Back when I was making my felt pictures for the Weaving narratives project I thought that it would be good to improve my drawing. I wanted to go beyond using photographs and begin drawing up my own designs.
I already had an account at Lynda.com, so that was the natural first place to look for tutorials. I took Von Glitska's 5 Day Draw course where you...well... get drawing prompts five days in a row. Simple really! Part of the course was to post your drawing on social media, so that's what I did.
My first few weren't that inspiring but after a few days I lightened up and had some fun with it:
I really like Von Glitska's work and he said one thing in the course that stood out for me. I'm paraphrasing a bit but it was something like 'don't worry about drawing something photo-realistic. If clients wanted that then they'd use a photo.' (I don't have art or design clients, but it was a lightbulb moment anyway).
In art lessons at school I felt I was encouraged to draw what was there in front of me in detail. Which I guess has its place but is pretty boring! So now I don't have to do that it's opened up lots of possibilities...
It's been a while since I last posted but I haven't stopped making. I've been teaching myself freeform crochet on and off for the last 9 months or so. Ever since I made my first piece for Weaving Narratives and wondered what else I could do with crochet but without a pattern.
My plan with this was to just doodle with wool and try out as many different things as possible, so if I found something online or in a book, in it went. I didn't even have a plan for what it would be, but it's so big that I guess now it's going to be a blanket.
Part of the fun has been seeing people's reactions because I don't think most have seen anything quite like it! Anyway, here are a few close-ups.
I have no idea when I'll finish it because there's still a long way to go and I fit it in around other projects. Next winter would be a good guess. But that's another part of the fun - being as relaxed as possible and only working on it when I feel excited about it.
I'm aiming to make it freeform in every possible way!
It's been a very busy September!* So I've only just got around to posting here at my craft blog.
We're currently part of the way through the Weaving Narratives exhibitions, with Bedford and Luton done and Flitwick still to go (Flitwick library, Oct 13th to 15th) and they've been a great success.
In fact other venues have asked if they can host us for extra exhibitions. I think we (contributors and visitors) have all been amazed by the variety of techniques used and what we have been inspired to make by the material in the archives.
For the non-professional artists in the group (me included) it's been such good fun sharing the excitement of seeing our work in an art exhibition. For most of us it's been something we didn't realise we had the capability to do or ever expected to happen.
I have been doing a few other crafty things this month, so look out for my next post on that. :-)
*Ironically one of the things I did this month was listen to this series on the cult of busy-ness. Well worth a listen. So every time I hear myself saying 'I'm so busy' I question why. Which can only be a good thing.
If you'd told me nine months ago that I'd be hanging up my work in an art exhibition later in the year, I would have laughed at you. I wasn't an artist...I didn't even have anything resembling artwork.
But that's what I'm doing tomorrow and I have to say it's very exciting!
Here are the details of the first Weaving Narratives exhibition at Borough Hall, in Bedford this weekend. You'd be very welcome to come along.
There are others in the next month or so in Luton and Flitwick.
I finished my needle-felted picture of the Britannia Ironworks clock tower and there were still a few months left before the Weaving Narratives exhibitions in September and October. Could I squeeze in another picture?
Well, it was worth a try! I went back through my scrapbook (well, most of it is on my PC and Android phone...) looking for another project. Then I remembered some photos I'd seen of the Bedford Picturedrome Cinema.
Bedford town centre had four cinemas at one time, but now all have been demolished. The last one to be pulled down was the Granada in 1991 and any Bedfordians who spent their youth there are still upset about that 25 years later!
The Picturedrome was the first Bedford Cinema to be built and possibly the first to be demolished, too. It's life span was from 1910 to 1964. When I first saw the pictures I couldn't believe that anyone would knock down such a striking building and replace it with the ugly concrete block now known as the Park Inn Hotel.
But according to Bedford Library, The Picturedrome was known in later years as The Fleapit and had problems when the river flooded (someone walked out of the door one night and fell straight in the river!) So maybe the reality wasn't as romantic as the photos suggest.
I couldn't resist attempting to bring it back to life, but could I manage all those details with felt? If I couldn't I could always try embroidery instead.
