Things I would like to do

The last few days have been full of 'doing things'. Even the textile side of my life is in tidying up mode.

Weavetech has mentioned   an On-line Exhibition of Tapestries by a Korean artist, Inyul Heo,  The works are based mostly on Tidelands and are very dramatic - not to mention technically gifted. I look wistfully at tapestries like these and think if only I could guarantee another 50 years of active life! Braiding has the same effect on me. I am very taken with takedai (the picture is of work about two inches wide by Rosie Price) but I have so far resisted the attraction. The equipment is quite large - about the footprint of a small loom on a stand and  there are already too many looms in this house. Besides there is a lot of weaving I have not explored yet. Although you could argue that takedai is just diagonal weaving.

And on the subject of  saying 'No, I have enough to do', we attended a lecture by Jackie Hall on Japanese Embroidery last night. There was an audience of about 50 and most of them seemed to be embroiderers with a few Japanese embroiderers among them. She gave a description of each of the 10 levels you were expected to pass before setting out to teach. It sounded as if it takes 5 years minimum to do that. She had lots of stunning photos. Here is a link to more pictures of  Japanese Embroidery in the UK. This link was kindly provided by Jane who has yet more pictures on her own blog.

Our bookbinding class has finished until January 2010. I spent a lot of time on Monday and Tuesday bookbinding at home, trying to get to the stage where I could finish off two more books on Wednesday afternoon. It did not work out that way because of my stupidity. One of the pieces of cloth for a cover was not quite big enough so I spent time trimming the boards 1mm at a time and still could not get them to fit. Our tutor suggested that I would do better to cover the book in a  nice colour of book cloth, cut out the front and back from my fabric a little smaller than the book and apply these panels to the book. I am following her advice with a pale blue book cloth. So currently need to finish off the book inside. Yet another partially complete project.

I have also got round to getting on with my jacket. I bought some wonderful dark dark blue fabric (Linton tweed) a year ago to make a jacket. The squares are two inches on a side so there is the small matter of matching up the fabric across seams. One of my favourite people, Gill Arnold, has taught me how to do this and yesterday, I cut out the body sections and fused black fusible lining to those parts. Today I will start on the sewing up.

That will be after our monthly visit to Worcester Royal infirmary for Michael to have a transfusion. Once parked (which is very exciting and bad for my heart), it is all very restful. Quite strange really. There are usually 4 to 6 people being done in a large room with huge amount of window so it is full of light. The transfusees(?) get very comfy reclining chairs (the escorts get kitchen chairs) and there is a young nurse whose sole function seems to be supplying everyone with hot drinks and chocolate biscuits at 30 minute intervals. There are magazines and books to read but I shall be reading The Woven Pixel. The medical work is all done by two or three sisters and all the staff are very cheerful. The oddest thing about the two rooms (one to wait in, one to be done in) are the pictures. The ones in the main room are all Vettrianos - six of them! The waiting room has a motley collection of pictures which look to be presents from patients done by the patients themselves so there is a small tapestry, a couple of cross-stitch pictures, two or three watercolours, some calligraphy. I gather Michael is on this transfusion stuff for the long haul so maybe he should give them a picture. He is very good at water colours.

Oh and I hung the Vale of Evesham and Pears and Apples on the stairway and have nearly finished a total re-organisation of the library. By throwing out unwanted work conference proceedings and shifting box files around, we managed to get 6 empty shelves in the office. So the personal book collection has infiltrated the office. All the art books have been moved. I was astonished to find they occupied four of the six shelves. I will move the gardening books through next and then we can rearrange the main set of shelves, all 80 of them, each 30 inches long.

Progress on New Project

I have finished the Christmas cards. The weft contains lots of lurex and sari silk with lurex in it and glitter in most of the yarn!  I did over 40 and they are all addressed, ready to go.

We have been away for the weekend in Leamington Spa. At least Michael stayed there. I went off by train with my youngest daughter, Anne, and her daughter, Maddie aged 10, and we met my other grand-daughter, Charlotte,  who is coming up to 17, in London on the first floor of Harvey Nicks!!! Well, where else would you take a fashionista like our Charlotte? So we inspected everything in H N's, had a late breakfast on the fifth floor and adjourned to Burberrys which is across the road. This was for me to find a new winter coat. The last one was bought in MaxMara in Dijon 8 or 9 years ago and is thread bare.  I was rescued by Charlotte in Burberrys. All the trench coats were only in sizes 8 and 10 and I was about to leave in despair when Charlotte suggested gently that they might have larger sizes in the stock room. Which turned out to be true. You select the style you want and they go and fetch the right size!!! And a size 16 fitted perfectly so happiness all round. We then adjourned to Harrods to have a good Lebanese lunch and Anne bought a jacket. Along the way, we acquired several more parcels and bags including presents for the menfolk.

