Photo Friday : Sally Ann Westcott

It's always delightful to feature other artists' work on this blog, and I particularly like this 12 x 12  lino print on lutradur by Sally Ann Westcott, from Tasmania, called 'Red and Brown Algae'.

Sally says of the piece;

I carved the algae image into a 12 x 12 (piece of)lino.  I then painted the lino with transfer dyes and printed the image onto lithograph paper.  Once the print was dry, I transferred the image onto light weight white lutradur, using a hot iron.  I then sandwiched the lutradur, green cotton fabric, cotton batting and a backing.  I machine quilted it using pebble shapes and 'di-atoms".  After it was satin stitched around the edges I used a soldering iron to burn away some of the lutradur to expose the green cotton underneath.

Being me, I was wondering why the lithograph paper (as opposed to any other kind), but forgot to ask before I wrote this post, so consider that as your first question, Sally!   You can see more of Sally's work here, on her blog.  Thanks, Sally, for sharing your work with us.  

Photo Friday : Elizabeth Peters

`

Peacocks are fabulous birds, and this one, by Elizabeth Peters, is no exception. `It is a lovely example of how you can combine Evolon with other fabrics to produce a partially three dimensional image.

Elizabeth says of her Evolon creation:

I absolute love using Evelon in projects. It is such a versatile fabric. I first bought some about two years ago with another friend, at the Textiles show in Brisbane Australia. We had read about it in one of Isobel Hall's books & was interested to see how it worked. So we bought some.

I have painted it and dyed it. And it is absolutely amazing to stitch into.  The inspiration for the peacock came from the earring that I used for the tail. I saw the earrings on a stall in the shopping centre & thought that they would make a great peacock's tail. So I bought them. Along with quite a few other pairs of earrings that I will use to embellish other pieces of work.

I used the evelon as the base fabric, as I knew it would colour just the way I wanted it to do. It is great stuff for colouring, & feels so lovely in the hoop when stitching on it. I coloured the Evelon with water colour paints then hit it with the heat gun to dry it so that I could start stitching on it straight away.

I embroidered on the tree design & made the detached leaves first.

Then drew up a design for the body of the peacock. I made a padded body from felt. After which I then stitched over the top of in the colours of a peacock. There are about 7 different colours used in the body of the peacock. Then I secured on the earring for the tail. And hay presto the peacock was made.

After all the stitching was done, I took the piece out of the hoop, then machine stitched around the edges. Again Evelon is a wonderful fabric for sewing on the machine as well as in the hand. I mounted the whole piece behind a framed card & posted it off to my very dear friend, who lives in the UK, for her Birthday.

Sadly though. I completely forgot to take a photo of the completed card before posting it☹☹☹ I was running short on time to get it posted over to the UK on time, & it completely slipped my mind. The good thing is though I know if I ever have to, I can get my friend to take a photo of it & email it to me.


I am a great advocate of Evelon. It is such a versatile fabric to work with. It is great for painting on or dying. It is also wonderful to stitch on both hand & machine & is strong & sturdy for uses in book covers as well as backing embroideries.

If you have any questions, I'm sure Elizabeth will be delighted to answer them here.  Once again, many thanks to her for sharing this lovely piece of work with us.  Te see more of her work, check out her blog.

Photo Friday : Gum Flower

Thanks to Dianne Nunn, who has shared this lovely project with us.  I asked her to tell us a bit about it; she said:

First I should explain that I designed this myself as I went along.

A friend sent me some evelon to try and I thought I would start with something simple.

First I drew one leaf on the evelon using a pencil and included a central vein.  I then stitched the outline on my sewing machine.  Once I was happy with the outline I laid some wool fibres (wool rovings) over the evelon and used my needlefelting hand tool (5 needles) to secure the fibres building up the surface with some more wool, some silk fibres and some thread.  With the first leaf I outlined it with some very fine green twine couched down with silk thread (although this pretty much disappears into the surface.

When it was finished I added a few red beads and burnt some holes in the piece to replicate the condition of many eucalyptus (gum) leaves and finally cut the shape out with my soldering iron.  I was thrilled with the fact that the evelon cuts so cleanly with the soldering iron.

