For centuries women have used cloth as a tool of comfort and as an expression of beauty within their homes. Creating cloth for warmth, cloth for shelter, our female predecessors embellished these linens with hand stitch using laborious and time consuming techniques thereby enhancing the functional beauty of objects which enveloped and protected their families. Inspired by these women I hope my creations pay tribute to and recognise the devotion expressed in cloth by our female ancestors .







''the use of traditional often time consuming process alludes to the devotion of a mother''. c K. A. Ruane 2007







Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Keeping You Interested!!

I am very conscious of the fact that a lot of what I do is very repetitive. I am not complaining, my main work, the 'wrapping cloth' series is really important to me and I love everything about that creative process, the constant creation of embroidered text, the subsequent distortion of that text, the sampling of other techiniques to compliment each cloth, it's all a true labour of love. Having said that, I think it would be extremely tedious if you came here each time and saw nothing but text etc etc. I think it's also really important, as a creative person, to constantly try and push boundaries, come up with new ideas, ideas that I can hopefully use further down the line to compliment existing and ongoing projects. With that in mind I have been busy with this, do you remember the post when I spied an idea from looking at the back of this work?




Well, this morning I cut some templates from an iron on embroidery transfer. This is one of the modern transfers, why don't they make them blue anymore?????



And hey presto.....the template becomes the feature of the patchwork piece. I am sure there are more possibilities from this technique and I am definitely going to look at this further. For the moment though, I really want to push on with the text hexagons and get near to completion of my current cloth. I feel happier now, knowing I have at least given you something different to look at today.



Yesterday I went to Leeds. I was out until the early hours of this morning supporting my son and his band in a 'battle of the bands' competition. They are SOOOOOOOOOOO good, (o.k. I know I am biased,) but they really are, check them out here and well done to James, Chris, Allisia, Al and Patrick for storming through to the next round!

6 comments:

Eileen said...

I'll be watching to see what ou create out of your new hexagons. :) It does look interesting.

jude said...

i have found that blog world is one of the only places where having different projects going at the same time has its advantage. i often switch back and forth just to give my readers a break. i know how you feel.

Victoria said...

Your work fascinates me!

Anonymous said...

i am curious about the transfers. do they transfer?
your work is so tidy, and the white silk so sensual. if I were to try this technique i fear i'd end up with transfers transferred everywhere like so many weeds in the garden.

Threadspider said...

What a genius idea! There are all sorts of possibilities to explore with transfers and I expect you will pursue some of them. Great band btw.

Ulla said...

Hi Karen,
I've been trying to get an e-mail through to you just to say welcome back, but it keeps bouncing back to my mailbox.
That new idea with transfers looks interesting. I preferred the blue as well.