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.

Screen Printing

More progress from my class: my very first screen printing.

I'd always thought of this as a rather mystical, unobtainable technique that I would never experience. Only really expert artists made screen prints! And all those people who were doing Art while I had to do Latin at school.

This is what happened:

The prep work for the stencil and the cutouts from the stencil.

The stencil based on my bird theme.

My flight of birds across a piece of tie dye I'd made. I like this a lot.

Detail of the piece above showing the patterened texture of the fabric.

The flight across some patterned textile.

And again, trying to join more than one repeat of the stencil.

Overlaying the stencil with the cutouts.

Some serendipidous mixing up of colours having picked up left over pots from other classmates. One of my birds went AWOL (it stuck to the fabric on the previous pull and I didn't notice).

The back of the above piece has much neater and cleaner white spaces.

I'm not sure the sheer joy of indulging this technique comes across but I was like a kid in a sweet shop.

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This post is part of a series: see Part I -- see Part II -- see Part III -- this is Part IV
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Dyeing

We did some tie dyeing in my evening class. I really didn't enjoy it. It's messy and chemically. And I don't like the results. Reminds me too much of travelling through Guatemala in the 90s and the kinds of clothes the tourists were wearing. I don't like the regularity of the repeating patterns or muddiness of the colours.

Nevertheless here are the results.

Preparation - putting in the resists.

From my sketchbook - the results.

This one I liked - the way the red bleeds into the green rather randomly. I later overprinted it with some screen printing.

This was done by one of my classmates and I really like it because it's mostly the original fabric and the dye is irregular.

I'm not sure that I'll be doing much more dyeing but glad to have had a chance to find out I don't like it.

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This post is part of a series: see Part I -- see Part II -- This is Part III
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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...