The second leaf is a lot more simple – just fibres over the shape added using both the hand felting tool and my pfaff embellishing machine before cutting out.  

This was really an experimental piece to try out the properties of evelon.  I love the feel of it: so soft and strong.

Once the leaves were done I felt I wanted to use them for something so made the gum flowers from cotton yarn with felt forming the gum nuts. 

The piece is mounted on a small canvas which is covered in gold foil and hessian (stapled to the back).

The leaves and flowers are larger than life size but look realistic.

Many thanks, Dianne, for sharing this with us; it's wonderful to see how differently we all use these fabrics.  I'm sure if you have any questions for Dianne, she'd be happy to share more about this pretty piece.

How did you start off using Evolon?  Please do share some pictures, and tell us a bit about it... the same with other spunbond fabrics.  Email me here; thanks!

 

Photo Friday

Same structure, same size, same basic monoprint as a starting point...but two completely different quilts.  I much prefer the top one; what about you?

Photo Friday : Peaks And Troughs, detail.

This is a detail from one of my quilts, called Peaks And Troughs.  I think it illustrates beautifully the benefits of working with spunbonded fabric; this is a piece of Lutradur 100 on top of a piece of hand dyed fabric.   The fabric itself is highly coloured and interestingly patterned, as well as having a slight sheen (it is vintage rayon).  I wanted to show that on the surface of the quilt in some places, so I cut back the motif.  To strengthen its visual impact,  I added some fabric paint following the lines of the quilting, to give the swirling effect that you see above. 

How could you apply these techniques in your own work?

Photo Friday : Dervish

We tend to think of lutradur as a fabric we use on its own, or with a different fabric below it.  Here, though, hand dyed cotton has been fused on as a top layer, to describe a dervish type figure blowing its way through the quilt.  I stitched this one first, as suggested by the marks below the lutradur, but felt that it needed more than that to have adequate visual impact. 

I'd really love to feature YOUR work here... if you have something suitable, please do send me an image and a short artists statement, telling us about the thinking behind the piece, and the techniques you used.  I'll link it to your blog or website.

Photo Friday

Jungle Patterns.  How do you think that was made?

Photo Friday : Strange Swimmers

Strange Swimmers is a small art quilt using lutradur 100.  All of the colour in this piece is made using transfer dyes and paints, with the stitch following some of the interesting marks that suggest swimming.  I think it has a real underwater feel; what do you think?  How do you think I achieved that look?

Photo Friday : Ticking Clock

I was really struck by this piece, by Angela Huddart, when I saw it mentioned on her Facebook page, so I asked her if we could share it here, as well as the International Quilt Challenge blog, for which she made it in the first place. She was kind enough to agree.


 She says of the piece;

 'Ticking Clock' features a dandelion seed head.  As a child we used to 'tell the time' by blowing the seeds off the plant.  Depending on how many blows it took, that was the hour...only it was never correct!!

I used two weights of Lutradur, 8" x 11", one heavy (130) and one medium (70).

On the heavy one which would be underneath, I used a white Inktense block to cover the sheet in white, then when it was dry painted an iridescent sparkly paint over it.

On the medium sheet I used two or three different shades of green Inktense blocks and blended them.

With a fine pencil I drew the outline of the dandelion clock onto the green Lutradur and used a soldering iron to slash & burn on the design.

When laid on top of the heavy Lutradur the white showed through. 

I finished it by stitching the seeds using Madeira Rayon thread in bright white and embellishing the background with a Madeira metallic thread. 

This is the first time I've used Inktense blocks and found the colour amazing.  I don't have the facilities for dying here so this is the next best thing for me!

 

For those of you who have not heard of Inktense blocks, they are water soluble ink blocks, which you can use with brushes or directly onto paper or fabric.  Made by Derwent, they were originally produced as pencils; for more information, have a look here. 