I used the same technique as the Britannia Clock Tower, I traced a photo emailed to me by Pamela Birch of the Bedfordshire Archives...
....then flipped it over, drew on the back with a fabric transfer pen and ironed it onto felt. I kept the temperature of the iron a little lower than last time as, with the clock tower, I could see the heat was just starting to damage the felt. Unfortunately the pen didn't transfer as well at a lower heat setting, but the image was just about good enough to work with.
Then I got to work with the needle. This is where I'm up to now (I abandoned the embroidery!)...
Now I had a felted building it was time to attach the felt trees. Emma had said I could 'borrow' some green wool in a beautiful mix of colours and just by curling it into loops with my fingers I could see it would make much better trees than I made a few weeks earlier.
Then I sat the felted work next to the sky fabric I'd painted and - yes - the sky looked flat and boring next to the wonderful texture and colour of the felt.
So now I was going to felt the whole thing!
Here it is with some sky and road added, but the clock face removed as I wasn't happy with my first attempt.
By the way, I added a new clock face and sewed the hands on using gold thread. It was too fine to do with felt, which is why my previous attempt hadn't worked.
Remember I said I'd become fascinated by the changes seen by the Britannia Ironworks Clock Tower? (If not, click here!)
I wanted to make a fabric picture and I had been inspired by the book Applique Art by Abigail Mill. So Crafty 8 Year Old and I painted a sky using fabric paint on calico and some sponges:
At that time, Emma of the Crafty Mrs Noah group introduced me to needle felting, which is where you use a barbed needle to make roving (unspun wool) into felt by stabbing it repeatedly. I didn't even know that was possible until that point, but I had a go and thought I could make some very effective trees to add to my applique.
The problem was that the woolly trees were so effective that the applique building looked flat and boring in comparison. What if I felted the building, too?
I needed to transfer the outline of the building onto my backing felt, so I used a transfer pen designed for embroidery on the back of some tracing paper. I didn't know if the pen would work on felt, but it did!
Then it was a question of 'colouring in' the building using wool fibres. I mixed orange and brown felt together to create the sides of the building in the shadows, and fluffy trim to make the decorative parts of the building:
As I was looking through the old pumps, turbines and engines that used to be made at the Queen's Engineering Works in Bedford, I wondered if I could make a picture of them in crochet.
I started off with one 'pipe' then added the fluted bit at the end, then the wheel used for opening and closing the valve. Yes, I think this might actually work!
I carried on like this, adding bits and pieces, rearranging them, fitting them together until I had something like a pump and turbine. I tried to make a fairly faithful replica of the pictures I found in the catalogues at Bedfordshire Archives - here's an example of the kind of pump and turbine I was working on.
I've almost finished my this piece now, I just need to sew it to backing fabric and then mount that on a frame of some kind so it can be hung on a wall. I'll post a photo when it's finished.
So I'd decided that I wasn't freaked out enough by the thought of exhibiting my (currently non-existent) artwork to pull out of the exhibition. And that I was going to do something on Bedford's engineering history. What now?
I had an idea of doing some kind of big collage and stuck down a few ideas...
I really hadn't a clue how to do a collage so it 'hung together' properly as a whole, so I started to Google industrial art and fabric collage to get some ideas.
I discovered Grayson Perry's tapestries (click here for examples) and thought they were fantastic. I'd heard of Grayson - hasn't everyone? - but had no idea of his work, so this was a great find. Aside from the work itself, I love the way he's doing something you don't usually see in textiles - modern, political, angry in places. I'm used to textiles being practical or decorative and this was something different.
It also hit me that I didn't really have the skill or experience to pull off a decent collage and I'd be better zooming in on one aspect instead of trying to cover a lot of ideas in one go.
During my Googling it became apparent that I needed to decide what I wanted to say and then remove anything that distracted from that. To decide my goal, in other words. This made things much easier as I dropped the 'what the hell am I doing I'm not an artist' mindset and thought about what I wanted to say and achieve instead. Here's what I came up with:
- I want to show people a snapshot of Bedford's proud industrial past, which is actually surprisingly recent but all-but forgotten.
- I want to try some new techniques, learn some new things, meet some new people.
