In shock!

I'm in shock!  I'm working on 3 wallhangings at the moment, each approx 50cm wide by 150cm drop.  The last time I did hangings I used an old sheet which I hand dyed as the backing and some curtain interlining which was a remnant from my soft furnishing days as the wadding.  Admittedly the finished hangings weighed a ton & I did have difficulty getting them under my machine but they looked great.  I thought this time I'd do the job 'properly' and this morning popped to a quilting shop to buy wadding and since I didn't have a sheet knocking about I thought I'd treat myself to calico for the backing.  I had £20 in my purse....haha....£44 it cost me!  I don't think I spend that much on my recycled fabric all year!  And it's not even as if any of that £44 cloth will be seen!

I don't think I can bring myself to use the calico.  I promptly went next door to a charity shop and bought a king size cotton sheet for £1.50 which is more than enough to back the 3 hangings.  How do people afford to quilt as a hobby?  This is not how the tradition was born...the Gees Bend quilters had nothing but worn work clothes and look at the stunning quilts they produced.  I feel like I compromised my values in my haste to finish my work & that doesn't sit well with me, naughty Madame Jacqueline!

Finding a Rhythm

It's now been a year since I made the decision to eschew all synthetic dyes, electing to work only with natural dye materials and as far as possible to only use plant stuff foraged from my local environment.  It has been a difficult but wonderful venture....weaning myself off Procion dyes proved extremely challenging and I just had to go 'cold turkey' in the end!  The greatest change has been in the rhythm of my working; I've had to surrender to nature and the seasons, dyeing fabric like a lunatic in the summer when there was a wealth of plant material to harvest,  whilst this winter I've withdrawn to my studio to pursue sketchbook work keenly waiting for Spring.

I've missed having a dye pot on the stove so a few days ago I tried bundling up a bunch of flowers which were sat wilting on a shelf, wrapped them in a piece of old sheet and let them simmer for a while.  The piece is quite pretty with some nice markings.....

The pink areas are from some dried flowers which must have had a synthetic dye sprayed on....I'm not worried about that, I was recycling and reusing which was the most important part of the process.

I've also produced another length of rust dyed fabric, this time combined with tannin which has turned the cloth a beautiful cool, bluey grey.....I just love this piece.....

.....in fact I think I love it so much I won't be able to cut it up.  This is a problem since I dyed it to complete a large wall hanging I'm working on.  I am becoming more and more precious about these dyed lengths of cloth...it never used to bother me when I dyed synthetically, I suppose I knew I could easily replicate the colour and in no time at all.  With natural dyes however I may spend weeks on one piece of cloth, slowly allowing the colours to reveal themselves and the results are so intricate and delicate that I can hardly bare to touch them afterwards.  It makes me wonder where my practice is heading.

House of Chanel Documentary...wonderful!

This is a must watch for anyone interested in Haute Couture.....it's a lovely, funny look at what really happens behind the scenes at the House of Chanel. Be warned though, you will want to watch the whole of the series in one go, it's very addictive!  I now wish to be addressed as 'Madame Jacqueline' like one of the couturiers!!

Framing Dilemmas!

Finding suitable, affordable framing options for my work is a continual headache!  I'm working on some 'journey' pieces which are long & thin but have to be shown landscape like this one below....colours are a bit odd by the way because I've been playing around in Picasa!

Typically I've made it a size which won't fit into any off the shelf frame comfortably so I've been costing up having it custom framed.  Trouble is, since I use all recycled materials and am now even foraging for colour it kind of goes against the grain to buy anything new!  Equally though I am aware that good framing can really enhance a piece and the work I'm doing at the moment is so delicate & fragile that it would look lost if not framed.  In future though I think I will purchase the frame first so I know what size to work to....hate being constrained like that though! 

Cocoon

It's been so cold here over the Christmas period that I've wished I could spin myself a little cocoon to crawl inside and keep warm until Spring.  As always, my mood effects the type of work I produce so I've been investigating wrappings, pods, protective shells and playing around with free machining fragments of cloth to produce fairly rigid structures....

These are large enough to wear as a decorative cuff but I'd like to try something much larger & perhaps try wrapping them around different natural forms....tree trunks etc.  Crazy I know but I'm loving my textiles in the natural environment at the moment....they look 'at home' there.

Nature's Threads

It's so cold here at the moment.....everything is frozen including the spiders & their beautiful webs.  I would be quite happy hibernating with the squirrels, burrowed down with a stash of nuts or perhaps cocooned like the silk worm in my own little self-made pod.  See you in the spring! 

Private

"Slave to no sect, who takes no private road,
But looks thro' Nature, up to Nature's God."

Alexander Pope