 

 

 

Photo Friday : Looking At Details

I thought it might be interesting to look at a detail from a larger quilt, instead of looking at a whole quilt...though in fact, this might be a piece in its own right...or at least, could be with a fairly minor change to the stitching (any thoughts?).  It is a detail of 'Flying Circus', a whole cloth, made from Evolon, which I showed you in full here.   For convenience, though, I'm showing it at the bottom of this post.  Remember you can click on the image for a closer look; try not to be distracted by the rather obvious cat hair...another use for a photograph of your work! The detail, though, encapsulates for me the strength of this piece, and particularly the quilting.  I used machine stitch to delineate what I thought were the 'features' of the piece; here, they are two strange flying beings...angels, perhaps?  More likely trapeze artists, given the context... but I still think the one on the left is an angel.

It's interesting to consider the different effects that the hand stitching has.  The larger stitches, to me, are air; the smaller, tightly grouped stitches, the ground.  To be honest, none of that occurred to me at the time; it wasn't until I found the flying angels, and the horse (elsewhere in the quilt), that I realised that this was a 'flying circus'; no reference to Monty Python at all...I'm not particularly fond of their humor.

I think it's really useful to look at parts of a piece of work, as well as the whole; it can inform you of what's really going on in the piece.  I know I've found this particular exercise enlightening...I hope you do, too.

Photo Friday : Wendy Cotterill

 This week's image comes from Wendy Cotterill, whose blog you can find here, and whose shop, Gallery Textiles,  is here; Wendy specialises in Spunbond fabrics.  Wendy says about this particular piece:

 

Lutradur

The inspiration for this piece (and many others) has been an interpretation of a seascape, or more specifically, waves. The resulting piece itself is not particularly inspirational, but more what it represents - embryonic techniques and the expression of movement.

 

This piece was created from a piece of 30g Lutradur which was initially painted with water colour type paints in the early days when I first started experimenting with Lutradur.

Water based paints are okay, but dry to a much paler finish.

The pink section near the top of the piece were coloured with transfer dyes, and although not immediately apparent, has letter forms on the surface. Again, this was the first time I used my now favourite technique of transferring text onto fabric.

 

 

Once the piece was coloured I cut the Lutradur into section with a soldering iron using a  vermicelli type pattern on the edges and reassembled the sections laying one over the edge of the next and stitched them together with a free running stitch.

 

 

This overlaying technique creates a colour combining effect, although on reflection, not a very good one in this instance. The colours are too 'muddy' and similar in tone.

 

This experimental piece did however turn out to be quite pivotal in informing much of my subsequent work with spunbonded and synthetic fabrics;

This where I first tried out my transferring text with transfer dyes and have used it to great effect many times since.

 

It is also where I made the decided not to use any kind of applied paint to the surface of any of the spunbonded fabrics including Lutradur, as any heat distressing is compromised. I also learned (eventually) that a soldering iron gets very hot and burns you if you touch the tip!!

This is the piece of work that I did as a result of the one described here

 

Artists Statement

When Marion asked me for an Artists Statement, it took me back a few years as I have not written one since I graduated with a Fine Art degree in 1993.  When I read them I find a lot terribly self conscious, but here goes!!.

I carry a lot of 'textiles' baggage around with me, enough to have invented the term 'bag lady' and once threatened that if ever I wrote my memoirs they would entitled 'My Life in Carrier Bags'. In my early 20s I worked in the fashion industry as a pattern cutter, a job that is now done by computers and subsequently taught in further education passing on my skills to young fashionistas in the 1980s - you may remember the 80s?? Big shoulder pads and mahooousive jewellery?? I honed my teaching skills but a combination of events - a terminal decline in UK based manufacturing, my hankering to return to my first passion of surface pattern & decoration and an unexpected left hand turn took me back to study for a degree in Fine Art where specialised in experimental photo/printmaking and colour on canvas which very much informs most of the work that I still produce. A short hiatus in producing any kind of work at all - ie unemployment - eventually led me down the road of gaining a whole new set of (digital) skills and have adopted the ever increasing possibilities of desktop technologies which has subsequently enabled me to reinvent my world of textiles. I still do a bit of stitching when I have too!!

 

Photo Friday : March Challenge

As today is the last day for submissions for the March Challenge, I thought I would show you my attempt.  There's still just time to submit a piece... you know you want to!

