Quilt design..... tentative beginnings

As mentioned in a previous post I have been working on the final assignment of module 4 of my embroidery C&G.
The brief was to make 3 samples for a throw to be commissioned by someone for a contemporary studio-lounge.
As this is a colour module I decided to create my brief as follows:

My client is a single man in his late 30’s living in a modern flat in London. His passion outside of the work place is for Fungi. He is an authority on the subject, but treats it as a purely therapeutic interest that helps him unwind from the stresses of his work.
My client’s flat is in a large modernised Georgian house situated in a quiet London Mews.
The room is furnished in a minimalist style with cream walls and curtains, so he would like to bring some colour into the room, and have it reflect the shape and tones found in some of the fungi he has studied. He has supplied me with copies of photographic works that he has hanging in his study and would like me to construct my colour scheme and design from them.





My next move was to select a suitable photo from a decorating shade chart and float the pictures onto it to see how the room would look.



As I had decided from the beginning that I would make this throw into a quilt, as this is an area of textiles that I wanted to explore, I started working with the Sandra Meech book Cotemporary Quilts, Design Surface and Stitch, page 24/25, on a series of colour exercises to determine a colour scheme from the 2 photos.



The next thing was to assemble some colour swatches that might be usable for this project, although I already had in mind to dye my own colours.



I was now a bit stuck as to what form the quilt was going to take, all I thought I wanted to do was stripes, so I painted a couple of ideas with spent dyes that were close to the colours I thought I might use.





Needless to say these weren’t working for me so I scanned them into the computer to see what a spot of montage might do and here’s the result.



Still not right, but interesting. I took the name and info of the purple fungus and pasted it over the stripes together with the original photo. The little circles are the recorded months that the fungus can be seen growing.

By this time I was seriously doubting the colour scheme as nothing seemed to be working, but fortunately I spotted Pippa’s post and felt a bit better as her colours were close to mine and looked great. So I decided to go and dye up my colours and see if that made any difference.



I made 10 Procion colours and chose 10 different natural fabrics of varying weight and textures to work with, plus a range of threads.

After making up all these dyes I was reluctant to waste any so had some fun painting my sketchbook pages.



I used some funky foam to carve out the stamp for these pages, another useful tip from Shirley, and used the mop up paper towel on the right, which gave me the lovely paternation when I accidentally left a damp dishcloth too close. The brown paper is old packaging treated with a peeling paint stamp and the newsprint was used to blot off the pages.



And finally this is the page I posted up in a previous post, where I’m trying to break away from my desire to make everything look “beautifully executed” as my ex print tutor instilled into me.

So this is very much the first part of this project, but there has been a lot of development this week so I will post that when it’s all collated.

BTW thanks to Pippa’s continued support I’m feeling a lot happier about the loose WIP sample.

Post holiday blues

The trouble with having a good holiday is that you don’t want to return to the humdrum of everyday life, work, the dreaded HW, etc.
In an effort to counter this growing feeling of malcontent, we went to one of our favourite places on Sunday, the Arundel Wetland centre. As those of you who visit my blog regularly will know I have a thing about an artist’s installation there known as an obscurer.
I have briefly explained what it is before but didn’t have any pics to illustrate my explanation. So this time I tried to take some, not an easy task in the pitch black inside a structure that resembles a tepee, (my apologies to the artist).





Anyway the structure sits in the middle if the reed beds, which this visit were at full height. At the top of the installation is a hole and inside is a mirror, which reflects the surrounding reed beds and as the sun moves in front of the clouds a moving picture slowly forms on the floor in front of you. It’s pitch black inside so you have to let your eyes adjust before you see something. It’s a very basic form of watching a video, but this is real time and you can hear the rustling of the rushes and the occasional passer by (whom I was preying would not be tempted to come in and spoil my reverie.)



I tried several times to capture a photo of the reeds, but eventually gave up and hit on the idea of drawing them in the dark. It was a wonderfully therapeutic experience, I tried to follow the flow of the reeds as they moved, and by the very little light that was admitted I looked, just occasionally, to see if I was staying within the circle of the reflected image.



When I’d been in there about 15 minutes I decided to come out into the world again, as a mother and toddler were on their way in, and found a quiet seat to record my feelings. It really was a lovely experience, I can totally recommended it to anyone who lives nearby.

We’d gone into the centre early, as usual, and by about 11.0 it was filling up so I decided to wander back to the sanctuary of our camper, but not before I’d taken a couple of mandatory textile/pattern shots.


This lovely waterlillly was past flowering but left this wonderful seed haed behind.


This female pheasant was so close to me it would have been rude not to take a pic of her lovely feathers.

Once back in my portable studio I set about following up on the piece I’m working on for my C&G, hmmm!!!! Yes I have restarted the course after about a 6-month gap and am determined to finish by Xmas. There I’ve made the commitment in public, so I will have to follow through.



