Imagination

Where would we be without imagination?  It's where our art comes from.  I made some leaves using three techniques, free-machining over wire, over watersoluble fabric, and over sheer "bits", but my plan to put them in a basket meant they didn't show to their best advantage.  So I imagined a way to display them such that they could be turned around to see both sides but they could also all be seen at once.  I made a panel from my hand-dyed old sheeting, and strung the leaves from the dowel at the top.

Leaves Panel 

©Christine Linton

tie-dye chances

My other half asked me to dye his jeans back to blue again (that shows our age), so I bought some hot-water dye and did the job.  When I took the jeans out of the dye, I gathered some assorted bits of fabric and a pale peach t-shirt, left to recycle in some way due to - what?  Couldn't find stains, no apparent holes from cat claws, so anyway I put it in the dye and didn't move anything around so I could get some random effects.  I knew it would be pale because most of the dye molecules would have gone into the jeans (everything was cotton).   After an hour, I rinsed everything out.  The odd bits of fabric were actually quite dark blue but the t-shirt was light, with terrific tie-dye effects, couldn't have got this effect if I'd tried.  Even the back came out great.

t-shirt front

t-shirt back

Art journal colour

After reading a blog post from Aloquin, I started browsing through one of my journals and rediscovered a page I really loved - painted with gouache, from a little starter pack of colours, when I was experimenting with colours.  I haven't decided on a name for it - is it a fire, a solar flare, a Eureka moment (an idea moment) ..... I think the Eureka moment does it for me.

©Christine Linton

Aloquin's blog post's on art journals can be found here.

New to me

How fantastic are these works of art:
from Helen Suzanne
and this one too.

Saatchi online

I discovered this website when looking for weaving, and we had a Saatchi travelling exhibition in Adelaide last year which was fascinating.  The only thing is the images are slow to load so look in the middle near the top to click on thumbnails instead of full images; the search does bring up some textiles and weaving but this one http://www.saatchionline.com/art/Mixed-Media-Paint-China-Ghost-Town-Abandon-Building/71560/1365926/view was interesting and does evoke a ghost town effect with mainly paper and appears very simple to good effect.  So you don't have to get complicated.

Weaving a rock formation

I've become fascinated by some rock formations near home.  This is one of the photos I took -

and I decided to try some experimental weaving to interpret it in fibres/textile.  So I took a mesh bag that held oranges last week, and some wool I bought for 50 cents at the op shop, and some dyed string in small pieces from the dyeing I did last year  where I had to cut the string off the pole-wrap shibori because I couldn't undo the knots; also a bit of tapestry wool from a bag of them also from the op shop.  I love recycling and everything in this is - or in fact upcycled, made into something better instead of languishing in the back of a cupboard.  Here is the result -

Experimental weaving on mesh bag, 100% recycled stuff 

©Christine Linton

Originally I had it facing up the other way to better reflect the curves of the rock formation but when I dropped it and picked it up upside down, I immediately liked the effect better.  Never mind accuracy, it's effect I'm aiming for.

There are two blogs I follow that have inspired me to try weaving:

http://windthread.typepad.com/windthread/2013/02/maybe.html

http://avisualsensibility.com

both different approaches and both very individual, and both worth looking at.

Embroidery - hand or machine?

I think the answer is both, because each has it's own beauty and use.  For instance, I bought a home-made cushion cover in a local charity shop purely because I think it is lovely; it is hand-embroidered with little shisha mirrors and satin stitch, back stitch, buttonhole stitch.   The dye from the thread had run when it was washed which I expect is why it was given away because it is so lovely, and the running dye adds to it's charm, making the person who washed it human (or the person who dyed the threads).

Then you've got machine embroidery like these leaves I made last year:

Machine lace leaves 

©Christine Linton

I've always loved hand embroidery and I have found I love it even more now because I can use it as embellishment in new ways; I also learnt to control machcine embroidery much better.  Another textile artist with some very useful information on machine embroidery is Linda Matthews - see this link for using the decorative stitches on your sewing machine and how to get the best effects with them.