ECHOES: Weaving, Printing and Stitching

Back in August, in a post called Even Deeper Rabbit Holes (final image), I made a narrow weaving to express how I saw my field in summer. The image immediately below is a follow-up piece, showing the field in autumn. I'm really thrilled with the way it conveys the changes at that time of year: its raggedness, its faded colours and the few seed heads that cling. The piece itself is deliberately narrower than the summer version and the plans I have winter version are narrower still.

Field Gazing: Autumn

Field Gazing: Winter

I've been assembling this set of blogs over such a long period that here in fact, is the winter version. Narrower still than the autumn version, over just five warps. The range of yarns and threads and strings are complemented by cellophane, newsprint and opaque plastic and a very few beads to mimic raindrops. I had to wait for weeks to take an image of the field affected by frost.

My little loom is warped and ready for the spring version, using a photograph from the early days of my year of visiting and looking . . .

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Some weeks ago Gwen Hedley, through TextileArtist.org, offered a five day Stitch Camp which I joined, albeit a day or so late. Below is my final piece. I very much enjoyed melding the cut pieces and hiding the overlaps with stitch and applique. I completed the stitching with a range of different sized circles which overlap and extend beyond the patched strip onto a piece of calico. The whole piece is stretched over a board.

Celestial Bodies

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Late to the party for a second time, I joined Sian Martin's Stitch Challenge 2022 and I'm so glad I did. The first four tiny samples are below. It's such a thought provoking and engrossing thing to do and especially lovely as I can use my field photos yet again: I feel I'm getting twice the value, more close observation and more learning about what works in terms of needle, thickness of thread and size of stitch, and yet more engagement with colour.

Ground, Docks, Hedgerow and Frost on the Ground
(clockwise from top left)

Instead of using luggage labels for the samples, I've decided to put them in a little spiral bound book together with photographs and comments as a reference for further work.

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Most recently, in March, I went along to a day's workshop at Norfolk Wildlife Trust in Cley to attend a workshop run by Nicola Coe called Making Tools with Natural Foraged Finds. We had a lovely walk, the weather kind, and bought back reeds, twigs, feathers, seaweed, bits of sponge and so on and, back in the studio, created tools to make marks with ink.

The next time I visited my field I foraged for heads and handles and made the set below. I'm hoping mark-making at home will be a much less self-conscious affair, having, as I do, the many field shapes and rhythms already in my mind and hand.