At last my brain has jumped out of its Artists Block - I had been struggling with making a Book Cover at the end of last year, tried lots of techniques and didn't like anything, it all looked so dull, that's why I took a long break from it. I think sometimes your brain freezes up and has to take a rest. Then I spent some time recently with my new camera, and found that I really enjoyed pictures where the main focus e.g. flower bud, stood out sharply from a soft-focus background. This gave me the idea to try for this effect in textiles, so I tea-dyed some white cotton sheet from the Op Shop, to get a fuzzy background, and looked for a sharp bright colour to embroider with. Here is the result - or at least the first part of it. This is a letter T, almost finished. Working with french knots, I used mostly doubles, some singles, and some loopies. So I got lots of texture into it. It is DMC perle cotton no. 5, thicker than I originally wanted to use but once I started I loved it, had to use a chenille needle for the thickness. I love the colour, I wanted a beautiful bright blue to contrast with the background.
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| French knots on tea-dyed cotton sheet | ©Christine Linton |
Then I went to a natural-dye workshop at Pepper Street Art Centre, with Lizzy Emery as the tutor - who I first met as the tutor of a basketry workshop in December. Multi-skilled lady! We used mixed berries for red, onion skins and acacia flowers for yellow, the bark from the ironbark tree for brown - today I will show you the yellow. I used cotton voile. If you look at the left near the top, it looks like a frog leaping downwards.
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| cotton voile dyed with onion skins and acacia flowers |
©Christine Linton
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