I recently signed on for another 12 months of Stitch Club workshops – go here for more information about it. My regular readers will remember this monthly subscription is my Pandemic Treat to compensate a little for not being able to socialise normally or travel to visit the offsprings. The cost is approximately equal to 2m of good quality fabric that I’d buy in a quilt shop if I could get to one! Though having said that, my work has changed so much, that it really doesn’t matter at the moment that I can’t buy quality cotton fabrics here in Uruguay. I’m using other stuff though perhaps not for the purposes I originally intended them to be used.
This is the first workshop I’ve done this year and it is a blast. Jessica Grady is a UK textile artist who uses a wide variety of waste materials to craft her highly textured embellishments she puts onto her fabric compositions with stitch. This first pic is the materials I gathered up in a few minutes rummaging around in my studio:
She devised a set of little exercises for us to cut up shapes from out materials and layer them fastening with stitches and knots:
One of the great things about the Stitch Club workshops is that every workshop has a page where people can put of photos of what they\re doing or have finished. One fellow student cut some rectangular and square shapes from glossy cardboard, perhaps a shoe box or something, and using heavy bright thread stitched them all down in an overlapping mosiac kind of arrangement. That struck me as something that could be done with small fabric shapes as a surface design or texture on an art quilt/textile wall hanging, and so I did this little sample to capture that idea.
And somewhere in all this it occurred to me that cutting mylar tea bags into shapes for applique could look interesting, too –