This piece is my attempt to be a little less constrained in my approach to my work, but when I looked at it the next day I vowed that this would be the last time I tried to follow this route.

I will blog the assignment later this week when I’ve collated the WIP, and also assessed whether I’m on the right track (for me) or not, and you'll be able to see this sketch book page in context.

Colour studies

I was very pleased that this week I managed to stick to my New Year's resolution of having 2 dedicated creative days per week. I got on well with my C&G colour studies on those days and found that with the extra time available I was much more relaxed and able to approach the task without feeling that I should be doing something that would result in a finished piece.

I completed my blue 'story' as described in the previous post and also the purple collage. The only problem is it's a very messy process, with bits of paper and glue everywhere! Still it did give a good idea of the range of tones you find in each of the hues, and it made me think about the emotions that are evoked by different colours, so all in all it has been a valuable exercise, so far. There are still 3 more colour stories to complete, but by way of a change I moved on to the next part of this exercise.






This involved painting a colour wheel based on the three primary colours, which were then mixed to make the secondary colours and then the tertiary colours. Sandra Meech explains all this beautifully in Contemporary Quilts, Design Surface and Stitch, an absolute must for any textile artist’s library, in my opinion.



The next exercise involved painting patches of different colours and then painting small squares of another colour in the centre to see the interaction of the those colours. It's an exercise in contrasting values. 'A colour will look lighter against a dark BG and darker against a light BG' (SM). I don't think my examples show this off too well, as I didn't really understand the meaning of the exercise till I read Sandra Meech's book. Also I think it would have worked better on the computer where the colour is flat and easier to see the reaction between the colours. This applies particularly to the grey square with the orange in the middle as this is supposed to show '...how a neutral colour is influenced by what appears with it. When a colour of medium intensity is placed next to areas of different colour strengths you will see more intense colour contrast......' (SM)



Another section of this exercise was to make a hot to cold collage. I enjoyed this as I decided to use a new tool I’d bought on yet another visit to the dreaded craft shop. This time it was a square die cutter, what a lovely little tool, it chops nice little squares of any weight paper the same size every time, so I decided it would be fun to use it for this collage.






The last exercise I tried was where you add a little black to the primaries and the secondaries and keep adding it till there is no colour left. This gives you the range of shades in the colour, which is quite a surprise when you see the range that appears. The same exercise was repeated using white to get the tones in the same set of colours, and this produced a lovely set of pastels.

So far this module has been a bit of an eye opener, I thought I’d done colour theory, but discovered I obviously hadn't. I'm also very impressed with the amount of colour theory that's involved with quilting, and how successful it appears to be. I often wondered why I have always been attracted to the quilting area of embroidery; maybe I should have done my C&G in that!

Module 4 and other directions

Back to normal at last after all the Christmas festivities! And what a lovely family time it was too!
Now down to the serious business of the creative direction for 2008. Well! The first thing in the 'to do' pile is the new module in my C&G embroidery Certificate curse, (whoops, a bit of a Freudian slip there!!!) course.
As this one is colour I have high hopes of it being a bit easier going than the last, texture, as colour is probably the first decision I make about a new piece and is often the first thing that sparks my imagination in whatever it is that inspires me.

The first task in this module is to begin 'building a portfolio collection of colour'. The first part of this exercise is to make a 'Colour collection of colour stories'. I hope you're following the gist so far! The idea is to work with the primary colours to start with, (i.e. red, blue, yellow) and explore with the aid of magazine cuttings/photos, fragments or squares that reveal as many of the different shades and tones of these primary colours as possible. These are then to be glued to a backing sheet/sketch book in such a way as to show the story or flow of the above.





As usual it's sometimes quite difficult to interpret what is meant by the written instructions when you're doing a distance-learning course. So as you can see I've started with red and moved on to pink. I don't know if I'm on the right lines, but I just felt it was important for me to create a colour story that would inspire me in the future, and I think these might. There wasn't much time pre Christmas to do a lot but with my new timetable in place (Tuesday and Thursdays as creative days) I hope to get on with this a bit quicker than my previous effort of 6 months per module!!

My second priority this year is to make artwork to sell at future exhibitions that our fledgling group will be hosting. We plan to have one in the spring and one in July, so far, and I’m also exhibiting with a friend as a joint exhibition in a local gallery in June, so I’ll definitely need my two dedicated days.

By way of light relief I have my monthly commitment to Calendar Girls, which I love, as it gives me that much needed contact with other like-minded people.

Finally I want to build in more time for experiments with new ‘stuff’ that at the moment I know nothing about, get to grips with my embellisher and refresh my composite work on Photoshop.

Did I mention that part of my New Year plan was to reduce my nightly hours of sleep quota to 4 per night LOL?

Have a happy and creative New Year!!