"Breaking Boundaries" exhibition by the Textilers

The textile art group that I belong to, Textilers, has just held an exhibition in which we made the effort to break our artistic boundaries.  I would say that everyone succeeded very well.  It was a terrific show.  These are my own entries.

Meditation Bowl - totally recycled yarns from Op Shops over strips of recycled fabrics.  Boundary Broken - using traditional coiling with non-traditional basketry materials.

Phoenix Regenerating - rayons threads in machine-embroidered feathers and head, real feathers.  Boundary Broken - extending my machine embroidery skills.

detail of above

Rundle Mall.  Machine-stitched figures from my sketches.  Boundary Broken - drawing people, fifty years after being told I couldn't draw.

detail of above

Dare to Differ

The Dare to Differ contemporary art quilt show begins tonight, at Marion's Gallery M.  It's open till 20th October so if you can hop down there and see many interesting quilts, mine amongst them.  My quilt is about the Strands of Life, each one being different; some we like more than others, some are comfortable and some are scratchy.  They all crowd in together and make up our whole life.  Here is a detail to intrigue you.  I have used all recycled items, because we have to take in life what we have, and work with it.  You will see the wrappers from embroidery cottons, bread tags (beads and straight), cords made from all manner of materials.

©Christine Linton

Detail of my "Strands" quilt

Weaving and woven vessels exhibition - wow!

This week I went to an exhibition by Megan Walsh-Cheek, who has been working on some wonderful experimental weaving.  Unfortunately most of my photos didn't come out well, but Megan has kindly given me permission to show her work here, and one of my favourites did photograph well:

weaving from Megan Walsh-Cheek

What I liked so much was not just the variety of materials she used, such as fabric and lace strips, as well as yarns and threads, plus sticks of various kinds, but also the fact that she wove around the shape of the sticks, so that when a stick curved, so did the weaving.  She also made some fantastic vessels which can be seen on her etsy shop, see below.

The exhibition has now finished, but you can see the exhibits on her etsy shop here, it is lovely to look at them again.

Hand embroidery threads

I'm back to hand embroidery again, and just discovered this web page in which there is a link, down the left hand side, look under "Resources" and you will see DMC Colour Chart listed, where you can access the full colour range of DMC threads, in glorious colour.  8 pages of them.  It also has stitch instructions - I had been looking up Vandyke Stitch, which was referred to in Jan Messent's book "Celtic, Viking and Anglo-Saxon Embroidery" - a wonderful lavish book with textiles you feast on with your eyes.

I have been working on an embroidered panel "Cootamundra Wattle" for the Port Community Art Centre SALA exhibition, at the Black Diamond Gallery in Port Adelaide, starting 24th August - can't show here until after the exhibition, and that is a contemporary, freeform type of embroidery.  Impressionistic.  I haven't done anything else like that by hand and really enjoyed the freedom - though machine-embroidered plenty of freeform - my hand embroidery previously has always been traditional like this:

Fletcher the 2nd 

Dare to Differ Art Quilts

Yippee!  My entry has been accepted in the Dare to Differ Exhibition in September.  I have long admired the entries in this exhibition, which has run every year since 2011, and feel honoured to have been accepted. The idea is to make the quilt something different, hence the title, and for some pix of some previous shows, look here.  This exhibition is run by the SA Quilters Guild.  The exhibition opens on 24th September 2013 and runs till 21st October, at Gallery M, in Marion, South Australia.

Pics of Creative Fusion

I have just updated my website with images of my entries into the "Creative Fusion" Exhibition, which was held at the Pepper Street Gallery recently, with close ups of the scroll on the Book Arts Page. 

Chook Tales, my book made from recycled brown paper bags featuring Chookys

©Christine Linton

Creative Fusion - fusing creativity with artistic techniques

At last, the culmination of all the work we put in last year at Marden - our exhibition starts tomorrow 2nd April and runs till 26th April, at the Pepper Street Gallery in Magill, South Australia - any who are able, we'd love to see you there.  It is wonderful to see all the students' work finished and displayed, everything there is so different from the next piece and I like every single piece.  (This is most unusual for me.)  It is called Creative Fusion.  As we can't show anything we are exhibiting online until the end of the exhibition, here is an experimental wax flower garden.  I was working with the mini-iron tip, tiny screws of tissue, which gives the flowers texture, being 3D relief, maybe not obvious here; I worked on one of my free sample glossy photo papers.

flower garden in wax 

©Christine Linton