fix-me

last saturday (31st jan) I went along to Alex Falkiner's "Stitching off the Page (fancy edgings)" class in marrickville. it was a lovely afternoon learning new stitches and techniques for the edges of fabric. I really wanted to learn her "netting" stitch and just block out a few hours to spend stitching. great to speak to others too

some photos of the "in progress" parts of the stitches for future reference. I felt I was having a bad day stitching - extra slow and making lots of mistakes (which given my state that week after the recent surgery/recovery wasn't too surprising), but I'll try these again when feeling better.

the netting stitch is like blanket stitch but you stitch into the air / where the loops join instead of into the fabric

we went to life drawing class at 107 projects tonight. Syd Mead said that if you can draw people, you can pretty much draw anything (paraphrasing), so I'd like to practice more. I'm happy with a couple of these. I was trying rough outline of shapes and concentrating on shading the shadows. one lady asked about the other colours so I showed her the pastels. J's lines are amazing - I need to practice looser lines, and seeing & drawing volumes. and find my line at all. these are 5mins, 10mins, 15min poses - I'd arrived late so missed the 1-2 min poses. my proportions are out most of the time so this needs improvement. the model walked around later and looked at everyone's drawings. he said he thought my last one of him "everything is expanding", so hopefully that's a good thing?

adding them all here, so if I keep going throughout the year, I can look back and (hopefully) see improvements, and my line. these are charcoal (vine + thicker), white charcoal/pastel and coloured conte crayons

"Solace" project: India Flint is doing a residency in South Australia in June this year, and has invited people to make flags to hang.

"Make a triangular flag or pennon [meaning a personal ensign, derived from the Latin penna meaning a wing or a feather] preferably using a piece of pre-loved cloth. Stitch on it a word or a phrase or a sentence that might act as a wish for peace or an acknowledgement of beauty, imply a sense of stillness or simply something that gives you solace. It can be as brief or as long as you like. A haiku, a snatch of song, a word that takes you where you want to be. Attach ties to the tethering end of your flag"

& then post it to the address on the page. she'll dye them, and photos will go into a book/online.

http://prophet-of-bloom.blogspot.com.au/2014/09/an-invitation.html has the details.

I made one tonight using a song snippet:

"sunlight falls, my wings open wide" from orpheus by david sylvian, on the secrets of the beehive album, because it always gives me solace when i play it.
japanese cotton with wool thread

some others in the Sketchbooks and Experiments for Textiles facebook group are going to make one too

for assignment 3 they suggest we try working with tyvek. I tried one experiment a couple of weeks ago, based on a tutorial I saw on December 2014's workshop on the web issue. it said to iron the tyvek then paint it with acrylics afterwards. well, I tried it and didn't like how the painted version turned out. at all. I really liked the plain, white ironed tyvek - the shapes are amazing. very organic. like pebbles in a stream, or cells in the body. I like the ridges on the reverse side also. but I must have painted too thickly with the acrylic paint so I think I ruined them. then last night Hanna posted her watercolour painted versions on the textiles facebook page and they looked amazing. she'd made them look so fluid. she said she painted with really watery watercolour, then used a heat gun to shape the tyvek. so I tried again last night using watercolour, ink, charcoal, brusho, coloured pencils, pastels - this time painting them first, then ironing to get the shapes. much better! I like these attempts much better than the initial ones. Barbara mentioned you can use silk dyes too (setasilk) and stitch them before heating too. that makes more sense as the tyvek I have is soft like paper originally but once heated becomes like hard plastic, so I'm not sure how stitching it afterwards would work.

tonight I went to a drawing class with Daniel O'Toole aka Ears, a Sydney based painter and now video artist. Ears is one of my favourite Sydney artists and I'm lucky to have one of his paintings. now I can see how contour based his works are. the class was held at his studio called "Higher Ground Studio" in Leichardt & was lots of fun. we did some mark making exercises to different styles of music, drawing different words, blind contour drawings & contour drawings where we added shading/colours to the shapes, drawing by rubbing out the charcoal using putty rubber, making a variety of marks, drawing a landscape with our marks and we finished up with a collaborative painting of a brown, flattened box. I only had butchers paper instead of cartridge paper so some are a bit rough. we used mostly charcoal and ink with a touch of coloured house paint.

http://earstotheground.net is Ears' website. apart from amazing paintings, he has also uploaded some of his sketchbook pages which are pretty inspiring. some of the line/contour drawings remind me of Carla Sonheim's ones and class exercises where we try to draw animals. Ears draws faces — there's a lot of portraits with masks/faces in his paintings
http://earstotheground.net/Sketch-book

some paintings from Carla Sonheim's flower crazy 5 week class. I'm learning a few new techniques for watercolour, gesso, and mixing colours and textures to create "imaginary flowers".

layers of watercolour lines and pens/markers with some pencil shading

painted imaginary flowers in watercolour with gesso painted over the top

watercolour blobs in 3 colours, with gesso masking off interesting shapes to create flowers. scratched lines and textures in the gesso before it dried

plus one of the "2014 — year of the fairy tale" exercises — this is my "princess and the pea" mixed media painting. it's gouche, gesso and pens. the paints are applied using a credit card instead of a brush. it leads to a "free-er" line. I liked the gouche — they dried very quickly

making some geometric fabric folds on cotton since my copy of "Shadowfolds" book by Jeffrey Rutzky and Chris K Palmer arrived. this one is called "Fujimoto's twists" — it's a mixture of stitched squares, triangles and lines, and is a bit like smocking. I need to iron the front side flatter, but happy with how it turned out. I'd drawn the pattern shapes freehand instead of tracing the pattern as the book suggested, so the shapes are slightly uneven compared to the examples in the book, but I'm OK with that. makes it a bit more organic.

they don't take too long to make either — I made this sample over a couple of hours whilst watching tv.

front side:

back side: (actually I like this also as a front side — might do another)

Shadowfolds book:

I sat down again to my stitch noodling frame today to relax and play and tried some thinner cotton. this time double stranded sewing thread. tried some button hole stitch — still my favourite ever since discovering Junko Oki's work — especially her circles, last year. the first row is a row of straight edged button hole stitch. for the second row, I noticed the thread was settling into the fabric in a more organic way, not wanting to stick to the straight line. so I let it go, and it made this really nice organic, jagged line which I really like. it's a bit closer to an open (loose) cretan stitch, but also looks more like a heartbeat, or simple audio waveform. sometimes it's worth letting go of your plans to find the better line.

