Life in Miniature

One of my friends is busy making a miniature quilt for her final year of City & Guilds Patchwork & Quilting at the moment and whilst looking for something else in one of my many boxes I found this small quilt I had made years ago. It is approximately 8" x 5" and was foundation pieced using up old scraps of fabric.

A Little More Blue

I have now taken pictures of some of the samples I produced at the weekend.  We used various methods of resist, some I had done before and some new to me.  There were vats of natural indigo, synthetic indigo and woad dyes to try and I also decided to pop some threads into the pot as they always come in useful.

Stitch Techniques

The above piece of silk fabric had been scrunched up and put into a mesh bag before popping it into the dye bath.

Various clamped items were employed above: foodbag clippits, thin wooden hearts and circles, milk bottle tops with their severed threaded necks and acrylic blocks normally used for stamping.

Fabric had been wrapped around a drainpipe

Beads and Elastic Band were used here

Dyeing the Blues

Just spent a wonderful weekend with Janice Gunner at Missenden Abbey in Buckinghamshire.  I will photograph some of my efforts and blog them later in the week but here is a taster of what the class got up to.

Wonderful tutor, lovely company and fantastic food what else could one ask for - except perhaps more days doing this wonderful activity.

White and Wonderful

This year I decided to plant some pots of tulip bulbs which have been a major failure really.  One pot produced leaves and started to get flowers before rotting off and the pot above has got stunted growth, but presumably encouraged by the recent sunshine, has now flowered and looks rather nice with the blue anenome blanda in the bottom of the pot - a 'Freebie' which I won in the local Horticultural Society raffle.

Well Dressing and All That

Over the Bank Holiday the wells in Malvern had been dressed and Malvina was no exception.  The Elgar statue had also been 'bombed' again - this time with textile ivy leaves created by students of Malvern College of Art.

Printing Class 2

This week we printed our lino cuts onto cartridge paper, did some chine collee and could also use printed papers we had brought along or old non copyright book pages. We also produced a mountboard registration print ready for the collagraph we are going to produce next week.

My bird printed onto old Geli Plate prints

More of my birds plus a couple of prints by another member of the group using patterned tissue paper as a background with the chine collee technique

This jolly lady was a chine collee print by yet another member of the group.  Such fun.

Printing Class 1

Last week I created this linocut image ready for printing this week.  I have never really done much printing with lino and struggled to get nice neat clearcut lines. I am determined to persevere though as it is something that is easy to do at home. We tested our linocut by making a rubbing with a graphite stick over a piece of printer paper. It showed up where there were areas that needed further work.

The bird image was inspired by a tile I had seen in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery collection.