Marks

I found this card in my stash the other day when I was searching for intriguing images by other artists to include in my current sketchbook. As I'm not sure where I bought it and am not organised enough to anotate my cards when I buy them, it doesn't carry memories for me like some of my cards do, but it did fascinate.

It is called The Quilt, which seemed appropriate, and is an original wood engraving by Fiona Hope

It has a decidedly textile feel to it and I was attracted by the range of marks and set about recreating them with a black Uniball Signo roller ballpen on white paper (thereby inverting the image). I dotted, cross hatched and created thick and thin vertical and diagonal lines and arcs within a hand-drawn grid.

It was an excellent, if idle, occupation for a rather chilly afternoon in Coronavirus lockdown.

Margaret Robbie

Family memories

Sorting through boxes that have been stored in my garage for several years, I came across some from my childhood home, a farm in the Mendips in the West of England.

In these boxes, amongst old linens and embroideries, was a farm smock. Several of the pieces of  embroidery were embroidered by my maternal grandmother but I don’t know about this smock.

I have no idea how long my family were tenant farmers there although I understand that my father, who had two older sisters, was born on the farm.

In the box, there were also the details of the sale of the Mells Estate in 1923, owned by the Horner Family, of the rhyme “Little Jack Horner sat in the corner”. Being a late child I never knew my grandparents but I know that at this time, my grandfather bought the farm where he had been the tenant farmer.

My family lived in the farm at Lot 13. I had 4 older brothers and I grew up there before leaving home to go to college.

There are other interesting documents and photograph albums for me to explore and looking into my family history is part of the research I want to do.  

Here I think lies the basics of my research for our next exhibition ‘Inhabit’.

Carolyn Sibbald

Ancient and modern

I'm working to combine images of modern high rise buildings with suggestions of what existed before for a larger piece of work.

Here, I've used very much enlarged and abstracted croppings from photos of high rise buildings in Sydney, Australia, taken on a trip a few years ago. I've made marks over and around these images with a fine black Uni marker pen to suggest circles and dots.

Explanation here and here.

Margaret Robbie

Little book of Circles

Corinne has been doing stitching based around some tea and rust dyeing completed the other day. The stitching involves circles - some regular, some irregular. Circles seem to be a common theme for the group just now.

 She then stitched further pages to go in the little book.

Corinne Renow-Clarke

Spring flowers

This lovely weather finds Linda gardening when she should be wielding a needle but instead its a fork! It seems to be a good year for primroses, they're everywhere. Here are a few flowers from the garden.

Linda Babb

Now there are five

This is the latest of my hand stitching from sketchbook images. Called "Green Shoots" its 

 
about those signs of spring growth on winter fields.
On to number six








Liz Harding

Repurposing a book

This is a book I’ve been making over the last 3 days. The idea came from a YouTube video by Caylee Grey.

It is a repurposed old book cover with text block removed. Filled with random papers cut to size - old paintings/drawings, cartridge, watercolour paper, squared, tracing, wrapping etc. Stitched using long stitch binding.

Corinne Renow-Clarke