I've started the "sketchbook now" class to practice more drawing techniques for my sketchbook, and in lesson one we need to do some tests of our materials. I've used some from previous class exercises, which I hadn't added to the blog, so adding them here as part of this class' notes. the watercolour washes tests were exercises from Fred Lisaius' class "Fall Watercolours". I'll add more tests here as I work on them

these are the watercolours I'm using most often — a mixture of Schmincke and Winsor & Newton pans:

testing different lines & pen textures:

watercolour bead washes:

watercolour wet in wet wash:

watercolour double wet / flood wash with salt added for texture. I used table salt and since the paper was thick, it didn't work too well

more watercolour washes, on thicker, handmade paper

watercolour pencils (texta zoom brand) and pens to see what they looked like with added water:

today I went to a workshop called "drawing with thread" at the Art Gallery of NSW where we played and tinkered with stitches and coloured threads. it was taught by Alex Falkiner and was lots of fun. Alex showed us how to use different stitches to recreate drawing marks, different lines and block colour techniques, and to ask ourselves "what would happen if ...", and to find the whimsy, playfulness and randomness in making. there were a mix of fluoro colours which I hadn't used before, so it was fun to try. very relaxing. Alex also spoke of making things that don't *have* to be functional. this is something I need to practice - previously I've don't mostly functional craft making over the years

it was great to see fellow OCA textiles classmates Judy and Eva at the workshop too — Judy wrote a post about the day at https://fibresofbeing.wordpress.com/2014/11/21/t1e1p1-workshop-alex-falk...

lots of great discussions also, and names of other artists to check out - recommended by Alex plus others in the workshop.

as part of the work on my "bee" theme, and as part of the closing assignment for "Year of the Fairy Tale" illustration class I've been taking this year, to learn more painting techniques, I'm doing an illustration for a Fairy Land zine on magic animals. of course I chose the bee. but as "bee" was already taken, I decided to be more specific and chose the "Australian sugarbag bee" aka Tetragonula Carbonaria bee, which is one of the native bees of Australia. this is a stingless bee, though it can give you a bite instead.

collating info here about the sugarbag bee as part of my research. another Australian bee I like is the blue-banded bee. there are a number of coloured bees native to Australia, which are different to the introduced yellow coloured honey bee that everyone is used to seeing.

for the illustrated page, I need to write a line about why this is a magic sugarbag bee, and draw a matching picture.

---
Australian bee websites:

Sugarbag Bees blog http://www.sugarbag.net

Sugarbag Bees facebook page https://www.facebook.com/sugarbagbees

Aussie Bee http://www.aussiebee.com.au

Kin Kin Native Bees http://www.nativebees.com.au

I've been trying out my new artgraf water soluable graphite tonight with another drawing of a bee for my theme. I think it's sometimes called watercolour graphite. I put water in the lid and found my paintbrush and tried it out. I haven't got the bee shapes right yet but I love the variations in lightness and darkness of the graphite. there's even a slight shimmer and sparkle to it in this dim light. will see if it's still there in the morning daylight.

I shouldn't have tried the background wash though.. :( don't like it atm

another in (hotel room) biro practicing hatching (with wonky bee shape still)

making squares and rectangles using contemporary smocking from square wave patterns. it's based on the lozenge pattern. getting the hang of it. I drew the square waves by hand so they're not perfectly even, so the squares sometimes don't line up perfectly. but I like the 3D shapes they make. I need to iron/press these too to see the effect. I like the puffy (un-ironed) version also

I saw this cool photo of waveforms placed next to nature waveform patterns, so I wonder if an audio waveform pattern could be used as a smocking guide also. worth a try to see what happens

next I might try some shapes like Matija Čop used in these 3D architectural based garments. there's so many fabric manipulations on pinterest too. I've pinned some on my textiles page to remind me to try them also

I've been making dragonscale (reverse smocking) using Michele Carragher's instructions (she is the game of thrones' embroiderer). I finally got it to work, after unpicking the first few attempts (& realising I've done it on wrong side of the fabric - right side for regular smocking). I'm using this as part of the fabric manipulation topic in assignment 3 work. I'll use this page to add more details and summarise it (with other samples) on the assignment page later.

notes for the pattern:

first attempt - I had only drawn the dots, not the triangles and became a bit lost, so these two didn't work out. I unpicked them and started again.

next time, I drew the triangles as a template onto the fabric also. this helped a lot, and I managed to make it correctly this time

the right side of the fabric - this shows the smocking pattern, but the "dragonscale" uses the other side, so I actually made the whole piece on the wrong side of the fabric. oh well. know for next time.

the wrong side of the fabric - showing the dragonscale. I need to iron/press it to flatten it, though I like the puffy pattern also.

some more progress

http://www.ooed.org/learn/understanding-contemporary-art-fall-2014 started this week. very interesting so far - speeding through modern art. use chrome if using ipad, safari is broken

i'm making notes in my workbook. might post photos here. I've read you take more in/remember more when handwriting notes than typing. but if i get time i'll try type them up too so i can search later.

week1: