Art in the GARDEN - exhibition work 2

My other exhibition work for AIG is a textile collage inspired by Jackson's Wold Garden. I wanted to give my work an aged look because the flowers & butterflies in the cottage and kitchen gardens reminded my of vintage embroidered postcards.


For this work I used some of the dyed fabrics I did using the tea bags and food colours.
There are quite a few photos as I captured the work as the layers built up.

The main background is stained with tea and makes a nice base to work on.

I slowly introduce some coloured items and I like to include typography in my work.

Flowers start to appear using my blackberry tea bag stained fabric, and after much moving around I stitch things in place.

I'm nearly done at this stage.

I added a few more twiddly bits 'n bobs, french knots, a few small beads in amongst the flowers and I'd reached the point I needed to stop. It is quite a small piece of work, about A5 size and it wrinkles and becomes tricky to work with so I'd had enough!
If it was bigger I think I'd still be adding to it as it's difficult to know when to stop and you're never quite happy with these things but I'm quite pleased with it.


A few final photos of the detail.

I also used some of my surplus bits to make a small felted brooch which will also be on display with this work.

ART in the GARDEN - exhibition work

AIG Exhibition 2012 - Triton Gallery, Sledmere. Sunday 15th Apr - 27th
Opening times: Tues - Fri 11am - 4pm, Sunday 11am - 4pm
The exhibition has been announced for the artwork which we've been doing based on the gardens visited last year.
I visited a lovely colourful place, high in the Yorkshire Wolds called Jacksons Wold Garden. I'll show you some pictures of the pretty house and the gardens.

I found the house particularly inspiring, it was the ice-cream like colours, the exterior walls are a delicate peachy colour and the roof is lilac, set amongst the strong shades of green.
Here are some more views of the cottage gardens.

A tranquil pond to sit and contemplate by.

The photos and a few sketches were my research & I've produced 2 types of work. I've done my digital style posters featured here and some textile work which I'll do as another post.

My poster starts out as a simple line drawing based on a photo & done on a graphics tablet. Looking back, that part is relatively quick to do. The laborious task is filling in the detail (especially leaves & plants), selecting the colours and 'painting' it up.
I got there eventually and added some nice, crisp typography. I set out to do one poster in the lovely colours which originally inspired me and then I messed about a bit with some sepia shades and ended up with a second, more aged looking poster.
Here they are printed up,

Problem: I can only choose one poster to exhibit and now I can't decide whether I prefer, the sepia one...

or the colourful one...

anyone want to suggest which!!! 
I may be influenced by the majority.


The textile work will be visible soon.

An Appointment with The Waterboys last night

Yesterday was a crazy day, it started when I met 2 old college chums who I hadn't seen for 20 years. We re-met by Facebook and then discussed the scary possibility of meeting again, but we did it! Other than stating the obvious that we are older and have filled out a bit, it was pretty much like it was back then, how can 20 years just disappear so quickly in the blink of an eyelid like that!
Nice to catch up.


Rushed home after that just to get changed, eat and head to York for the main event, The Waterboys gig, whooo hoo! I think it was 2004 when I last saw them which was also in York.

Whilst hanging around to be seated I decided to treat myself to the limited edition CD which is only available at the gigs and signed by Mike.

I had superb seats, right at the front and just feet away from the stage, it was an excellent view and the sounds was good. I took my little friend!

The first part of the set was classic Waterboys tunes, with magical fiddle playing by Mr Wickham.

The second part of the set was dedicated to the new album, An Appointment With Mr Yates, fantastic, with a particularly memorable performance wearing masks for Mad As The Mist & Snow.

The evening drew to a close with encores featuring Whole of the Moon & Fisherman's Blues, absolutely stonking live tracks and Bob bopped along to it. What an amazing evening we had. The Waterboys never disappoint when you see them live.

Happy Spring Equinox

I nearly missed this, I love the designs of Marimekko and they've illustrated google today for the spring equinox.

And they've illustrated autumn for folk in the southern hemisphere, simple but effective.

Yippee, spring has officially sprung, lets enjoy the next 6 months before the dark clouds gather again!

Trips

Very envious, this postcard arrived this morning from my sister and she's been to see the Hockney exhibition at the RA. It sounds like they queued for a couple of hours and it was very crowded inside but worth the wait and she tells me the new film is fab.
Not a trip I'll be able to do but still I have the postcard and she picked me up a leaflet as the programme was particularly expensive!


I have a trip out later this week which I am particularly looking forward to, first gig since Morrissey last year. It's The Waterboys returning to York after quite a few years. I'm sure the last time I saw them it was about 10 yrs ago, I remember it being Hallows Eve and a particularly fab concert. I can't wait, Mike Scott is a legend and I've got tickets right at the front. 

Bobs been out in his green bow tie!

Doesn't Google look good today, I love Celtic knotwork. Happy St Patrick's Day to my Irish friends.
Bob put his shamrock coloured bow tie on and we went for a spin to Bridlington this morning, good job as it rained in the afternoon.


