Lambeth Open on 4-5 October

We’re delighted to announce that Women of the Cloth will be taking part in Lambeth Open again this year on 4 and 5 October. There are more artists and artisans taking part in Streatham this year, so why not make a day of it and take the opportunity to discover the creative talent on your doorstep?

As a member of Women of the Cloth, this will be Carol’s third Lambeth Open event. She will be showing her latest work in nuno felt, including wearables such as tactile cosy scarves and items of textile jewellery, plus a small flock of her needlefelted birds. As a feltmaker Carol continues to develop her range of skills and methods through experimentation, and to indulge her love of mixing colours and textures using fibre and cloth. Once a year new inspiration and learning comes from attending workshops with world-renowned tutors, most recently Inge Bauer.

Carol will be running a needlefelted birds workshop on the Sunday, 5th October, from 2-5 pm at a cost of £25 including materials and a cuppa.  Needlefelting is relaxing, absorbing, anyone can do it and it’s a bit addictive!

Email us at womenofthecloth2012@gmail.com to book a place.

This summer Joan has been lucky enough to spend two months in France.  Taking a rest from weaving and sitting on the terrace with a cold glass of wine in her hand, looking at the riot of colour in the garden,  she was inspired to have a go at making textile jewellery.  She has enjoyed both making and wearing some of the pieces and, having received some very positive feedback, she is continuing to expand the styles and colours into an autumn range.

Kim has spent the summer experimenting with rust and natural dyes, which has been fascinating and occasionally frustrating! (You can read more about this on her Flextiles blog.) She has also continued to develop her sculptural felting techniques, attending workshops with Andrea Graham and Maria Friese, and has a new line of cutwork felted scarves for the autumn/winter season, alongside her best-selling upcycled hand-dyed indigo shibori pieces.

Guest artist duo AfroRetro will also be showing their funky handmade jewellery, accessories and clothing inspired by their Ugandan and British heritage.  They will be running a series of mini-make workshops on Saturday 4th October during which you can try your hand at making a lavender bag, a bookmark, an oyster card holder, a card or various other small items using colourful african fabrics, palm leaves and bark cloth and simple stitching techniques.  These mini workshops are £5 each including materials.  Email us at womenofthecloth2012@gmail.com

Lambeth Open takes place on 4 and 5 October, 10am-6pm. Women of the Cloth will be at 27 Mount Ephraim Lane, Streatham, SW16 1JE. We hope to see you there!

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Making Colour at the National Gallery

If you haven’t been to this exhibition at the National Gallery, I highly recommend it!

Flextiles

This exhibition opened in June, but I’ve only just got round to seeing it. Although it focuses on painting rather than textiles, it’s definitely worth a visit.

It begins with a brief introduction to the concepts of primary colours and the colour wheel, and how painters over the years exploited the combinations of complementary colours (those which are opposite each other on the colour wheel, such as purple and yellow, or green and red) to create striking visual impressions.

This is followed by sections on each of the main colours – blue, green, yellow, red and purple, plus gold and silver.

The earliest pigments were mostly from ground-up minerals. Lapis lazuli, or natural ultramarine, used for blue, was at one time more expensive than gold, so became popular for painting the robes of the Virgin Mary, as a sign of devotion. Red vermilion (cinnabar) was a mercury ore, green came from…

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British Folk Art at Tate Britain

Highly recommended exhibition at Tate Britain includes lots of textiles!

Flextiles

It’s official – I am an artist! 😉 Earlier this week I applied to join South London Women Artists, and I just heard that I’ve been accepted.

There are those who high-mindedly maintain that an artist is someone who paints, draws or (occasionally) sculpts. I don’t do any of these, but Joan, my sister Woman of the Cloth, who is a weaver and already a member of SLWA, encouraged me to apply.

Fortified by this acknowledgement of my status, I hot-footed it off to Tate Britain to see the British Folk Art exhibition. Now, the Tate is not exactly overflowing with textile art – the last time I saw this many textile works in a show was at the Alghiero Boetti exhibition at Tate Modern.

This “art vs craft” distinction has been around a long time, of course. When the Royal Academy was established in 1769, it explicitly…

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Mending Books

tomofholland

This is not a blog post about mending books, but a post about some of my favourite books about mending.

