Some changes and new books

As mentioned elsewehere, the last two months have been spent studying and working towards an exam, but once all of that was over I very soon moved into a studio I have rented to help take the pressure of storage off the house and to allow me to go to a dedicated space for working on textiles. I think this will help develop creative work in a more focussed way, as the home environment has its own distractions.

This studio is now being filled with equipment, wool and fabrics, craft items, beads and threads. It is all very exciting and I have started weaving there to see what it would be like working there. I almost immediately installed a radio as sitting alone in a room in a fairly isolated place is a bit empty, and so now I can listen to great music and audio books as I work - it is great.

Here are some pictures from the studio, a corner with some of the furniture - opposite this, out of sight is the table I am working at, ths is where I put out wools and fabric and sewing machine. The corner here is where the wool is stored and where a few books and craft materials have been placed:

I hung up some pictures of woodland and a drawing to help me work our how to place some textile for a books cover.

The clothes horse holds some skeins of wools and linen from various dyeing projects, thatare waiting to be wound into balls. Not my favourite project so I do a few at a time to get through them.

 
Some work in progress on the table - more about that on the theme book post.


Christmas - presents!

It has also been Christmas and I wanted to mention that here, as I got all the books I wished for this year - the latest books by Kate Atkinson and Margaret Attwood, two of my favourite authors, and a book on knitting by Carol Brown. 'Knitwear Design' is a book that reads as if the target audience is a knitwear fashion student. It has a lot of good-sized pictures, with short text pasages in sections themed on colour, texture, various knitting techniques, using a sketchbook for designing and so on. It is a useful short-hand to the design process as proposed by art colleges, but it also shows that despite the process prescribed by such writers and schools of textiles, the actual designers such as Sandra Backlund, will design experimentally directly on the figure. The book does not explain whether these designers also draw, but describe their design process as making up costumes and fashion items of fantastic ingenuity and creativity as committed to samples and testing experiments in situ. I guess designing is a bit like learning to cook - there are a lot of rules, recipes and certain things cooks will prescribe, but once set free in the kitchen, you actually just do what you need to do to satisfy your own free thinking.

For more details See Carol Brown, Knitwear Design, Laurence King, 2013