Posts Tagged ‘patterns’

Browsing With Pinterest

Thursday, February 22nd, 2018

Every day Pinterest sends images of things it thinks I might like.  Because I can so easily become totally absorbed and lose hours happily wandering through images, following links one after the other, I rarely take time to browse.  It’s worse than Facebook.  So I clicked on a page of enticing images headed ‘stitch’, and found myself looking at a page of pics on which was one work I knew I’d seen before, by Cordula Kagemann and as it turned out, had saved in my own board Lines and Shapes, though I’d never gone to her website.  What magnificent work, collaging with cut paper and some fabric. Textile friends in Australia, note that she will be teaching there in October of this year.  Her cutout paper overlays feature various shaped holes and overlocking rings – my mind asked could you call this paper ‘lace’?

Holes and lace have been part of my inspiration for some time: https://www.alisonschwabe.com/weblog/?p=2620  https://www.alisonschwabe.com/weblog/?p=2620  and I still have this little leather sample on my board after about 10 years  – suede bonded onto unbleached calico/muslin, and to me this is definitely all about the holes… and I’m still thinking about it.

 

Snippets and samples of holes in leather and fabric … ? lace

The surface design snippet below is part of a 12|”x12″ quilt first bought in a SAQA Benefit Auction some years back, of gold leather triangles with holes punched from it sewn to a black background with gold machine stitching forming the grid. This week it was auctioned among a collector’s pieces which were donated to the organisation to benefit SAQA a second time, and I am thrilled to hear an Australian collector it.  I never gave it a title, but with hindsight perhaps I could have called it Black Holes on Gold Triangles …

A question I’ve had in mind before is this – what is the most important part of ‘lace’ – is it the holes, or whatever it is that surrounds the holes?

Grids + Texture = Inspiration?

Saturday, November 25th, 2017

When something like these two surfaces grabs me, I always take a closeup of the texture.  Not that I want to recreate it in fabric, but I am recording my admiration in this ‘visual diary’, and possibly in time I will find inspiration in some aspect of it.  These obviously already appealed in terms of grid layout and texture.  There are more fabulous door examples here, and a few of some old safes and strongboxes here.

Left:  Gate in city wall, Cairo                  Right: Safe in Cabildo, Montevideo

When we saw this fabulous  C19 safe in the recently restored original Montevideo Cabildo on the Plaza Matriz, it reminded me of the fabulously textured reinforced door I snapped in Egypt 10 years ago.  Check out the keyhole in the centre of the detail (lower right) Some day when I have time (to wait around) I’m going back to inquire if anyone has the key to this old safe – as I’m sure that it too is a work of art, and I’d love to see it.  Momentarily inspired, I just googled ancient keys – and my goodness,  there are some beauties there.  I could spend hours more wandering via the keyboard, but not today.

 

Following A Trail – aka Making Samples

Saturday, July 22nd, 2017

Earlier this week I had a studio visit from local textile artist Lilian Madfes, and while she was here I gave her a demo/lesson in the basics of freehand patchwork piecing   Next week I will go to her studio for her demo of the basics of silk painting, at which she is a master in a very creative way.  When I had given her plenty to use to explore the technique if she wishes to, I talked about the dome-like shapes I often use in my designs and showed her how I do one.  Sewing it up therefore made it a sample – and my readers know I’m keen on samples for trying out any new ideas and materials!

That first one is on the RH end of this pic.  I liked it, so made more, and love where this is apparently going.

