Long time no see......

Have been off writing up this blog although have been doing quite a lot so here goes....

yesterday a friend came round and we carved some block printing patterns from small erasers . We had great fun and you get some very satisfying results from small beginnings. This is the eraser block I carved last week:

Then I tried it out on paper:

before finally having a go on fabric

I think this might make some very lovely cushions.

I then thought I would play with scale so made another block with larger image using the same pattern. Again, first on paper:

And then onto fabric using either acrylic paints mixed with screen print binder or fabric paints:

This design could also be used as an overall design and in contrast to the smaller version.

Two weeks ago I had a four day short course at West Dean on 3D machine embroidered flowers using soluble fabric. I was very excited before going but was very disappointed by the end of the course. The tutor was inexperienced at teaching and it showed but she was energetic and clearly wanted to please her students. it was however a big disappointment - but that's another story.
I thought we were going to work from sketches we would make from actual flowers but this didn't happen and we somehow just launched straight into our project. Not the way I like to work....

Anyhow, I used a beautiful photograph taken by a friend of mine and worked from that. First I drew some petal shapes onto the soluble fabric ( this is a fabric that washes away when placed in water leaving the stitched shape/pattern), and sewed densely with a focus on colour mixing:

I cut out the flowers and then ran them under the tap to remove the glue.

I then sewed the feathery fronds that are part of the clematis seed pods after the plant has died:

These too needed to cut out and the glue washed away -  a fiddly business!

I then attached the fronds to the ends of the seed pods:

Before finally arranging them into a more pleasing style with a more visual link to the photograph:

Sadly, the rest of the course was very repetitive and I didn't produce anything else that I was satisfied with - enough said!!