Recycle, Reuse

Recycling, reusing and repurposing provided the focus for our recent meetings. The group was encouraged to look at how ‘rubbish’ or items that might go into the waste stream could be repurposed for art making. 

Janice showing us clever ways to use wrappers, plastic, bottle tops and other discarded items to make small hoops

Jo talked about ways to recycle old cans and metals 

Jenny demonstrated ways to create new fabrics from old with the embellishing machine.

The artisan book group also joining in the theme by reusing a box/tin as a cover/container for a concertina book.

 

The grand finale or our Christmas meeting. We celebrate with a shared lunch and the making of a small Christmas ornament. This year a simple Santa made with gifted leftover yarns, old string, a small wooden bead and a piece of paper towel roll.

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The Making of An Earth Goddess

The theme for the GeeTAG group this year is earth. At a previous meeting members were shown how to create a simple flat doll shape and asked to bring them to the meeting ready to embellish or sculpt so as to create an Earth Goddess. As with many of our activities and projects there is often a bit of time between starting and finishing the project, however, hopefully there will finished dolls that appear throughout the year as show and tell.

These are simple dolls that started their life as flat ‘pancake or cookie cutter ‘ doll shapes. These dolls show a variety of ways to add limbs and sculpt to add further shape to the body.

Some simple sculpting to create a motherly pregnant shape for this earth mother, legs and arms made from wrapped wire.

 In various stages of production

Meg hard at work

Hilary, a visitor, came along prepared with many dolls to work on.

This year we are having a year long activity that is focussed on collage, design and responding to a fortnightly prompt. The works can be glued into a book or made as postcards or maybe both for some.

This goddess didn’t get to the meeting.

And sometimes we get to see some spectacular work. Marina has been working on this during the  Covid lockdown.

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Zoom Zoom

A snap lockdown and the plans for our first meeting  were in disarray. Jo, keen to get us started, organised an emergency meeting via Zoom. So there we were,  zooming away, introducing ourselves to new members, planning a slightly revised program for the coming year and even some show and tell. 

An album cover and Covid piece from Carol

Artists Trading Cards and swap from Sandra

Free machine embroidery, fabric collage and paper collage from Kerrie

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Creating fabric paper

Thank you to Gillian and Carol for inspiring us with their fabric paper examples for our March meeting. We had a wonderfully relaxing and productive afternoon chatting and collaging a variety of paper and other items onto fabric to create pieces of fabric paper for further embellishment. Hopefully we will see these made into a variety of possibilities including these wonderful hanging birds:

Paper cloth birds

The application of this one simple techniques resulted in great diversity. Meg’s piece showing a progression as more strips were added.

Jenny created two quite different pieces.

Laurene’s variety of different items -top and Rhonda’s retro pirates and mermaids -below:

Gillian in progress -top and completed -bottom with the dark shadowing giving great effect.

Carol displaying her great compositional skills

Gail – top and Gillian – bottom using bright colour combos

And my quite subtle combos using a variety of tissue papers, teabags and dyed silk rod (requiring some more embellishment -possibly printing.)

Our group will be participating in the group challenge for our Embroiderer’s Guild exhibition in September. The theme for the challenge is “Something in the air”. For this we are creating LP or EP record covers of songs that reflect the theme. Below are some of the interpretations: Carol’s Space Oddity and Laurene’s Somewhere over the rainbow.

Record covers

Last month wings were made and today they reappeared as winged creatures:

Winged creatures

Winged

Some of Laurene’s book pages from her wonderful textile books:

Bookmaking

We now have a break for Easter Saturday and will be back in May for a cord making round robin.

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Gelli print extravaganza

Thank you to Kerrie for all her preparation and an inspiring demonstration of a range of techniques on the gelli plates. Less is definitely not more when it comes to gelli printing, the more layers the better in most cases!

Kerrie demonstrating Gelli printing

Textures and colours

After her excellent presentation we all got seriously to work and the results were quite outstanding from just 1-2 hours:

Gelli prints

More gelli prints

Pauline brought her in progress fabric pages from last month’s meeting on using a variety of pencils and crayons on fabric, looking amazing!