That made it seem much more doable.
After that I tinkered around with my paper collage and found there were two things that attracted me:
- The machinery in the old photos of the Queen's Engineering Works. Could I 'do' this hard metal in a soft fabric?
- The Britannia Iron Works Clock Tower. It's one of the very few signs of Bedford's engineering past that's still visible. I believe it narrowly escaped being demolished a few years ago and it's now crumbling in places. What did it look like when i was first built? And what had it seen in the years since then?
I mentioned to Kathryn and Rachel at the Beds Archives that I was looking at WH Allen and the Britannia Ironworks and they said I might like to take a look at one of their blogs on Bedfordshire at war, where I found this photo of the Britannia clock tower taken in 1865. What struck me is that the clock tower has hardly changed in 150 years, but everything around it has changed dramatically. It was an industrial time-traveller. I could definitely do something with this.
So now I was feeling much less overwhelmed and I had a plan. Time to start work!
Back in March I read about a textile craft event called Weaving Narratives that was being held at Bedfordshire County Archives. It sounded interesting and they were offering to show us around their stack room (I'm a bit nosy), so I signed up.
Here's the stack room, by the way. I think it's the map shelf...
A photo posted by Sophie Atkins (@sophosptophos) on
Amazing, eh?
There are tons of even more amazing documents inside but unfortunately I'm not allowed to share them for copyright reasons.
It turned out that this little craft project was filled with proper artists, which was frankly quite intimidating since I'd barely picked up a needle in twenty years. Especially as we were asked to create a piece of artwork inspired by something we'd find in the county archives and then display it in an exhibition in the Autumn. My big fear was that my effort would look embarrassingly bad next to the proper art!
But it's a fascinating project and the enthusiasm of the archives staff was infectious. And when else was I ever going to get a chance to have my art in an exhibition? I had to do it, even though it was taking me outside my comfort zone.
So the next question was what on earth was I going to make? The challenge with the archives is that there's just so much material there, it's hard to decide. But while having a chat with Emma from the Crafty Mrs Noah craft group I hit upon the idea of using Bedford's engineering past.
To read more, please head over to the Weaving Narratives blog...
I started to learn to crochet just over a year ago (March 2015) and that means I've made a lot of hats and scarves in the last year. My first scarf was the one where it felt like it was two stitches forward and one back with a lot of swearing in between, but by September I was able to make this one that I don't mind being seen in on the school run.
All the members of the Crafty Mrs Noah craft group made one or two each and we ended up with about 60 in total.
Crafty 8 Year Old wanted to learn too so I taught her to double crochet and she's been making hats and scarves for her toys ever since, as well as a hat and scarf for herself. She didn't use a pattern for her hat and just kind of freestyled it. I thought that was really clever and then discovered freeform crochet was actually a real thing! I've picked up a book (Freeform Crochet and Beyond by Renate Kitkpatrick). More on that in a later post...
I was always making stuff as a kid, then when I got to about 11 I started doing a lot of machine sewing (I never had the patience to do it by hand). That carried on until my early twenties and then I pretty much stopped doing anything creative.
Three people have inspired me to get back into making over the last couple of years.
The first is my 8 year old who constantly has at least 3 craft projects on the go, and reminded me of the way I used to be.
The second is Emma Johnstone who has eased me back into making things by encouraging me to try lots of different crafts at her Crafty Mrs Noah group in Bedford (anyone for wet felting?!) and teaching me to crochet. Not forgetting all the other members of Mrs Noah, too.
The third is Janet who teaches sewing but I've never actually made it to one of her courses (sorry - guess I needed to get my confidence back!) But her blog http://kitchentablesewing.blogspot.co.uk/ and seeing her flow of new creations on the school run has definitely inspired me to get sewing again.
Here's a bag I finished a couple of months ago. it's upcycled from a pair of old jeans and has some hand embroidery, crochet and a lining. I couldn't use a pattern because I had to work with the size of the jeans I had, so I'm pleased I managed to fit it all together myself. It's a little more ...er... embellished than I originally planned because crafty then-7 year old gave me some things to sew on it and I couldn't say no, especially when she crocheted me a flower just for this bag.
