Another day at the wonderful place called Zigzags. My perfect local fabric and textile art shop, this is were I am studying a City and Guilds certificate in Creative Techniques. I'm at that stage now where all the plates are spinning, I can see the end date but all of my stuff is in a state of half (if I'm lucky) completion.
We are doing the 2 mandatory Design modules: Research for Design (7113 - 001) and Sampling (7113 - 002) and 2 selected modules on embroidery: Collection of Hand Embroidered Textiles (7113 - 200) and Collection of Machine Embroidered Textiles (7113 - 208).
The early days were very painful, learning to play again. Getting messy and making slightly shy pictures made with ripped masking tape and charcoal, then oh my god we were told to make a drawing of some flowers! Panic all round but now it's starting to feel more comfortable. I have my design work in some sort of presentable order and the machine embroidery is ticking along nicely. By the time we started the machine work I'd got an idea of how the syllabus worked and was able to 'build' a sketchbook with labels to organise and monitor my progress.
I've since gone back to my unfinished hand embroidery work and replicated the sketchbook idea for this module too.
Back to today. Its been niggling me that I have started lots of hand embroidery samples but none of them are really completed or in anyway ready to present, so today I've been edging my quilting samples. I have a number of samples that have machine stitching on and will need some hand stitches so they can be included.
I have completed 10 quilting samples from designs I developed based on the floor plans of
the Rolex Learning Centre in Lausanne in Switzerland. I bought an Architectural Review magazine and it included an article about this remarkable structure with huge circular segments that are connected by sweeping walkways and tunnels. These walkways literally 'sweep' up and down, in some places at a 30 degree angle!
In one piece I used photographs of the centre and layered them between Japanese paper and straight stitched some shapes lifted from the floor plans.
Whilst I was edging the pieces which I am going to work into 1 or 2 wallhangings that can be folded into a 'pack' in a concertina way, I was soaking a base I have made using dissolvable fabric. We have to complete a sample on canvas and after getting inspired at a Jan Beany workshop I decided to make my own canvas with wool. I used some hand dyed Rachel Middleton wool which I laid down in a grid shape. Using YLI thread I sewed a cross stitch on each place where the wool crossed and then added some machine zigzag stitch on every third row to hopefully keep the fabric together! The plan is to add as many different kinds of square canvas stitches in a nice light wool.
The sticky stabiliser is almost gone and a couple of good swills tomorrow should have it clear. I probably should have put the canvas stitches on when it was still wrapped in the dissolvable fabric but I so wanted to see the fabric as a canvas.
Just to top off the day I've had my nails done in preparation for my trip to Budapest, not sure what my lovely and long suffering hubby will make of them!,,
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