Pauline’s Inktense pages

Jenny combined colour, fabric and free machine stitching to create some fabulous flowers:

Jenny’s flowers

Just a reminder that in April we will be having a ‘stitch’ week where we can work into our artistic cloth and paper (stitch on paper too!) and perhaps transform into a form- a book, 3D, postcard, ATC. Bring along all your bits and bobs and be inspired by how others transform their pieces.

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Mounting collage on canvas

We had a full house for Kerrie’s great tutorial on mounting paper and fabric collages onto canvas (with thanks also to Sue Dove for allowing Kerrie to share this technique with our group). Some of Sue’s inspirational collages are shown below with the one’s Kerrie created at her workshop.

Hopefully we will see lots of finished items back next month at the August meeting to go onto the gift stall at our upcoming exhibition in September.

Several members attended a fantastic book making session with Lyn Dixon recently, making some very clever books from the miniature to the larger. Some of Rosalie’s books:

Finally we critiqued our ‘Golden scrolls’ which are in progress. They will make a very striking exhibit when finished and hung-well done Jenny on all your hard work and leadership for these-no pictures; they are under wraps until the exhibition!

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Print, Stamp, Appliqué, Layer and Stitch

This month’s mini workshop was taken by Carol O’Loughlin and a brief report was provided by Gillian.

 

We stamped using Pigment ink on dyed base fabric – tea dyed in most cases.
We then cut out motifs from fabric or pieces of colour to apply to the cloth.
Transparent gauze and muslin were used to mask some of the space and then we stitched over and around the resulting areas/images.

 

These photos are very much works in progress, the workshop continues next month with time in between for stitching.

 

Leonie, Martina and Janet had some show and tell from the dyeing workshop.

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Xmas joviality

Yesterday was our last GeeTAG get together for 2017 and we partied with delicious food, had fun making tricky origami books and secret boxes and continued stitching for our 10 year celebratory exhibition next year.

Here is a taster of some works in progress that will be on show at “Breaking Traditions”, The Shearer’s Arms Gallery, Geelong, March 16-18, 2018.

The 2018 program has been sent out. Don’t forget to email your March exhibition entry forms through to Jenny by 5th February 2018, do not leave it to the February meeting as it is after the cut off date.

We will be starting 2018 at our first meeting on 10th February with Mixed media and the Golden Scrolls for our Embroiderer’s Guild 50th Anniversary exhibition in September.

Contact Leonie or sign up Monday for the Summer School, get in early before it is opened up to other branches of the Guild or you may miss out.

Wishing you all a very happy Christmas.

 

 

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Endless Possibilities with paper

The 5th Saturday messy day at the Shearer’s Arms studio was a fantastic play day with Lyn Dixon exploring endless possible variations on her paper altering techniques. Lyn displayed a wonderful array of papers and a variety of books and 3D elements constructed with her beautiful papers.

Lyn Dixon paper based books and art

And everyone enjoyed the many different techniques and experimentation that eventuated:

Rubbings

Experiments

Texture and colour

Thank you Lyn and fellow experimenters for a great day.

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February is all boxed up

Our first meeting for the year saw 23 of our 30 members join us to begin our first piece of postcard art. The suggested project for this year is to try out some interesting techniques on a postcard sized piece of art. These will be kept together in a box which many of our members have finished after receiving a bonbon of goodies at our end of 2015 xmas gathering.

Some boxes, finished and in progress:

Texture and maps

 

Beautiful boxes

 

Pauline brought along a box and postcard to show made from gummy silk, embedded synthetic lace, lumiere paints and tyvek:

Silky Box

 

We also had some great results on display from last years shibori experiments:

 

Hopefully we will have some postcards to show at our March meeting based on the theme wings and using the techniques of layering, collage and/or distressing. Perhaps give the technique with the incense sticks a go?

Our March meeting will feature two mini tutorials: Water soluble paper and foiling,  an email will go out about two weeks prior with info.

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