Amanda McCavour Workshop: Culminating Project...

After creating several samples while working on exercises in Amanda McCavour's workshop (see them here and here), it was time to start work on our 'big' project.










I decided that I wanted to use a range of neutral colours. I've included a couple of in process shots of the piece at the sewing machine. Because you work with the fibres trapped between layers of water soluble stabilizer, it's very easy to stitch...no threads and bits to get caught on as you sew!

I put the piece up on the design wall (stabilizer still in place) for a while to decide where I wanted to go next. Then, after adding a little more machine stitch using the ivory coloured thread, I rinsed out the stabilizer and hung it to dry.












In this final shot, I'm auditioning it on a loosely woven piece of fabric that I may use as the backing fabric for the piece. I plan to add some hand stitch and possibly some beading or other embellishments and then mount it on a stretched canvas frame.

A Week With Amanda McCavour!

I spent the first week of June in a fabulous week long workshop with the incredibly talented Amanda McCavour.  If you ever get a chance to take a workshop with Amanda I highly recommend it.  In addition to being a talented artist, Amanda is a lovely person and a great teacher!

The workshop was all about using water soluble stabilizer to create thread lace. What fun!

This sample piece was a bit of an experiment gone wrong...I was not intending to make a creepy, very dense spider web. But, when cut up and reworked I created a fun flower that I quite like.










I really like where these random, free form doodled leaves are going, and I have plans to continue with them to create a larger piece with that in the future. My thoughts right now are for some sort of a vessel, but we'll see...

This is another piece that was reworked a couple of times. The first shot shows me stitching in the thread grid to support the pieces I had cut up from the original piece (sorry, I forgot to get a picture of it).

You can see the rinsing process and I wash out the water soluble stabilizer once the thread work was finished.

 

I then added some scrim bits and the text...perhaps to be used as an embellishment on a journal cover.

This leaf was another sample, this time to experiment with just how minimal I could go with the thread and still have the piece work.

I just love the incredible shadow that was cast in the late afternoon sun!

 For this sample I was playing around with laying down interesting bits of yarn before machine doodling connecting circles to create the structure that would hold it together. Again, the second shot shows the wonderful shadow cast later in the day.

This final sample was done using Japanese rice paper. I love the pattern in the paper, and because of the long fibres in this type of paper, it sews well. The exercise was to cut holes into the piece and then sew connecting threads within the spaces. I can see some interesting potential for using this technique in future work!