A Shared Taste? Not Really …

Friday, September 2nd, 2016

Pinterest this morning sent this email:   “Alison – meet X!  They say great minds Pin alike. And we just found someone who shares your taste in Pins. Follow their boards to discover more Pins you love!”  I’m about to be disparaging about her pinning, and as I don’t know her, but have two friends with the same name, I’ll just stick to “X”

First up, this person has set up 111 boards to pin her 13,000+ saved images onto.  My experience is that anything over about 30 boards is a red flag, as I typically find such a pinner’s selections are of a ‘pin everything’ approach, and it becomes time consuming and sometimes confusing to sift through.  I’ll back out quickly from such a time waster.  I have no idea how I’d keep track of thousands of pins in hundreds of boards, as I’ve only saved 450 images or so over several years.  I’ve found more rapport with pinners who seem to carefully choose whether to pin or not, and whether something is important to their ideas collections.  I believe it is definitely a case of ‘Less is more’.   Having a huge number of boards somehow seems the equivalent to the groups of  holiday travellers on organised guided tours.  We’ve all seen them, no matter where we live.  All the passengers on the bus are from the same foreign country, they hurriedly alight, take masses of pics of each other standing in front of whatever view/building/monument/large sign is behind them, and then quickly clamber back on board for the next whistle stop on their tour.  Pinterest for some people is clearly the same kind of hurried ‘travel’ in the field of ideas.

Secondly, on X’s page this morning, I scrolled and a few lines down found a board labelled “Kantha Stitch Style Fibre Arts”.  Several years ago I attended Dorothy Caldwell’s wonderful workshop on mark making with reference to Kantha , so thought I was in for a treat.  Kantha is not a technique, it’s a style of embroidery from W. Bengal India that uses running straight stitches to form patterns and fill shapes of  flowers, birds, animals and scenes of everyday life that are meaningful to the maker and her community. 

6" square, hand stitched, straight/running stitch filler, chain outline.

From my workshop with Dorothy Caldwell; I chose a kangaroo shape to stitch a 10cm sq. kantha-style stitchery

In the west, with the growing popularity of hand stitch, ‘Kantha’ is one of the trendy hand stitch buzzwords, and while technically it is ‘merely’ a running or straight stitch worked into all kinds of patterns, the scale and potential of Kantha work within its cultural context is rich, often complicated and overall glorious. (see the above link or google Kantha images)  On X’s page however, faced with lots of hand stitchery of many different kinds, I saw nothing ‘kantha’ before pulling out at about image #50 or so.  There were however some mixed media hand stitched textiles, most of which featured some pattern darned areas; and it became clear as I looked further into X’s boards, with “Kantha style 2”, and “kantha 3” listed lower down, that X equates Kantha with pattern darning.  I know, dear reader, that might seem a bit nit picky, but there we are – that’s me.  I am a bit pedantic on things I know a thing or two about.  There were other gems in the boards in X’s boards titles –   “tea bag fibre art” 🙂   “safety pin fibre art” for heavens’ sakes, and, well as I said, 13000+ pins under 111 titles.  I guess I was overwhelmed at what this represents in terms of time spent looking at, collecting and saving images of other people’s work and inspirations.

We all know social media run on algorithms based on how we use those media sites.  They’re often enough totally wrong, but we put up with that for the other benefits we enjoy by being part of them.  Today Pinterest got it quite wrong when it told me that X and I are an exact match – but that’s ok – I’ve vented and will be back on Pinterest again in a few days’ time, prolly.

 

 

Alluring Lines

Saturday, August 27th, 2016

posted previously on a great design workshop I attended nearly a year ago in the Wool Museum at Geelong, Australia, with fibre artist Jan Mullen. Photos I took of various activities that day included this and several others of pages of a huge wool fabrics sample book lying open on a table.  This morning, while mulling over a request for information and images of most most significant innovative works had me looking back through photos and information sheets to select a few key works of mine to include in a submission to SAQA for possible inclusion in a book.  Of course, looking back takes time, as it is soooo easy to be distracted 🙂 and I could have my stuff half assembled by now; but revisiting these photos in the files compelled me to resize and post some, shown below.

 

wool sample sheets 1 blog

This morning I revisited those photos of lovely lines and printed this particular one to pin on my wall to look at whenever I walk past.

Wool samples file NWM geelong1

These others are inspirational, too, though for the moment they’re not getting a page of their own on the pin board.

Followers know that I adore  fine freehand cutting and piecing, and I can feel some of that coming on in a way I haven’t quite dealt with it before. To me, the line is the single most important design element, and that includes the expressive potential of the glorious straight stitch.

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