loveFibre

I’ve just emerged from under a mountain of end of year accounts, VAT returns and more meetings than I like to go to. I missed Draw Something Every Day altogether last week, but this week I have some doodling in my diary (done at one of the meetings) so here it is. The mugs and the lamp were in the room but the fruit was just in my imagination. A return to normal life (as normal as it ever gets, that is), as well as art and blogging, will happen tomorrow, I hope…

The Draw Something Every Day challenge. I’ve been exploring a photo of apples, looking at colours, shapes and textures; these drawings focus on shape and form.

OCA Textiles 1 is (obviously) a textile course, but a significant proportion of the exercises involve design work on paper - I’m still not sure what I think about this or whether I’ll continue to work that way - it’s a big change for me since my previous method was basically to get out the materials and see what happened. It feels good, though, to be challenged so fundamentally. I did enjoy this exercise very much - to isolate interesting parts of an image using a frame and represent them, focusing on the shapes.

I only live about 60 miles from the Scottish border but I don’t often cross it. Last week, however, I went twice! Tuesday was a visit to the Gracefield Arts Centre in Dumfries to review Ruth Lee’s exhibition, Reading Between the Lines, for the next issue of Workshop on the Web. It’s an excellent show of Ruth’s work and well worth seeing, if you are anywhere nearby before 3 November. There was also a preview copy of Ruth’s new book Contemporary Knitting for Textile Artists, which has gone on my wish list! I’ll post a link to the exhibition review when it’s published in December.

Then on Saturday I caught the train up to Edinburgh to visit my friend Lee and her husband Andy. Lee is a fibre artist who creates wonderfully vivid images in felt, like this "Sheep Number 12".

Lee took me on an eclectic tour of the city. First to the Elephant House - not the zoo, but the coffee house where JK Rowling wrote the Harry Potter books. I have a passion for elephants so I was overwhelmed by the sight of so many in one place - models, photos, books, hangings, furniture… this one was given to the Elephant House by “Linda Greer, on behalf of her brothers and sisters, in memory of her father Jimmy Ferguson”.

After delicious coffee and cake we took a circuitous route through the city, via the delightful Dean Village and along the Water of Leith to the Museum of Modern Art. In front of the museum is the stunning ‘Landform‘ by Charles Jencks - a landscape of banks and curved pools that you can walk on and around.

(The tall slender shadow is Lee and the small round one is me.)

We ended up sitting in Lee and Andy’s pretty garden, drinking more coffee and enjoying the late afternoon sunshine. A beautiful day in a beautiful city.

The Draw Something Every Day challenge. This started off with me thinking about pastel colours for an assignment. I saw a big heap of candy coated chocolate eggs on a market stall and started doodling shapes and arrangements for a potential design.

The assignment was to do colour mixing with pastel colours using a pointillist stitch technique in a design derived from an image. I tried to do some painting and drawing in pastel colours using shells and stones and flowers, but there was nothing I wanted to take further. I found it came more naturally to work the colours directly in the stitching in a more abstract way. It is inspired by the candy eggs and the doodles but has taken on a life of its own.