Boro Stitching

The focus for the September meeting was Boro stitching with the intention of constructing a bag from the stitched cloth in the October meeting.  Boro is an old Japanese technique of mending and repair that uses scraps of cloth and Sashiko stitching or running stitch to extend the life of the fabric or garment.

This bag is made from small pieces of indigo dyed Japanese fabrics.

Jo led the session, demonstrating the construction of the base cloth. The idea was to create a base of fabric pieces or scraps stitched down onto a base cloth using running stitch ( Sashiko)

Base cloth in production.

A finished base cloth, ready to be made into a bag.

Finished bag

Another bag in production.

Some samples of mended and patched fabric, quite small pieces and probably will not be made into a bag.

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Plethora in May

There was an abundance of beautiful work on show from our productive members at our May meeting.

First up was Pauline with an explanation and great examples of Faux leather. This fitted in beautifully with our theme of recycling for our May postcards with the possible re-use of all those brown paper bags.

Our other topic for discussion was felting. This arose from the tendency for people to gift me their accidently felted woollens for recycling. There were some lovely examples of needle felting and wet felting.

A dressed Scallywag:

Now onto the finished and in-progress pieces on display.

Firstly the April postcards where the theme was ‘Dancing the night away’ and ‘bling, bling, bling’.

We had some icons appearing for March:

We had book pages and covers from Jill:

We even had a finished May postcard using recycled materials:

Many of our members were inspired after the Velma Bolyard workshop and went home to spin paper and make more shifu:

Wow, you are a talented bunch.

Next meeting is June with our 15 minutes of fame spot with Robyn and a theme of ‘Out of Africa’- sure to bring out the wild side!

 

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Xmas party time

Our December meeting began with a delicious buffet meal prepared by Kerrie featuring some delicious salads as well as some amazing desserts by our members. We opened our bonbons and received an additional gift each, prepared by Kerrie, to begin our box decoration for our 2016 project. Thank you to Kerrie, and her assistant Bronwyn, for the tremendous amount of work and effort in preparing for the day.
During 2016 we will be responding to a monthly theme and holding/participating in a series of mini tutorials to produce a box of mini artworks (postcard sized).
Below are some glimpses of the beginnings of our collaging to cover the boxes to hold our postcards.
Our next meeting will be in February, perhaps we will see some beautifully finished boxes.

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Woven and Stitched

For our June meeting Gillian gave a brief rundown on the history of sashiko and boro stitching and showed us some great samples. She also showed us a very efficient method of weaving the fabric strips using a ruler.

Everybody was quickly at work cutting strips of fabric and weaving using this ingenious method. Most people also got onto stitching to attach and enhance their pieces.

Thank you to Pauline who emailed through a photo of her boro piece in progress with interesting shapes embellished on top.

Pauline’s woven boro

Next meeting is 11th July and will be ‘Stitched and Dissolved with FME’. Requirements list will go out Monday by email. Don’t forget to email through photos, they can be added at any time.

 

 

 

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Stitching into Paper

The focus of the August meeting was stitching into paper. The first thing to was to create a background of collaged papers that were fused to some felt. Next came the stitching. This technique is a good way to recycle or incorporate odds and ends into your work. We discovered that some papers were more successful than others, however, all lent themselves to further treatments such as over printing, crumpling, dyeing or paint. Here are some of the pages that were produced.

Next time there will be photos of the needle weaving work from the September meeting.

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More for August

Something else to inspire you. This is a small piece of work by Cas Holmes. It consists of altered/dyed paper and fabric that has been layered and stitched. As with much of Cas’ work she is happy to combine machine and hand embroidery.

 

 

These two books are good reference books  for the topics that we covered in the August meeting – both have lots of information, ideas and how to.

 

 

 

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June bobbling along

Saturday was our June meeting and textile artist extraordinaire, Shirley, shared a technique with us to make permanent 3D shapes in polyester fabric. It will be interesting to see what our inventive group does with these amazing amoeba like formations!!

with marbles

After removing marbles

Some of our members brought pieces to show.

machine embroidery:

FME lace on net:

Lovely little handmade books

An interesting mixed media ‘nest’

And our project for August:

Thankyou for sharing your amazing pieces.

July will be a catch up month so bring anything you are working on. Don’t forget to bring your finished items to show and photograph for our blog.

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Summer art

Many of our members have taken advantage of the summer break to create.

Pauleen’s recycled xmas card book:

Pauline McK printings and Shiva rubbing over rust dyed fabric:

Pauleen’s stitching with a variety of rust dyed fabrics:

Pauline McK also did some very effective rubbings using gold Shiva over stamps on the rusty fabric. I will post a photo when I get them.

Don’t forget next meeting on February 9th: we will be discussing and outlining a suggested program for the year, for our Bi-annual exhibition in October and for our Johnston Collection pieces in 2014.

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