Alice Fox Workshop

After Saturday’s talk, a whole Sunday workshop with Alice Fox. We had just been asked to bring our normal sewing kits plus threads, so I wasn’t sure what to expect, making it even more exciting. There was a tempting array of papers, threads and ephemera laid out…

…along with some examples of Alice’s own work for inspiration. To start, we were each given a selection of different papers…

…and a prompt sheet asking us to explore how it felt to stitch into them. I used a template from my silversmithing course five years ago to do some feather stitch in various weights of thread..

I really liked the rough texture I got from putting stitching holes into the heavy tracing paper, so once I’d stitched through it, I used a metalworking scribe to mark wavy lines into the paper without piercing it before punching varying sized holes from either the front (smooth) or the back (rough).

I really like the differences of line and texture on this. And it reminds me of the sea.

The next prompt was cutting and patching.

So a piece of old map cut along the grid lines became the fragment on the right.

As you can see, by this time I had succumbed and made a little book for my fragments. It started off as an origami book, folded from a single piece of paper with one cut, but I wanted a bit more stability and to have access to all the sides of the pages, so I pamphlet stitched it in two places and tore the double pages into singles. Winging it, but it works.

Next was couching.  I followed the road and river lines on this scrap of map.

By this time we were all engrossed in our own thing, and although there were two more prompts about deconstructing marked papers and accentuating printed marks, everyone was well away with their cutting, stitching, tearing, patching and experimenting.

At the end of the day we ended up with with a fascinating range of responses.

Alice uses rusting quite a lot in her work and so when I got home to my rusty washers, I couldn’t resist some mark making on tea soaked paper.

My little book was over half full by the time the workshop ended.

With my rust and tea stained papers and these that I didn’t get round to exploring…

…I have every intention of playing with some more of Alice’s prompts and completing my little book!

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December Travelling Book page.

My inspiration for my page in Janet’s Travelling Book came from finding the rusted fragments I was working on for an art quilt a while ago, including a fragment of very old soft sheeting scattered with rusted marks. I added a scrap of rust coloured silk, variegated thread, silk ribbon and some rusty washers and sat down to stitch.

I started by attaching the silk with a line of back stitch and the largest washer was couched down with metallic Madeira thread.

Then I added parallel lines of kantha stitching with the variegated thread, weaving around blobs of rust and paint, (I think the fabric was part of an old paint cloth I ‘borrowed’ from my dad’s workshop when I brought home a load of rusted bits a few years ago!) the washer and the silk scrap.

French knots on the silk strip in a variegated turquoise and rust coloured silk ribbon were joined by metallic thread straight stitches and then I couched some brass watch cogs into some of the spaces.

I added an explanatory paragraph with little photos of some of my rusted fragments…

…and attached the finished rusty piece to the next page.

Janet’s spattered page backgrounds work really well with the colours of the fabric and threads.

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More playing

This is the other playing piece I started on holiday, combining the rusty ironmongery that I love to ‘streetcomb’ with the sea glass I love to beachcomb.

As with so many of these pieces, the story is layered in there. I found the rusty washer on the quayside at Charlestown, where we had our holiday cottage this year. We last visited Charlestown on a wet August day in 2006 and I bought 4 tubes of mixed Japanese seed beads from a gorgeous bead shop which isn’t there any more. It was coincidentally one of those tubes of beads which I used to embellish the washer.

The base fabric was a scrap of crinkled satin left over from one of my sea glass canvases but I wanted something semi-transparent to layer over it, and the answer came from a charity shop in Looe, where I bought a floaty scarf to cut up and use in just the right tones of rust and grey-green.

The sea glass came, if I remember rightly, from Talland Bay and Looe beach and is trapped under the scarf layer with collars of chain stitch in my favourite semi-metallic Madeira thread.

It’s the first time I’ve worked chain stitch in this thread and I love the way it gives the impression of a neat cord.

I plan to put spirals around the other nuggets of sea glass too.

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