After the Weekend

Have had a wonderful weekend away at Urchfont Manor in Wiltshire, working with Julia Carpara. So have not been able to keep the blog up to date. However I feel very motivated to work on some new ideas and develop some of my other designs to a new level. So watch this space and I will try to share my endevours with you over the coming weeks. I feel so fortunate to be able to work with someone who inspires me so much.

It was a working weekend and our first task was to connect with our inner creativity. We did this by working into large sheets of paper (A1) with charcoal or Lithocoal. My effort is above (nb the brown bits are the wallboard I pinned the drawing to to take the photo). Doing this is very liberating, the first few marks are very daunting as they glare at you from a fresh white page, but then as the drawing progresses, the interaction of the hand, charcoal, eye and brain seem to meld and the anxiety fades. We also did some simple exercises with fabric and threads, just to get the "feel" of textiles again.

On the Saturday, after a strenous mornings work, a few of us staying at Urchfont, went for a wander round the village to the local duckpond. As you can see the daffodils are blooming happily, many of the children in the village were having an Easter egg Hunt around the village, they were really enjoying themselves. It had been organised by the local playgroup.

After a delicious lunch, I returned to the studio to work on the Embellisher and this time I was embedding the felts I had made into calico ( muslin) that I had previously dyed. At the moment I am showing you just one as an example, but I am in fact making quite a few. The next stage is to start stitching into the fabrics. I just love the handle of the felt embellished into calico.

Here is a close up of some of the stitching I have started doing on the fabric. I don't have a game plan for the design, so I thought I would just let it evolve, in much the same way as the charcoal drawing. I would like to become immersed in the stitching rather than in the design. Too often I am drawn in by the designing rather than the emerging stitching. Perhaps I am too controlling?.

NB: have found the website for the galerie in Germany that I posted last week. It is called Galerie in der Waldemai.

Image updated on 3 April 2006 - 7pm