We have been to my friends veggie bakery, The Little Organic Bakery and had a lovely feast and drinks courtesy of a christmas present voucher.


Whilst choosing cakes at the counter, I had to take a photo of this enormous pavlova, Katy who makes all her delicious offerings is more than generous with portion sizes.

I opted for a more modest lemon slice with a lovely flat white.

I also got a lovely selection of things to bring home for tea.
On the left we have black olive tart, to the right is hommity pie and at the front are a couple of herby, nut & cheese 'no meat' sausage rolls.

These were all wonderful warmed up and with a nice crispy salad.

Weekend reading

The sound of lawn mowers has been driving me mad this morning, what is it with people so frantic to have their first grass cutting when it's still damp & mossy on the bit of grass here. As far as I'm concerned I don't like to even think about it until Easter time, it only prolongs, the long enough grass cutting season which is such a chore. I hate cutting the grass and I want to live in a way where I eventually don't have to cut grass and I can have a wild, messy, vegetable garden.


Anyway to escape that whirring mower noise I nipped out for a magazine, how did you guess... Mollie Makes. I was parked near the library so I went in because sometimes it's rubbish, other times quite good.

There were quite a few different craft books today. Not that my head isn't already spinning with ideas I want to churn out but I couldn't resist bringing these home.

Weaving is something I struggle with, I have a couple of small looms but I never seem to successfully cast off so I hope this book shows me.

There are some luscious boxes in this book.

Nice stitch ideas & techniques in here.

Have a good weekend everyone.

Mini Tutorial - natural dyes in the kitchen!

It seems like I haven't messed about with things like this since I finished my textile course a couple of years ago but as I was about to throw away a box of herbal teabags (date 2008), I thought they might dye some fabric I'm currently working with.


I'm starting work on a piece of textile art which will be in an exhibition at Sledmere in April and I need some delicate colours of cotton. 
The kitchen is a great starting point for some simple, fun dyeing. As my fabric dyeing is only going on a piece of artwork it does not need to be colour fixed.

I started out with some old fruit teabags and food colourings by diluting them slightly in hot water.

Next I popped in my bits of cotton fabric, you can either leave the teabags in for a stronger effect or remove them. I pre-wetted the fabric which I used for the food colouring and just splatted it about and splashed more water on to get a mottled effect.

I happened to have a fresh beetroot hanging around so I salvaged the leaves and the top and again diluted that with boiling water and dunked some cotton in.
Onion skins are also good, both red and normal ones for a yellow colour.

I left the bits of fabric submerged for a few hours then wrung them out and they were left to air dry and here are the pieces ready to use after a quick iron. 
The normal tea gives a lovely sepia, old parchment effect, you can also achieve that with coffee, the light pink is peach tea, the darker pinks are blackberry & beetroot. Green & orange were the food colourings.
Just have a rummage through your kitchen and you'll find all sorts to try out.

I decided to use some of this fabric for making delicate little flowers on a mini embroidery (the end result being a Mothers Day card).

Small circles were cut and folded into quarters and then stitched onto some fabric. I then embroidered stalks and leaves.

Here is the finished card that I've made for my mum. This card was an experiment before I start my artwork for the exhibition.

Just remember that the dye methods I've used here have not been fixed properly but as my items will hopefully not be coming into contact with water I should be ok.

York does Vintage

On Saturday there was another vintage fair in York at the Merchant Adventurers Hall, it was the one where they do a clothes swap and I needed to go because I had quite a few clothes swap tokens from the last event when I couldn't find much to use them on. 


Quite promising when I went in as we got a goodie bag with a lots of leaflets / vouchers, a vintage explorer magazine & a mini pot of BodyShop rose body butter which was nice.

It was pretty busy, lots of stalls I've come across before at events, a few new ones and a few interesting clothing items in amongst a lot of not so vintage, over-priced tat.


I found the clothes swap and it was about as disappointing as last year. I think some people turn up with a bag of rubbishy stuff in the hope to find some choice items but if everyone turns up with rubbish, or like one lady, a bag of her husbands stuff, then there's nothing much for other ladies to choose from. They had 3 small clothes rails and I found hardly anything I wanted or anything which would be my size and I've still come away with tokens to use up!
I got the things below, the only item which will fit is the linen jacket bottom right, the other things were bought purely to chop up and use the fabric.

On a slightly more positive note I did purchase some vintage fabric & trimmings. The fabric below is 50's barkcloth with a medieaval banquet scene, the woven braid is vintage but not the made in britain ribbon.

Moving swiftly on from the vintage fair I had lovely coffee and snacks in Spring Espresso which is just a few doors along from the back entrance of Merchant Adventurers Hall.
I then made a first time visit, with Bob, to the LoveCheese shop on Gillygate.

It was a lovely little shop, we sampled some cheese and have come away with Ribblesdale cheeses, the one on the left is a mature Wensleydale & the one which I'm really hooked on is the piece on the right, a smoked goats cheese.

Our trip was finished with a quick ride in the trolley for Bob around Sainsbury's.

He had carrots on his shopping list so we had to get a stash to take home!