A small selection of my mending library

I frequently get questions about where I’ve learnt my mending skills, and what books I would recommend. Most of my skills come from old books, combined with a lot of practice. I favour old books as they tend to go more in-depth, and usually have many repair approaches depending on the fabric and what needs repairing. I’ll discuss a selection of my favourite books, in order of acquisition:

Don’t just think about it, MEND IT!

A call to arms for all my mending comrades, I think Mend It! A Complete Guide to Clothes Repair is a great introduction into mending and repairing clothes. As it states on the cover, it is pretty much complete, and deals with many repair jobs. It has clear instructions with…

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Felting in France

Kim’s blog and pictures of a workshop she attended in Paris recently.

Flextiles

Apologies for the long silence – I had a sudden rush of website work before I headed off to Acheres, just outside Paris, for a five-day felting workshop with Maria Friese and Ariane Mariane. Both these felters are German, living in France, and the students were mostly French, but also included one Swiss, one Belgian, one American (who had lived in Acheres for 20 years) and two Brits – Abigail Thomas of Felt meets Cloth and me.

The five days was split up into two sessions of two days and three days, and students could mix and match, working with one tutor for all the days or spending two days with one and three days with the other. I elected to stay with Maria for all five days, as her work has a really organic feel that appealed to me. As we got talking we discovered other mutual interests…

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The Point of the Needle at Hall Place

Kim’s account of our latest exhibition outing as a group,

Flextiles

It hasn’t been a very creative time for me over the past couple of weeks. Too busy with my day job, earning money towards my next felting workshop – five whole days with Maria Friese and Ariane Mariane just outside Paris in a couple of weeks’ time. ESP is going to wander the streets of Paris (and no doubt stuff himself in fine restaurants at lunchtime) while I enjoy some fibre fun with a group of like-minded enthusiasts. I’m really looking forward to it!

So it was a relief to escape for half a day with my sister Women of the Cloth, Carol and Joan, to go back to Hall Place in Bexley for an exhibition by the New Embroidery Group (their website is currently being redesigned).

Contradicting its name, the group was actually established more than 40 years ago. Its president for many years was Constance Howard, famous-…

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Spangled and patched

Lovely article about patching and re-using precious silks and damasks for bedcurtains in Britain’s stately homes.

Shibori rust dyeing pt 2

Flextiles

To give you a break from yet another eco printing experiment, I thought I’d share another shibori rust-dyed scarf with you.

This scarf is made of a double layer of heavier silk (it’s actually a man’s evening scarf), so I thought it would be more robust than the very lightweight silk ponge scarf that I used last time.

I bound it with rusty screws, slightly more loosely than last time. Because the silk was thicker and double layered, the rust colour didn’t spread as far or as fast as last time. By the time I had finished binding the screws on the silk ponge, the scarf was already a rusty colour all over, whereas with this scarf there were only faint traces of colour.

I was also concerned that although there would be good colour on the side of the silk that touched the screws, the other side of the…

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Community Feltmaking

Carol's Creative Workshops

I’ve had a wonderful time lately making felt with various community groups around south London.  Feltmaking is  such an ideal communal activity because it enables just about anyone to take part in a productive, creative session and go home with something colourful and beautiful made with their own hands.  No particular artistic ability is required for success, and it’s great fun watching everyone around you produce such different creations, starting off with the same tactile materials at their disposal.  Conversation and laughter flow freely as people experiment with skills they didn’t know they had!  In some cases SONG too …

I made my way to Plumstead in south London last week to make felt balls and cords for necklaces and bracelets with a group of women from Nepal and Brazil as part of the Cultivating Communities project run by Groundwork London.  This project forms part of Groundwork’s Women in…

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String – to quote Spike Milligan – is a Very Important Thing

Cordwainers Garden

It may not look like much, a hairy bit of nothing, but that is the result of months of plant growth and hours of human endeavour.  It  is string made from flax grown in the garden last year.  If it were priced by person or plant hours expended, it would be probably worth more than, oh, the annual salary of a dentist but if we were to sell it, we might get 30p.

Anyway, this is how we did it.  Last spring I sowed about a square metre of flax – a very forgiving plant which will grow pretty much anywhere.  Ours was in a spot shaded by lime trees and it didn’t seem to mind.

Flax in flower in July.  It was in partial shade.

Once the flax had gone to seed I pulled it up and dried it, then in the autumn we rippled it – combed it…

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