bread we continued on to the gallery at Brighton Town Hall for the Annemeike Mein exhibition, where we encountered Stella, who joined us to marvel at the amazing textile artworks. Like most textile art, you really do have to see these artworks ‘up close and personal’ to appreciate their texture, colour, artistry and skill.
Although there are a limited number of her artworks exhibited, it was interesting to see the development of Annemeike’s work over the years, both in theme and materials. It was also quite wonderful to see the trialling and the stages of development of the work also displayed.
We were just standing discussing the differences in the free machine embroidery of Annemeike in comparison to the intensive work of Alison Holt (who Stella and I both have worked with in workshops) when guess who we spied, Alison herself! We had a chat to the wonderful, artistic and very friendly Alison about the where, what and why of her latest trip to Australia and then, of course, couldn’t miss the photo opportunity!
Alison Holt in Melbourne
After a lovely lunch in the beautiful sunshine, Stella left for the city and Rhonda and I went for a walk and a little op shopping in Church St, followed by a walk to the beach and the famous Brighton bath houses.
There were many locals and tourists taking advantage of the beautiful spring weather.
A beautiful day out, thank you for your wonderful company ladies!
What a difference a day makes
On our walk yesterday the beach looked like this:
And this morning the floodwaters flowing from the river had turned the water a murky brown with lots of slush:
I am still adding TAST stitches to my postcard box, here is beaded looped cretan and buttonhole wheel cup:
And I am looking forward to a weekend of stitching with Hazel Blomkamp from South Africa, followed by some tambour beading over the next two weeks with Jan Timms from the UK.
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