More photos for personal theme.

I was at college last weekend and have shown my work to my tutor. She is really happy with my personal theme but said I needed to show more examples before settling on my area of focus which will be pottery by J&G Meakin.
We have been cleaning today and when washing some of the plates I have on display in the house I decided to photograph them before doing some artwork based on them.


This plate is by Alfred Meakin and I just love the design - I would love to use that as a quilt design.

This photo is a closeup of a jug made by Wade. What I loved was the way the coloured stars have a hexagon as their centre. Again, more quilt inspiration here.

And how could I not include one of the most iconic 1960s pottery designs, Homemaker. This is one of my favourites.

I am hoping to use some of these designs as inspiration for artwork and even quilt samples.

I do have four samples completed that I have not shown yet so hope to get them photographed soon.

Tyvek, fibretex and kunin felt samples.

The next college weekend is rapidly approaching and I need to get all my samples completed. The theme for this set of samples was to use materials which can be burned, distressed or distorted using heat. Some of them I like and some of them I don't - however it has been valuable to experiment with them and some of them I may incorporate into my quilting.
The six materials we had to investigate were tyvek, fibretex, xpandaprint, kunin felt, lutradur and foil.
We also had to investigate some new machine stitches for embellishment - feather stitch, whip stitch and moss stitch. These mostly involve allowing the bobbin thread to appear on the front of the work - the situation we usually do our best to avoid!!
This first sample is made using tyvek, strips of tyvek were painted and then woven through cotton threads that had been wound onto a picture mount board. Various scraps of fabrics were added and they were all secured with machine stitching. The whole thing was heated causing the tyvek to distort. The piece was then attached to a background fabric and embellished with beads.

A border was added and then it was backed with wadding and calico. The quilting was done with feather stitch which causes loops to appear on the right side.

The second sample was made using fibretex and kunin felt. Three layers of fibretex were each painted a different colour. They were then layered with a layer of navy blue kunin felt on the bottom. The piece was machine stitched using metallic threads in a zig zag design to mirror the triangle in my Aztec plate. This was then heated with a heat gun and the coloured layers and felt backing were reavealed. I then took a square of turquoise hand dyed cotton and a square of lime green kunin felt and attached the heated sample to these using a machine zig zag in a variegated thread. The sample was then layered with wadding and backing and free machine quilted in a meandering design. The lime kunin felt was then heated to give that lacy effect revealing the turquoise background fabric.

The centre piece was then embellished with sequins and beads.

Both samples are the required 10 inches square.

Collages and Montages!

Still not 100% sure what the difference is between a collage and a montage - but I think that the first two are montages because they contain whole images and the last one is a collage because a new image is made up from using different elements. Sounds impressive anyway!

This first one is my favourite - it is made up of images of my 1960s plates and some of my decorated papers.

In this one I tried to use the leaf shape to showcase the different decorated papers - monoprinting, sponging, using a roller, rubbings and sponge printing.

This is my collage which turned out better than I was expecting although I still can't decide which way up looks best! I coloured in the central rubbed sample to try to give the piece a focal point.

I am now working on my stitched samples which I hope to show soon.

More Artwork!

Just over a week to go until our next college weekend and I am happy to report that I have completed my artwork for assessment! Now, this is a big thing for me because usually I do my stitching homework and leave the artwork until the last minute.


This is a sponge print based on one of the plates from my personal theme. The pattern on the plate is called 'Aztec' and comes from 1966. I think it looks quite modern.

This is a drawing done with watercolour pencils based on the sugar bowl in the photo. I have also included a photo of the backstamp which I think is lovely. Ascot comes from 1964.

Artwork - scraffito and string prints.

The Research for Design module requires us to put together a portfolio of artwork based on our personal theme. My personal theme is 1960s pottery and so far I have used three pieces of pottery made by J & G Meakin.

The first piece of artwork is a string print of a leaf taken from one of my pieces. I printed it using acrylic paint and then coloured the leaves and the background with drawing ink.

The second sample is scraffito again based on a design on one of my pieces of pottery. The crosses were done in wax crayon and then I washed over the whole page with brown ink. Then I went over just the crosses in black ink. The crosses were then scratched back to reveal the wax crayon underneath.

Here are the photos of the two pieces of pottery used as inspiration.