Kantha course

I took a class with Amarjeet Nandhra in Recycling fabrics using Kantha.

Kantha is popular in South East Asia and features the running stitch. Kantha work has a story or narrative and people develop their personal motifs. It's often worked communally.

Key themes in Kantha

Some of the features are the personal motif, as mentioned, border patterns, puckering, a sense of personal meaning in the fabric, using thread to make connections between one part and another.

I decided to use pieces I'd already made using dyeing, screen and block printing. I didn't like any of my dyed pieces so had no sense of personal connection with them but the printed samples were ones I quite liked.

Here is how it went.

The stitch goes for a swim around my tie dye.

Really don't like this piece but I persevered. 

Amarjeet suggested I take the spiral stitch out onto the rest of the piece to unify it.

Just a small bit of running stitch added to a couple of samples to join them together.

A couple of samples from another class (trying out opaque screen printing and puff medium)

Cut up and reassembled.

The work to join nit up starts.

Using both the shape of the birds and the pattern on the background fabric to inspire where the running stitch should go.

Class work - some great ideas.

Some great inspirations

Suggested by Amarjeet:

Debra Weiss - I'm always drawn to patchwork reuse of textile scraps with overlaid stitch.

Christine Mauersberger - Kantha-esque stitch work as well as lots lots more. More here.

Arlee Barr - lots of natural dyes and reuse of textile scraps.

Dorothy Caldwell - dense stitchwork and reuse of textiles. Dorothy's website here.

Review - A Stitch in Time: A Day of Embroidery at the British Library - 6 June 2015

I went to a great day-long event at the British Library themed around the new art work by Cornelia Parker: Magna Carta (An Embroidery).

"Fabricated by many hands, from prisoners and lawyers to artists and barons, Magna Carta (An Embroidery) replicates in stitch the entire Wikipedia article on the Great Charter as it appeared on the document’s 799th anniversary in 2014" (www.bl.uk/events/cornelia-parker-magna-carta-an-embroidery)

The piece itself was really impressive but more of that later. First to the event on the 6th of June 2015 called A Stitch in Time: A Day of Embroidery.

Karen Nicol

I have to jump to my immediate excitement at having met Karen Nicol who had a stand and was showing her famous sample 'sketchbook'. It is literally a set of A2-sized fabric 'pages' onto which she loosely pins a movable feast of her latest samples.

Karen Nicol's 'sketchbook'

She explains this all very well in this Embroiderer's Guild video. Also in this justhandson.tv video. I got to see her resin raindrops in 'the flesh'.

She also had many of her Lace series on show and it was priceless to be able to see them close up and touch and feel and look at the back. Above all she was very generous with her time, explaining some of her techniques and she literally talked me through every single page of her samples.

I really admire how she pushes the boundaries of surface creation. She said she sees things and wonders how she could replicate them in materials and then just experiments. Namely the resin raindrops (see videos above) and plastic bags cut into glistening fringes, the stuff magpies like me flock to. The other thing I really noticed is how often she pushes scale to extremes, for instance fly stitch and French knots with thick ribbon.

Her pieces are playful and humorous and make you wonder what goes on in her mind and how much fun she must have. Each one is also a lesson in textiles imagineering.

Jacky Puzey

I also spent a long while chatting with Jacky Puzey who demoed the digital embroidery programme she uses. Her work is really striking and her current theme is centred on tattoos.

Raven included real feathers and the scale of it (about 4' high) makes it a remarkable piece. I loved the textures and colour in her Shade suits too.

Raven by Jacky Puzey

Cushion cover with tattoo theme by Jacky Puzey

She is also a great example of being a good businesswoman as well as an artist. She detected a gap in the need for digital embroidery processes, especially for students leaving college and not yet set up with the expensive equipment.

Several other textile artists had stands including Adriana Tavares, a rug designer, and Jess de Wahls whose pieces I find disturbing (not being a fan of dolls, which they resemble) but she is an interesting artist.

Workshops

There was a wide variety of free and inexpensive workshops. You could be part of the over 7,000 people from all over the world who have contributed to the World’s Longest Embroidery.

The World’s Longest Embroidery - the Guinness World Record-breaking embroidery from The Embroiderers’ Guild

The World’s Longest Embroidery shown hanging in loops from the ceiling above the day's goings-on

In the Stitch a Word workshop run by the Embroiderers' Guild you learnt basic stitches to replicate words from the Magna Carta.

My satin stitch had an independent mind of its own

A tip for perfect Satin stitch is to run a Split stitch all along the border/edges of the intended piece (a bit tricky on the one above as it was so small) then do your Satin stitch around this stitched border, angling your needle around the thread. I will try that out on a piece I'm working on and show you results.

I also took Blackwork and Goldwork tutorials run by the Royal School of Needlework and by Hand & Lock respectively.

Blackwork: the exemplar on the left, the reality on the right. I have discovered that I don't mind counting at all, it's quite therapeutic

I was introduced to the renowned method of unstranding your thread and rejoining the strands. And no licking the ends to get them through the eye of the needle!

My Goldwork effort: I angled my gold in the wrong direction and the borders were a bit scrappy but all in all I'm not unhappy with it

Magna Carta

Back to Cornelia Parker. The embroidered wiki page about the Magna Carta was impressive in scale and I loved being able to see some of the back via mirrors set up underneath it.

