Designing for felt and tapestry

Recently I have been working toward the Open Studios event in May in my local region. My studio is very cold at the moment so I have not spent that much time there, but there has been time to felt at home, and do some drawings to start thinking about composition and texture.

I am interested in the regenerative forces in nature - the way nature reclaims spaces, breaks through even in the hardest and most inhospitable urban environment or how plants can be dependent on what might at first seem like devastating fires to regenerate. But at the same time I am continue to interested in process and materials and I still wonder how you bring the two together. For that I look at certain artists on Youtube, who are generous with tutorials and ideas, and I am very grateful to them for the time they spend explaining things.

The felt I have been making is actually more a manipulation of existing fabric - a woollen scarf I cut into pieces and added wool and silk to the surface.  because the fabric was quite tightly knitted it has not picked up the felted wool to merger the materials together and currently the merino and silk fibres sit on the surface to some extent. the plan is that I will be working onto the surface with stitch and applied materials, so it won't matter and will add to the depth of the final pieces.

In photographing this work the light was a bit hard coming onto the pieces so the colours are not accurate:

 

These are work in progress. There is still much to do on them. I am working up four different pieces to have a small series although I hope that they will also work well independently.

 

To work up a plan for the next steps I have started drawing some outlines of the pieces which I plan to use  as 'templates' onto this which I can add textures, other colours and so on. These drawings are themselves work in progress as they are not complete in terms of colour etc, but some of them are in themselves not too bad as drawings and I may just leave them as they are. This process takes time and needs to be revisited several times.

 

An unfinished sketch to look at texture

 

Using wax resist, watercolour, water soluble graphite - working out texture and may use as foundation for further work on what textures, materials to apply t the textile pieces

 

Detail of the above

 

This drawing seems more of a complete drawing, various textures, marks and colours seem to balance more as a complete entity, and just suggests the felted piece - I will return to this drawing to look at how I can improve its textile sister. I don't seem to get away from a painterly type of expression.

 

A detail of the above

 

Tapestry designs

 

 

 
 
 

 

I have also been designing for tapestry. I have been interested in using oil pastels for tapestry design as my weavings are usually quite textured and the strength and weight of the colours and textures you can derive from oil pastels feel as if they would be useful. So I started a sketchbook for these designs. whenever a drawing was done there were a lot of crumbs left from the pastel and I picked these up and used them in another type of drawing which is light and is more about a mood. These may be useful sometime in the future.

 

 

The designs are based around the colours I want to concentrate on: the dark browns of wool and alpaca, orange and green. Perhaps some dark blue added to the brown.

 



 

Some designs may seem a little unadventurous and I think they could be livened up with some additional elements such as speckles of colour in the brown, textured weaving and the like. Certainly I would like the orange to sing against the brown and so I hope that a few tapestry samples will start showing how this effect could be developed.

 

 



The next images are some examples of the pictures that used the crumps from the pastel, I rubbed and dragged them across the page in different ways and the use of fingers as a tool is great and enjoyable to work with - there is a degree of serendipity in how the pastel ends up being bound to the paper. The softness and openness of the way the colours lie on the paper with a great deal of the white paper showing through is suggestive and on one I used a thin pale blue-grey wash to see how this would affect the atmosphere of the image.

 



 

And finally a simple sample of my first ever weft-faced weaving on a rigid heddle loom. At my Guild we had some workshops at the January meeting and this was the option I chose - I have a rigid heddle loom which I have not yet used, and this was a bit of a taster to get a feel for what might be achievable. The sample is shown with the warp threads showing, these will be attached to the back to make the sample a bit more tidy looking.

 

 



West Berkshire and North Hampshire Open Studios

This May has been a month of exhibition and making at the Open Studios. Together with two other artists we have been showing at City Arts in Newbury, which as an old chapel has large spaces to fill.

In order to fill the space in interesting ways the last two months or more have been spent making hangings and felt pieces. These have been hung together in a bit of an installation and I have used some tables to show other things, as well as a table for me to work at. It has all worked out well, and I have had time to do some tapestry weaving whilst there.

Here are some impressions from the exhibition:

 

This is an overall view of one end of the exhibition space, you can see the hangings, the folded book hanging from the ceiling and some of the tables.

 

These two pictures provide details of the green hangings, with a drawing (top) and green felt piece (below)

This image shows an interesting effect in the book: perforations from stitching lets the light through

 

 

A view of the full length of the book

 

A table set out with experimental pieces, felt and embroideries

 

A second table set out with small tapestries, sketchbooks and drawings on the theme of trees.

 

A view of the other end of the exhibition space with the table we have been working at - my friend came for a few days to learn tapestry and I have been working here on a small piece.

 

And finally - a couple of bookcases have been very useful in displaying the small tapestries. I had bought some perspex stands to show them off in a gentle sort of way, and you can also see the weaving frame ready to be used with a couple of reference books.

 

 

It has been an interesting event: the number of visitors has swung, with an increase over the bank holiday Monday, and I have been pleased that some people asked whether I give courses, which suggests that some are interested in the work. What people haven't done is bought anything. It is not a climate conducive for people to spend, and as textiles are relatively specialist I did not really expect many sales. I think people still prefer paintings or prints as primary art works for the home - textiles as decorative items are not common and my works are necessarily easy or ready for hanging. There has been a lot to learn during this last month and I am pleased to have been part of it, what will happen next year is another question and something I need to think about quite hard.

 

 

Starting life drawing and felting

Well, the two are obviously not directly linked: life drawing is a way for me to learn to look properly, get proportions right and to do something art related that isn't directly textile related. Felting is at the moment at the sampling stage to understand how different wools work.

First the life drawing: I did some as an absolute beginner in 1990 and have done nothing like that since so am still a beginner. This means that I am pretty terrified at the prospect of trying to draw the body, getting things wrong and so on. And of course my first drawings in the first class were wonky, out of proportion and not confident at all. The tutor was very helpful and she suggested ways of looking and marking up elements of the body to enable an appropriate set of reference points to get the drawing straight. 

Here's an embarrasingly wonky pose just to give you an idea of how un-confident I am, it is drawn with pencil, so the lines are a bit feint:
 

 

The very last drawing was the hardest. For some reason I got the worst possible position - an extremely foreshortened perspective with the model lying with the crown of her head towards me and her right shoulder uppermost. Needless to say I had no idea how to get that shoulder right, and the tutor adjusted things a bit for me. However I am happy enough with the result to show it here,although it is obviously a weak drawign made by a learner. The legs and the twisted body bits of her lower section are mine.
 

And now to the felt. I am pretty happy with the set-up in my studio, the table is big enough to take a large piece of fabric and wool and I have space for moving along the length of the table. So I laid out some pure white wool on a loosely woven wool fabric with a bit of colour to create interest and a bit of very hairy wool in places to create texture. But oh dear, the white wool has clearly been treated and doesn't felt and the creamy hairy wool is heavy on lanolin and so felting has been inconsistent with only the coloured merino properly taking. A lot of the wool has lifted and I need to remedy this first stab - and that on a very large 'sample'!

This picture is deceiving - it suggests the felting is working, but I am going to have to change the whole thing radically to get the wool to catch the base fabric. You can see I have been using a plastic holder to aid the felting. Someone advised me that the plastic holders that meats come in from the supermarket are useful for this and it is. You can keep your hands soap-and-water free during the felting which is useful if you, like me, easily get dry hands and split skin from the soap. Well, it is probably better that I add wool to the unfinished peice, the thing is a bit thin and I would like a bit of substance to it. More pictures to follow when it has been finished.