Finished at last!!!!!

Well the C&G is finally finished and the CD has been sent for the final assessment, yippee!!!!!!!!!!!!!

As some of you know there were grave doubts as to whether I would finish it, and to be honest, without the wonderful support of my family, friends, and my tutors I would never have done it.

I received wonderful help and support from so many generous bloggers, who gave me great sound advice and I'm very grateful.

It's a bit of a flat finish as there is no exhibition or final finishing get together, as some of you will already know, Opus have sadly stopped operating as a school for textile arts. But a huge thank you to all those tutors and administrators who stepped into the breach and rescued those of us who were about to qualify.

It wasn't until I had to collate all the work for the final assessment that I realised just how much ground I'd covered and how much I'd learnt. C&G is a great skills based course and the nature of it is to teach you processes by which you can interpret the ideas in your head. I spent so much of this course kicking against the ordered exercises that I didn't realise that the process was embedding itself in my brain, despite my best efforts to thwart it.

My proof of this presented itself when I started working on my next project, this time on my own without the exercises to prompt me, and I found that I was doing what I've done for the past 2 1/2 years without even realising it.

That brings me neatly to my next challenge.

A few weeks ago Pippa asked me if I was going to enter the Charles Henry Froyle Trust Stitched textiles competition. Well I'd never heard of it, but decided to enter anyway and posted off four pics of my C&G work plus one close up, and to my utter amazement I made it into the finalists list. Now my new project is to create a piece on the theme of Freedom, so that'll keep me busy till August. And as finalist I will also have a Master Class with Alice Kettle, fantastic.

Unfortunately I won't be able to show you my progress as the piece will go on exhibition in September, with the sketch books as well.

To finish up I thought I'd show you my favourite piece of the whole course and the story behind it, my apologies to those who might have seen it on my web site when I had it up and running.





The story behind the gauntle is as:

It has been designed to impart power to the wearer. It has strength and magic within the entwining snake. However the wearer must be careful to use the power wisely. If not the false fragility and beauty of the dangerous and carnivorous dragonfly will become transparent and his true aggressive and predatory nature will be revealed.
The wearer must wear the gauntlet with pride and strength and only use its protective devices when mortal danger threatens.

I did a photoshoot with one of my GD's, Bethany, some of you will have seen her on my blog and Ben acting out a little tableau in the woods. I had visions of them being the backdrop to my exhibition in The Mall, where Opus held the Pathways exhibition for the C&G students, so I thought I'd show it here instead.





So once again a big thank you to all who helped me get this far :-)