Cornelia Parker: Magna Carta (An Embroidery)

Detail of Cornelia Parker: Magna Carta (An Embroidery) showing, top, an 'image' stitched by Anthea Godfrey of the Embroiderers’ Guild.

One of the 'images' was stitched by Anthea Godfrey of the Embroiderers’ Guild. She said it took her 450 hours using techniques from the C16th. The image above (as well as the one taken for the Guardian article, top of the page) doesn't begin to do it the least justice; it was glistening with gold.

The exhibition is on until the 24th of July 2015.

Building up my Stock of Remnant Fabric

I'm trying to find ways to quickly build up my fabric remnant stock (in preparation for a few textiles courses I've booked).

I've been bidding on eBay and picked up these great bits and pieces from Debby:

Remnant fabrics picked up on eBay

And the lovely Sally (who generously threw in an extra bit!):

More remnant fabrics picked up on eBay

It's a great feeling to see items on a screen and then be unpacking them at home. They are real!

And these wonderful silk ribbons and sari silk waste from YarnYarn.

Sari silk

Not to mention various multicolour embroidery threads.

Then recently I popped into John Lewis on Oxford Street to pootle around their upholstery fabric department. Result! Their remnant bin was full of ex-display mini-curtains at £10 a pop. I ended up with about £2000 of fabric for £190.

Fantastic variety of fabrics

Fabric length with matching waxed tablecloth

This one has beautiful silver motifs block printed onto it

The ones that came as mini-curtains had lining which I unpicked. Looking forward to incorporating the printed numbers in the things I make

It's a good idea to have a look in places like John Lewis or Peter Jones or Selfridges etc. just after the change of season stock.

Well, I'm all set.

I'd love to hear about where you get your fabric stocks from.

Experimental Stitch - a Recent Course

I did a course this year at CityLit (again) called Experimental Stitch with Amarjeet Nandhra. Three consecutive Sundays.

Amarjeet is a fabulously patient tutor and has an excellent way of drawing out the best in you. Then pushing you a bit more.

In each class we covered a set of stitches and applied them in thematic ways to the samplers we were making. For instance looking at a particular stitch and taking it to extremes of scale: huge and tiny; light and dark; dense and dispersed. So imagine French Knots in thick raffia or in sewing thread, bunched together or far apart.

If you get a chance to do a class with Amarjeet, take it! She co-founded the Windsor School of Textile Art which runs lots of interesting courses.

Here were two of the samplers I made.

The postcard that acted as inspiration
(apologies that I can't attribute the photographer)

Fabric paint - taking advantage of a crease

Some stitch added - not all results to my liking - running, couched, stem stitches

Downtown - woven picot, bullion and other stitches in metallic thread on tweed - beads added after the course

Downtown - beads added along the faint blue line in the tweed

Downtown - beads sewn in between the raised stitches

Learnings

I feel I learnt to take inspiration from a source (the postcard) which was something new for me. Learning to translate inspiration from the world around you is an important skill. This may seem obvious to natural artists but it's something I had to learn. I always thought the finished product was something that flowed out of you whole. And that if that wasn't happening it meant I wasn't an artist and should just give up.

I also think I nudged a bit closer to understanding when to stop working on something. And into letting a sampler be a sampler.

One of the things I may try to do with the work produced here is cut it up and use it as part of another piece. That takes some nerve but it may be a way to kill your darlings. I would never have thought of that but for another course I took where we were asked to do just that. See my post A Class from the Past.

On another tack, I'm a bit of a course junkie. Anyone else out there who could recommend some textiles courses that push some boundaries?

Textile and Stitch Aims and Ambitions

When I was 13 I really enjoyed my sewing class and have two abiding memories from it. One was when we made a skirt from a pattern. My mum gave me some horrible leftover woolly vomit-pink fabric to make mine and I was mortified. Everybody else must have had pretty flowery wearable cottons.

The other was a beautiful handbag made from tie-dyed fabric and embroidered with a variety of sample stitches. I particularly remember the French Knot. I don't have it to hand to photograph but will do so as soon as I can.

Even at the time I was totally seduced by how beautiful fabric and stitch could be made to look. I was tremendously proud of it and so must my mother have been because it was the only thing of mine she ever displayed on a wall.

I also made a cushion cover which is an ugly thing but I at least have a photo I can post. My first experience of letting the sewing machine go.

The first free-ish embroidered cushion cover, aged 13

The first free-ish embroidered cushion cover - detail

The first free-ish embroidered cushion cover - 3D detail

I didn't know at the time that a whole career could have been built on that dye and stitch and in any case I was made to do Latin (more useful for my parents' doctor/lawyer daughter ambitions) instead of Art ("you can draw any time you want"). I envied my school friends who went on to do O'Level and A'Level Art, Foundation courses and eventually art degrees. But I put it out of my mind. I could always draw any time I wanted.

This Christmas my mother pulled out the famous tie-dyed-embroidered handbag saying "I always loved this".

Well so did I. And now, a few decades later I've decided to give myself a chance at a Foundation course in textiles. So here we go...