On the train and in any spare time I had, I considered the problem of sorting out colours for the new project. On Friday last, I cut a set of 3 inch squares of watercolour paper and coloured each with the pastel I had matched to my yarn. It became apparent that this was a waste of time and I was not going to get anywhere using that technique. I wondered about cutting the 3 inch square up into much narrower strips but rejected that idea too.


So when we got home today, I took each cone of silk and matched the RGB colour using Photoshop, wrote down all the numbers and then set up these colours in Fibreworks. The result is below. The weft is entirely silver grey. The whole width of 25 inches is shown and it has the effect I am looking for. The draft shown is just a 32 shaft twill but in reality is very complicated.

Now to put a sectional warp with all these 10 colours in it! But first I must do some work towards my bookbinding class on Wednesday as I want to finish two books then. I need to do some dress making as well. Then there are buns to be baked for Kennet Valley Guild's Christmas thrash next Saturday. Just as well I have retired.

Michael bought The Woven Pixel  as my Christmas present and it arrived last Friday. Lots of good stuff in there. I am allowed to read it before hand but it has to be handed back on Christmas Eve - preferably in a clean state. It is going to need some attention.

Vale Of Evesham V (2)

 The separate weavings have been tidied up. Fringes have been trimmed and the pieces stuck on to black mount board with double sided sellotape. Before doing that,  I spent some time arranging and rearranging the six pieces but, in the end, put them on to two separate pieces of mountboard. The Vale of Evesham V is shown on the left. I have a lot of foam board in the garage used at past exhibitions and no longer needed. I cut up one sheet and backed the mount board with it. The sandwich is very lightweight but quite stiff and will stop the mount board curling.




The apples and pears are below.


So that is a project completed.

I did start another project this evening but came to a halt rapidly. I had woven a piece of cloth in the summer to make Christmas cards from. Tonight I located everything, thoroughly ironed the cloth and it looked fine. Then I spread out everything on the dining room table and started applying double sided sellotape to the cards. Not enough!! I ran out after one card.  I toyed with the idea of setting out in the car to trawl Malvern for double sided sellotape but decided that at 0830 pm, they would all be shut. Oh well.

The Xmas card cloth was woven at the end of a long warp using some grey 60/2 silk as warp  and the weft was some beautiful dyed 20/2 tencel from Just Our Yarn in a broken twill. (I made a smashing waistcoat out of that). The cards are also done in broken twill but in coloured stripes, using up every scrap of exuberant yarn I could find in my stash. There is fancy knitting yarn, some viscose ribbon (pale green) and some sari yarn (the grey and black). There is a scrap of chenille as well. Hence the thorough ironing needed. There are sets of stripes of the right length for the cards with 6 weft throws of mid-brown cotton between each set to make the cloth easier to cut up. Each set will get me five cards. Well that's tomorrow spoken for.

Thinking about Pictures

Today was bookbinding day and I sewed an A4 book together, made from handmade papers folded last week. I glued two cloth covers to paper. One worked and one didn't. So half an hour before closing time, there I was tearing the backing paper off. I had fused a dress lining to the material before sticking this to the paper, with the idea of protecting the outside from paste stains and giving the cloth some body.  This has always worked in the past but did not on this piece of cloth which is rather loosely woven. I took off the 'fusible' lining and put the cloth straight to the paper - which has gone on nicely and there are no stains.

Next week is the last day this term (Tutor is off to the Southern Hemisphere) so I aim to do a lot before next Wednesday.

I have been following   Alice Schlein's blog in which she talks about her TC-1. Why am I struggling to make pictures using the Megado when it can be done so much more easily using a TC-1? Well, it is big investment, I haven't exhausted the possibilities of the Megado for doing what it does well - yardage and where would we put a TC-1? Husband says 'you would have to get rid of the Megado?. I don't think so but I will think a lot before trying out more Vale of Evesham type weaving. It is quite a struggle and often does not work. For every one that I am halfway happy with, there are two or three which were ditched after an inch is woven or discarded when completed. Is this sensible? I ask myself.

