eureka moments @ ledbury artplace

Indian Block Printing

2009-02-23T13:12:00.000-08:00

Last week we had a block printing workshop in the studio and here are some photos of the activities.

We were using forma-foam blocks impressing various textures into them after warming with an iron then using acrylics printing onto paper and fabrics.

Valerie is a fine artist, she impressed a dolls face into her forma-foam block. Her work is about memory some of it childhood. Some of the images were quite spooky and dream-like.

Jane, an art teacher wanted to gain new ideas to teach her students but found herself hooked on printing images of her own hand. The pieces became quite bold and could have sent many messages.

Art Felt Workshop

2009-02-05T05:13:00.000-08:00

Here's a few images from the Art Felt workshop with Marietta Alker the weekend before last. the pieces the students created were absolutely lovely.

Brilliant Buttons

2009-01-07T03:44:00.000-08:00

Started the new year fantastically with Inspired by Klimt. Made me feel alive again to to be teaching and exchanging ideas with lovely enthusiastic students. sorting through my camera and cleaning out dodgy looking photos i can across some shots i took a month ago of Brilliant buttons workshop. We did a mixture of mixed media and stitched buttons, some painted some not. i have a button making machine but i think the nicest ones are the painted self covering buttons, the blanks you can get in any haberdashery shop.

This is a collection of my experiments with button and badge making machines

Jenny and Penny's mixed media buttons.

i would like to experiment more with button making but time gets in the way!!!

Tantalising Textile Tag Books

2008-10-04T09:57:00.000-07:00

We had a lovely day at Ledbury Artplace making textile tag books. They are made from a base of Timtex a firm material used in baseball cap peaks, we found it quite difficult to get hold of so substituted it with pelmet vilene and fusible wadding to get a quilted effect.

here's some we made earlier. The advance group of me Ann, Rachel and Angela had a go, we realised they take a while to construct this may end up as a 2 day workshop.
My little book called 'the littlest birds sing the prettiest songs'. It's good to have a theme it focuses the mind. I've used my favorite print blocks, photocopied tissue paper, some hand stitching and paper tags, the base material is calico.

Helen's first go at this kind of thing, it's really charming i think!!

This is Ann's she wanted hers to look quite 'trashy' her words.

This is Beryl's she used Rodin's lover Camille Claudel as an inspiration, the image is printed onto t-shirt transfer paper and ironed on.

Jillian used her own photo's of seed heads as a starting point.

Catherine enjoyed messing about with colourful cake images and lovely little paper tags attached with eyelets.

Jenny had a bit of a Christmas thing going on.

As you can see these pieces weren't finished I'm thinking of expanding it to 2 days but we really had some fun.

Mug cosy

2008-06-01T12:26:00.000-07:00

Marcus my Man friday has been making a mug cosy!! He found that sitting long hours at the computer was causing a major tea cooldown. So got to work on some quilting. He can play the ukelele as well

Long Purses

2007-12-15T09:06:00.000-08:00

After our tuffling day we got on and worked to make long purses inspired by Hilary Bowers purses and a couple of the group manages to finish their bags here are the results.

these are images of my bag it took me weeks to finish in fact i only finished on saturday. it is made from felted wool, silk fragments, beads and sequins. I did a lot of machine embroidery but also tried doing a bit of hand stitching this is why it took ages, i'm rubbish at hand stitching!

Marion really whizzed along and had hers finished well before the end of class. She has done a lot of textured machine embroidery.

Rachels bag is really bright and colourful, these pics don't really show how twinkly it is.

Rosemary was still working on hers when we broke up.

Tufts and Tuffling

2007-11-29T05:51:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the new Ledbury Artplace blog spot.On the 'Experimenting with Machine Embroidery' class this week we were trying to work out how to make little tufts that feature quite a lot on indian textiles particularly little bags.

First of all we wrapped stranded cotton (you need quite a lot of a plump tuft) around a piece of card about 1" wide and tied each bundle off either side like you would if you were making a tassle.

Then you need to slide each bundle off the card and wrap with more stranded cotton to make top of the tufted tassle you can get two tufts from each bundle if you wrap either end. When you've sewn off the ends of your wrappings, cut the bundle in half so you have two small 'tassles'.

Now you can get down to some serious 'tuffling' (phrase coined by one of my students Anni). Rub the cut ends of your tuft vigorously on the 'tuffling' brush (this is actually LA's nail brush but any hard brush will do) until you make the stranded cotton fibres very fluffy, this emulates years of rubbing that occurs on old indian textiles.

Eureka!! you have a tuft.

The word 'tuffle' describes a longer tuft a cross between a tuft and a tassle.

Anni was so taken with tuffling she was moved to write a song about it.

Ballad of the Tuffelers.

‘Twas on a Tuesday morning,

Oh, hear what I do say,

We all took up with tuffeling,

And stayed there half the day.

We spent the morning tuffeling,

And all that ye could hear,

Was ‘Pass me up the tuffeling brush,

I’ll give it back no fear.’

If you want good tuffels,

For the sake of art,

Don’t twirkle with the tuffeling brush,

Or they will fall apart!

If you want good tuffels,

Harken whilst I warn.

Never lose your tuffeling brush,

Or they will hang forlorn!

So carry on a tuffeling,

All on a Tuesday morn,

And I hope all your tuffels,

Are fluffy not forlorn!

Best sung with a quavery voice with a Hereford accent.

Better still- not at all.