Luscious folds - Ribbon Work

Well I have not created this, though wish I had, it is from the 1920's. I felt I had to add it here as incentive to come up with something equally as luscious. Watch this space.

Cake making!

I'm sampling cakes at the moment. But I wouldn't recommend eating anything!

This one above has been inspired from a large cake that I created last year for the Embroiderers Guild.

The guild celebrated 100 years together and I thought it would be a whimsical idea to create a cake made up of layers of techniques. I started on the layers incorporating distressed velvets, degummed cocoons, tye dyed cotton with foiling, burning and dissolving, acetone and acetate, wrapped threads and free-hand machine embroidery.

Water Vase

Inspired from a babbling brook.
Made with silk waste and hand dyed silk using a technique called acetone & acetate, and embellished with beads.

Flower Sac

Inspired from colourful summer gardens using scraps of hand dyed velvets and vintage braid embellished with vintage threads, wools and hand dyed cotton and silk yarns.

Ice cold ~

This long sleeveless coat was inspired from icebergs using Japanese stitch techniques which were used on country workwear from Northern Japan - recyled jeans were cut into scaps and frayed, bleached, and painted. Sashiko handstitch has then been applied along the length of the coat.

Pink Sands Bahamas

Welcome to this new blog the TEXTILE ART POST.
My main reason for creating this separate blog is to get a little show case for my textile art. It is so different from my vintage, living, home interior inspired work which is seen on my other blog ( twinklepinkpostit ) and really deserves its only little corner of the world.

I am a textile artist, creating art that incorporates all types of medium including fabric, metal, wood,paper, paint, glue, glass in fact whatever you can think of. Somethings don't always work but that is the fun of the experimentation.

I love working with velvets, dyeing all the fabric to my own specifications, then by using hand and freehand machine embroidery creating textured fabric which when embellished with other wonderful things be it beads, wood, foil the picture becomes irresistible - you just have to ' touch the picture'.

At the moment I am mostly inspired by water and nature. This picture below inspired me to create some wearable art, a large bag which I have called The Bahamas Bag.
I was inspired by a promotional picture for a resort called Pink Sands in the Bahamas. The sand here has a beautiful pale pink hue which it seems has been caused by microscopic particles of crushed coral from the seabed mixed into the white sands. It really looks beautiful.

My inspiration for the pattern has been loosely drawn from the artist Chuck Close – who worked in the style of painting called photo realism. He would work from a photograph, enlarging it, setting out a grid across the body of the image and then painting each block from the grid even larger. Working in this way with blocks of colour he built up the picture and created amazing results.
I have simplified this piece and used the colour from my photograph, the blues for the sky, aqua for the water, turning to lilac as it flows onto the sand and the pink hue of the sand. The image has been broken into squares, each square has been heavily stitched into giving texture to each square.
This bag has been worked in velvets and hand dyed with specially mixed procian dyes. The velvet has been backed with padding and heavily stitched down using a method called freehand machine embroidery. For the handle I have used hand dyed linen in strips sewn down in a random way. I have then created cording to embellish the sides. The central squares were heavily beaded, making this bag extremely tactile.
May I present - THE PINK BAHAMAS BAG