Joke of the week. I am not at all keen on rodents. We once owned a mediaeval house which had rats - and, when they were gone, mice moved in. Timber-framed buildings are full of air holes to the outside world. Anything in the nature of scratching in the current attic or cellar is now greeted with alarm. So husband sits down for his morning coffee and says 'What have you done with all the mice?' and wonders why his wife turns ashen. I mentally reviewed the precints - house, garage, cellars, attic and don't recall seeing any signs of mice. So I ask and the answer is my husband was talking about the spare computer mice which I had tidied up some months ago and he wanted back. Talk about a fit of the vapours!!

Vale Of Evesham V

I have tidied up the individual elements of the latest Vale of Evesham. This means ironing everything which had a painted warp to set the paint, tucking in any odd ends, embroidering stamens on the flowers. I visited a good Art shop in Studley today and came away with some black mount board to back everything with.

Winter Orchard - white warp, dark brown weft.

Spring Orchard - white warp, orange and pink weft. It all looked rather samey so I embroidered stamens in gold thread and half way through decided that was a bit samey too. So the gold ones are dotted about and I found some Oliver Twist space dyed silk thread to do the rest with.

Summer Orchard - white warp, dark brown tree trunks, two shades of green in the weft for the leaves. Pale green only for the grass between the trees. Possibly the most successful of the lot.

Autumn Orchard. Plums on a white warp with two shades of purple. One thread was solid dark purple, the other space dyed light purple and white

Instead of plums you could have apples. The pale brown ones in the middle are my favourite Egremont Russets. The warp has been painted in swirls of dark green and red. Not sure I like this one.

Or pears. This warp was also painted in swirls of green and two different colours have been used in the weft for each row of pears. These have worked better than the apples.

So I think the Pears and the Summer Orchard have worked best. Tomorrow I will mount everything up.

A New Project

I have three inches to go on the Megado and then it all comes off, making way for the next project. I should have started this earlier. I have a picture in my mind  and have bought some more colours of Uppinghams silk. By the way, they say this is 70/2 NM. I don't believe it. I think it is 90/2. I went to the bother of measuring out a fixed length and weighing it. And if you think a weighing machine can't be accurate enough, think again. Mine is accurate to +/- 0.1 gm. This works out at 60epi. Anyway I have all the colours I want but this will not be a striped but a blended warp.

The problem is how to translate what is in my mind to a colour chart for warping up. I have matched the colours of our Sennelier soft pastels to each cone. You can see some small scraps of card with writing on next to each cone. We could not match everything so the missing ones have been ordered. I will make a 3 inch square of each colour on paper and carefully position these. When I have something I like, I will photograph it and also make up a 25 inch by 3 inch full version. None of this is going to happen till the new pastels arrive so I will process the current weaving on the Megado. I should have started on this earlier - like 4 weeks ago.

Japanese Embroidery

We went to the Gallery, Nature in Art, today. This is at Twigworth, a little north of Gloucester and is a slightly odd place. I am entitled to say that - we are Friends. It has artworks based on nature which run from Japanese drawings/woodblock prints/paintings to David Shepherd's elephants. Lots of sculpture, ceramics, even bookbinding on occasion. They had an exhibition of BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year in spring 2009, the first time that show has ever been outside London. And it is not all animals.

Anyway the expedition today was because they have Japanese embroideries done in the UK on show for 2 weeks and this weekend they had two practitioners, Barbara Wright and Jackie Hall, demonstrating. No photography was allowed which means you will have to look at samples such as Michelle Ellender. The item shown there was in the exhibition as a Level 1!! There was an example from everyone of the 10 levels. By the time you got to 6, the brain was reeling. Level 4 was a stunning embroidery of 8 kumihimo braids in grey, white, pink and maroon and one maroon tassels. Imagine embroidering a picture of a kumihimo braid!! Later there was a picture of pansies done in flat and twisted threads of silk of varying thicknesses (Kathy Read). There must have been 30 or so embroideries on show.

The technique seems to be called nihon shishu and is carried out on silk fabric with silk and metallic threads. Various types of fabric are used. Some have metallic threads wefts, one was goose eye twill but most were a tabby in heavy silk. I spotted two which had been dyed with careful blending of colours.  I cannot find much on the web with photos by these named individuals which is a pity.

We have signed up for a lecture by Jackie Hall next week so I will report further then