Alfie helping Corinne

Corinne continuing with her wonderful cape

Corinne trying to work. Alfie the  cat has different ideas.

Brunel Broderers working on their pieces for Bampton exhibition

    

 

Liz Harding has been exploring stitch blocks and colour

Stars, stars, stars everywhere. Some samples of Linda's work on the symbols used by the Berbers of southern Morocco

the great barrier reef

Recently I have been inspired by the Hand & Lock competition brief looking at bio-mimicry. Looking at how things work is a hobby of mine and this took me to a wonderful book by W. Sackville-Kent who took photos of the Great Barrier Reef in 1894. A student of Darwins' bulldog no less, the images speak of study and discovery. This in turn has led me to discover the Australian Impressionists. At the time Australia was building a new nation, these artists sought to establish individuality in relation to location through landscape painting. My drawings and stitches aim to bring together our own understanding of locally global.

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postcard project continues with help

Please keep sending in your postcard creations, we love receiving them and adding them to the collection.
Two cards came today with a very flora and forna theme, not sure if they are from the same person or if serendipity is at play.

Another beautiful donation from Heather Anne.

Monday 18th September, the Textiles for Thought discussion group met at my house today and we sat around the dining table busying our hands whilst we talked. Many thanks to Liz Hewitt, Deborah Pawle, Patricia Brownen and Janet Clarke for their wonderful creative contribution while we discussed the range of exhibitions we'd seen over the summer.

Many thanks to Heather Anne for sending us this fabulous postcard.

Very excited to receive the first two postcards. Both very different and both wonderful.

We were pleased to see how many people took our postcards from the exhibition at 44AD last week and from the West Country Quilt and Textile show the weekend before. Many thanks to those who took them. We can't wait to see what you have done and including them into our next exhibition in Bampton.

Set up day at 44AD

 All artists arrived early to setup at 44AD. All work unwrapped,curators had the task of making  it all flow. Plinths and stands arranged. Altered postcards strung together and hung. Last minute alterations sorted. Gallery ready for audience. Ready, steady go. Do come and see us 

Silk bowl for pollen

Exhibition date getting closer, September 5th racing towards us. I have so much to do. I have made a list and gradually crossing items off, ha ha! One of them a bowl to contain wonderful pollen the bees have collected.

work in progress

Hoping to finish for the next exhibition in Bampton, Corinne

cards

Work for 'Underpinning' is just about complete so now I am putting fabrics together to cut up and stitch to make some cards

and now in colour

I started with experimenting with textures and patterns on the sandblaster, added crochet in linen  and mohair threads, all in ecru. But I do love colour and after the summer workshop where discussions included an very interesting one about our individual confidence in the use of colour in our work I decided to quit ecru and use the colours I'd gathered at the workshop. This has bought me to knitting and crocheting colours and textures together. I hope to create a range of lengths for the exhibition, now I am considering how I will display them at 44AD.

colours

 crochet detail

 my delightful assistant modelling a length

work for 44AD

       
                        and Linda has been seeing stars!
                      
                      while Liz is thinking about traces of making and changing
.

The bee

The bee now has wings made of stainless steel!

The bees

It has taken me five hours to do one bee and it still hasn't any wings, ha!

meeting

               Good meeting yesterday. Steph showed us some of her hand knitted samples

 

and some of the knitted and wrapped pieces she will show at the exhibition in Bath

The bees by Carla Mines

The South London Entomological and Natural History Society 1915-16 reported a deeply rooted superstition that if a death occurred in the family, the bees had to be told or they would all die during the coming year. I found a poem by Rudyard Kipling called, 'The Bee-Boy Song' which carried on this superstition.

 I have been looking at bees making nests in the wild, some on the ground, others in the trees. With the country leaving the EU the laws surrounding  the use of horrid pesticides on agricultural land are in jeopardy. We need to protect the bees.

  I decided that I would like to make a piece of work called, 'Tell the Bees'. This pictures shows the beginnings of the piece. I have made labels showing bees . In the poem, Rudyard  quotes, 'Marriage, birth or  buryin, news across the seas, all your sad and merry in, you must tell the bees.' So on the reverse of the labels I have put my news. 

Then I gave labels to my friends and colleagues and asked if they would like to add some news and these are some of them.

If you would like to contribute, make or reuse an old label  8 x4 cmx. decorated as you like and send them to Stephanie Wooster, University of the West of  England, Clanage Road, Bower Ashton, Bristol BS3  8 JJ. You can also contribute within our exhibition, 'Underpinning' @ 44AD, 4 Abbey Street, Bath BA1 1NN, From 5th 10th September. 11am -5pm. It will be lovely to meet you.

weekend workshop

We've just had a lovely weekend workshop run by Steph in Liz's studio overlooking a colourful garden. It was quite challenging as on the Saturday morning we had to collaborate in pairs, without speaking at all, and create a piece relating to the head and movement, that both people could wear! There were some very funny moments! I started by thinking about the moving parts on a head and looked at ways to create opening paper eyes, a wrinkling nose and an opening mouth out of one of the papers Steph had brought.

On the Sunday Linda was ill so we couldn't work in pairs any more. Instead individually we responded to what had been made by others on the previous day. The different sorts of hats appealed to me so I made some samples using fabrics that Carolyn had brought - a pleated silk ruffle to trim a hat, an overlaying of dyed scrim on another fabric to reference straw hats and plaited cotton that was wound & stitched round and round as some straw hats are. Ideas being taken from an NT book on hats & bonnets from the Snowshill collection.

Corinne

more images of the workshop from Linda

what's in the box

An excitement this morning with the delivery of the new fliers for our exhibition at 44AD in September

Chained and Unchained

Continuing my exploration of hand stitch which began with small experiments with chain stitch, this piece mounted also acknowledges the drawing of  Cy Twombley and the painting of Howard Hodgkin.

Experimenting with chain stitch led on to a freer approach which I termed "unchained". The death of Hodgkin earlier this year suggested this piece using the frame that the whole group decided to use.

"Boom" uses this free approach to stitch and its reverse makes a nod to the freedom found in quilts from the Gees Bend area of America

     

Still working and experimenting, watch this space!

                           

mixing materials

With the degree shows in full swing my work has been moving slowly but I have enjoyed the chance to contemplate movements.
Working with the sandblasted ceramics, adding threads and crochet I have been struck by the textures and varying natures of the materials, truly letting the materials speak to me. The next step I'd like to take is to translate this into knitting.