I’ve been a little quiet on the blogging front recently … a combination of back-to-school mayhem, planning and preparing for un upcoming craft fair, and the start of the Cloth-to-Cloth workshop I’m participating in over at Spirit Cloth … Jude’s work is so inspiring, I’m thrilled to get a chance to learn the techniques she uses.
It has been such a fantastic experience so far … I’m relishing getting back to working with cloth for the love of it, with no particular end in mind, though some of pieces I’ve worked already have tentative final purposes allocated to them … and working almost exclusively with the contents of my scrap buckets has kind of reconnected me with what is most important to me in working with textiles – the rekindling and reconfiguring of the memories caught up in particular fabrics, shaping them into something new and coherent and whole in their own right, with use and meaning.
It has been an incredibly freeing process, and I’ve moved away from my comfort zone of denims and washed cotton prints into colours and textures I’ve not really touched on before … inspired by both the process and the wonderful and diverse creativity of the others in the workshop, I’m daring to go in directions I haven’t travelled before, and the payback in terms of sparks of ideas is just phenomenal.
These are some of my favourites … from the peaceful blues of old denim mixed with co-ordinating cotton prints, to the bold splashes of shimmering pink silk against sombre pinstriped wool salvaged from an old suit jacket, the rich copper, bronze and gold of the textiles – an old tie, a scrap of taffeta, the bodice of an old evening dress – to the more disciplined monochrome of the vintage lace checkerboard … I love all of these, diverse as they are. I’m so looking forward to working more on these, taking them from their base forms into completed pieces.
I can’t quite get enough of it … it’s intense, and ever so slightly obsessive …
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some basting to do.
