Thursday 21 January 2016

Getting Creative

Every other Wednesday I join the lovely ladies of the Ten Plus Textiles group to arrange our exhibitions, chat, sew and sometimes eat cake. They are a great source of support, both personal and creative, not to mention a source of inspiration.

As we don't have an exhibition for a little while we decided to kick-start our creative processes with a little practical work. Liliane Taylor, a member of the group, offered to run a workshop for us and generously lugged in lots of materials, dyes, brushes, etc for us to use. Liliane is a professional textile artist, a bright, humorous and lively lady; a real breath of fresh air!


This was an example of work from one of Liliane's students and the kind of effect we were aiming for.

We got stuck in snipping, stitching and painting, with a lot of chatting too!


Working from a source picture or design idea, we cut out shapes from calico and attached them to a calico background with fusible web or stitches.


I isolated shapes from the image of a sculpted angel so it was quite abstract.





We then used Procion dyes to colour the pieces.







It's lovely to see how everyone's work evolves and how different each piece becomes.









This is a detail of Liliane's work after it was painted. I love the colours and how they have bled together.


This is mine- I think it looks a bit weird, but I do like the way the pieces curled up as the dye dried, showing the white underneath. I'm not sure what I will do with it next, but sometimes it is useful to experiment and see if it takes you in a different direction.

We are going to continue to work into these pieces with stitch and embellishments, so in  a month I will get some more pictures to show you.

What have you been creating this week?