Creative Textiles

Unfortunately blogger is still not letting me upload photos! Looks like its not just me as Debs reports similar problems! I'll try again later as I have quite a lot of yumminess to screech about!

In the meantime, heres what we did today at Creative Textiles!

I thought the colour theme was enough to get all screechy about and start diving for cover and heaving into cushions (heavily embroidered and richly patterned, of course!) but PATTERN - our newest theme .. thud thud THUDDD .. say no more!

We've moved on now to Design Style: Design Sources for Pattern

We decided that "pattern" is basically anything that isn't plain.
now.
had we STOPPED there. had we SETTLED for that. had we swiftly moved on. would have been alright! but no. we've to look at the definition of pattern which falls, I'm told, into broadly 4 categories:

• Natural/Organic
• Structural
• Planned
• and Combination

Luckily Sarah, our tutor, had brought along almost the entire contents of her craft room (had thought maybe had had falling out with the family and had moved out judging from the overflowing boxes and bags spilling over entire back seat of car but didn't like to SAY anything lest it mean the end of the course!) Happily she's not left home, she's brought the kitchen sink into class to demonstrate PATTERN!

Reminded, slightly, of the old scrapbooks we used to fill as children - cut up scraps torn from Mother's magazines and glued - we had books filled with inspiration drawn from colour, texture and pattern compiled in a style that in itself could be described as organic, structured and planned there's certainly something rather determined about this gathering of yumminess!
Books. two. I many hundreds! too. Lots of books - interesting that several of the super knits for house and home, throws blankets etc, had marvellous examples of "pattern" but, of course, rather different when compiling ones OWN selection to demonstrate understanding!

Several ladies got rather excited about design possibilities for inspired work in textiles and had horrid panicky moment as tried to imagine HOW to transform a decaying tumbling brick wall into something worthy of hanging ON my wall! (apparently am not to panic - yet - that will all be revealed in next phase! and feel somewhat reassured!).

Our homework for this week is to record some examples of pattern from each of the areas and discover which appeal to me and why and decide if some are more suited to textiles than others. We are to chooseone example and create a sample to reflect the featuresof that pattern, eg textured knitting/crochet, patchwork, quilting, stitching etc.

Well.
I've done half of MINE already!
In one magazine have cut out about 145 Structured and Planned kitchen themed photographs with linear designs and stripes and neat orderliness about them - thus establishing clearly what appeals to me - easy to say : its NEAT and ORDERLY! Oh dear, fear another grey and black wardrobe moment coming on ..

Next to me, Kim, our resident fling it all at ME and I'll show you how to use it ALL on one piece measuring 3" square, heaped, piled, layered, slashed and STILL managing to look like it all means something (unlike my 12" square with a few bits of something neatly coiled and stacked in a row looking rather as though missing half the class) demonstrates wonderfully how diverse we each are! in our approaches and in what we present as our findings/samples! Peggy commented how marvellous is must be to have such freedom and confidence to go for it! and happily (for me) reported similar tendancies to the grey/black wardrobe, all paint pots sitting neatly in a colour co-ordinated line holding hands nicely, syndrome! at least I'm not alone!

Whilst there is no pressure, beyond that we make up ourselves, amongst the group, there is a nagging feeling that somehow the expectation is that the level of work produced is higher rather than lower end, possibly due to half the group being fantastically CLEVER/CREATIVE! I mean having done the first year already! I need to remind myself that for half of us, we're newbies coming in with no prior learning and that the other half have the benefit of that past year. Overall its GOOD to have a mix, as we certainly benefit from seeing the recorded journalling examples and some of the advanced techniques that have been furthered from their original workings (and can't WAIT to be a 2nd year myself next year! except with MY luck all the new newbies will be creative whizzos like Kim anyway! bah!).

Any rumblings of pressure and stress due to the course are quickly put aside by our tutor, however, who is sew laid back is almost horizontal (except can't quite go fully horizontal on account of all the piled boxes and bags surrounding) and we're reminded this course is for our LEISURE and our PLEASURE and no one is to feel unduly STRESSED or PRESSURED!

See? what happens? when blogger refuses to show my photo's? it all comes out verbally instead. Late readers will be able to skim speed-reading manner and skip TO the delightful photo's soon (I hope!).