I started by manipulating the image a little more than I had before.  Then, I printed it out on Bertha, my large scale Epson printer, on Lutradur XL.  I then carved into it with a soldering iron.  I hadn't intended to cut all the way through the cloth, but it seemed to work best that way, so I carved enough away to strengthen the idea that these were flints (in fact, they're not; the original photo was of an asphalt pot hole.  As a result, the piece is called Asphalt Dreams).

I decided not to add any stitch at all, as I felt it would be a distraction.  The piece varies depending on what colour the underlying surface is.  The first of the detail shots is on a pine table; the second on navy blue.

I'm planning to frame this piece so that it can be hung away from the wall, to explore the shadows it creates.  Another option is to put it in a light box, but that could prove to be prohibitively expensive, as I'm planning a series of similar works and would want them all framed in a similar way.

I've received one entry for this Challenge; I hope to receive a few more today.  Then I'll share them at the weekend and you can vote for your favourite; the winner will receive a small prize.

Photo Friday : Circles I

Today's image comes from the amazing Dale Rollerson.  You can find her blog, and more of her work,
  here.  She works a lot with spun bonded fabrics; this piece is Evolon.  She says of this particular piece;' I have monoprinted with the Gelli plate using acrylic paint and stencils – Evolon takes colour so well. I plan to stitch on it before too long'  I'm hoping she'll send me a follow up image when she has stitched this incredibly richly coloured piece, and keep us appraised of the progress of the series. 

So there I was thinking, what's a Gelli plate?  I'd never heard of them, so had a look at their website .  They make a gel printing plate that looks like gelatine, but is reusable.  It sounds fab...want one...but until one of us has a paying job, I'll settle for gelatine printing, as I have several packets of gelatine in the kitchen cupboard.   I found a video on U Tube showing how it's done; please note that the video is the copyright of the original artist, and has nothing to do with Spunbond Sensations!.

Many thanks to Dale for sharing this with us; if you have work at any stage of development that you want to share with us, please contact me here

Photo Friday : 'The Magpie' by Angela Huddart

Our first Friday photo is from Angela Huddart, in the UK.  If you have ever bought a pack of C&T Publishing's Lutradur, you will have seen this particular photograph before, as it is on the packaging, a well deserved honour for a lovely piece.  I asked her to tell us a bit about it;

"This is what I call my 'famous' piece!    It is a journal quilt measuring approx 8" x 11" and is based on Monet's painting 'The Magpie'.  I made it by sketching onto plain fabric then covering with a layer of Lutradur.  I thread-painted the gate, magpie, fences and trees, then painted strips of Lutradur dark brown for the trees in the foreground and stitched them in place before zapping with a heat-gun.  For the snow in the foreground I added a layer of scrunched up Lutradur, stitched it in place and zapped it again with the heat-gun.  After sandwiching, adding borders and quilting, the foreground and the sky were lightly brushed with a sparkly paint.

The Lutradur behaved just how I wanted it to - I could paint it, stitch on it and heat zap it.  I wouldn't do anything any different in hindsight.  I'm all for making life easy for myself and this worked for me with results that I liked - thanks to a great product! I loved making it so much I've made another as C&T Publishing have this original. 

I am a member of C&T Publishing's 'Creative Troupe' who occasionally send a 'call-out' for members who are interested in various new products.  When I joined there was a call-out for pieces made from the the new Ultra-Light Lutradur, which they provided.  I had made a couple of fused pieces based on The Magpie and loved how they turned out, so decided to have a go using Lutradur and thread.  The pieces they receive are used as models to demonstrate to retailers what can be achieved by using a particular product.  When it came to producing the packaging for sale to the retailers, they chose this piece as well as four others to be featured - mine just happened to be on the front !"

 

You can see more of Angela's work here,and you can contact her here .

I'm sure if you want to ask her anything about this particular quilt, you can just leave a comment in the box below, and she'll respond.  Thanks, Angela, for being so generous with your time and expertise.

If you would like to have a photograph featured on Photo Friday, please contact me here