I’ve finally sat down to draw some new tangle patterns 🙂
This is LRI, based on iron railings around the Leicester Royal Infirmary next to Welford Road. It’s amazing how many patterns there are to be quickly snapped with a camera phone and broken down in to step by step instructions:
On Saturday I’ll publish my 100th tangle pattern – inspired by a wood panel in Liberty, Regent Street.
Well, it’s raining and dark. World of Warcraft isn’t letting me log in. What else is there to do except update my blog banner pic? I decided it was time to have the banner show some of my newer skills, and move on slightly from the ProMarker coloured zentangle. I’ve added ceramics, quilting, printing and painting as well as a little bit of self-promotion as artist, designer, maker and tutor. And my PanPastel playbook makes a colourful background to the zentangles that still are the most popular part of my blog.
I’ve also added a new page to let you follow the progress on my planned studio – please leave good advice if you’ve been there and done it before!
The choice of final project in textiles was to either design and make three tea towels, an apron or a Cornell-style fine art box. I followed my ceramics theme and chose the box, and thus embarked on a project to include every technique I could think of to transfer my patterns from my sketchbook to my ‘panoply of patterns’. Here’s the completed box, complete with my display sheets displaying its contents:
Lots of techniques in here, from free hand drawing with a fabric gel pen, to free motion machine stitching, backstitch hand embroidery, iron on transfers, applique, fabric paint and quilting to name but a few…
This term in my print lessons I’ve revisited dry point – with a new twist which I hope to develop and share in due course… And then there was the lino cut – it turns out that lino is a lot easier to carve when warm, but crumbles when hot… And there was the collagraph – sticking items to a piece of card, liberally coating with PVA and allowing to dry before using it as a print plate. Part of the final project is to take prints that aren’t quite exhibition standard and embellish them a little:
Here’s the before and after of a piece of serendipity – I was washing out my large screen with a large repeat pattern on it, and the water/ink mix was caught by the scrap paper beneath – I loved the texture and distressed colours. I embellished it with watersoluble graphite pencil and a bit of frottage on sandpaper to add texture, and a distress ink mix to tone down the white paper:
Finally, I wanted to play around with a repeat pattern on a large scale… the screen alone was two feet square – and I chose to run off a couple of lengths of wallpaper as well as a couple of multicoloured prints:
Not sure that I’d want that repeat in black and white across the chimney breast!
For our final project this term, we’ve had four weeks to work on either a ceramic bird house, or a Cornell-style box. In principle, we had to slab build the box and then use at least two of the techniques we’d learnt to decorate it. I’ve gone for the Cornell-style fine art box:
Once again, all the work is based on my bead or button collection – the filigree is the back slab layered with D-shaped extrusions and then pierced (two techniques already!). The flowers are one and two part plaster moulds taken from other beads (sprig moulds, technique three). The box will dry over the Christmas break and then get fired – it’s white earthstone, and we’ll be playing with glazes next term. The box will hold vertical strings of ceramic beads, which I made by designing my own extrusion die, slicing this into uniform thicknesses, piercing and then carving (and there’s technique four):
It’s no secret that I have become completely bah humbug about Christmas. So it was with a heavy heart I accepted a commission to make a dozen Christmas Tree decorations this weekend. For our tree. So you see why I didn’t turn down the commission! They’re a little rough and ready, but since they’re generally only lit up by fairy lights, who’s going to notice? 😉
I used a heart shaped die to cut the fabric using my Big Shot before putting right sides together, sandwiching 12″ of ribbon in a loop between them and pinning it so the tips of the ribbon peep out of the top. I machine sewed round the edge, leaving an inch gap along one side, and then turned the whole thing inside out before stuffing and sewing the gap closed. I haven’t flame proofed them – might be worth a thought if you have a can of flame retardant spray close by.
I’ve just been reviewing my myriad pictures and realised I hadn’t posted my favourite painting of the session so far – it was completed before half term. We worked relatively large scale (I think this was on A3 size paper) and were encouraged to be free in our movements with the brushes. It’s painted with watersoluble inks, resisted by oil pastel outlines and highlights, and I moved the inks around after application by flooding areas with water. A bit of thinned PVA adds shine, as well as more ink movement. I think the result is rather abstract, very free, and still resembles the rose bead I was using as a reference!
