exploring the mystery of nature with painting & embroidery & mosaic
My latest project is a Purple Glossy Starling inspired by seeing one at the Botanical Gardens in Birmingham. I love the way the tail is so long and seems to flow behind the bird like a ribbon as it flies. They certainly are very exotic looking and their feathers change colour as they catch the …
Here are some of the lovely artworks created by the special needs participants during textile sessions held at Creative Arts, Oldbury. We had a lot of fun splashing around with paint, glitter and sequins. What impressed me was how different and interesting everyone’s work was and how they all took to the creative process with …
‘Peacock on a Hilltop’ is a small silk painting embroidered by machine using free machine embroidery and by hand too. I’ve used some rayon and stranded cotton threads for the hand stitching (feather stitch and fly stitch. I’ve added lots and lots of sequins to build up the layers of textures especially on the …
The weather has been so warm and sunny recently (hip hip hooray!) that I’ve been feeling the need to use lots more yellow in my textile experiments – to be truthful the urge to use yellow started last year when we went to Andalucia and were submerged into a wonderful world of sunbaked olive groves, …
Here’s an update of my peacock embroidery. It is proving one of those embroideries that never seems to be quite ‘right’ somehow. It started out life as a very tight drawing of a peacock which I painted in inks on silk habutai, having done that it looked dull and contrived so I spread a load …
[wpg] I’ve been planning a large peacock embroidery involving the whole peacock not just the imagery of tail feathers. I started out drawing it out carefully but the composition didn’t feel quite right, I went ahead anyway but after I started painting it out in the silk, the feeling continued and the imagery felt stilted. …
My love of poppies was rekindled yet again (!) by the late appearance of clumps of sumptuous oriental ones in my mother’s garden. They were surrounded by Michaelmas daisies and the glowing red and purple hues made for a heady colour combination in an otherwise drab October garden. How delicious! This started out as a …
I created this silk scarf for a private commission. Interestingly when the person received the scarf she told me she’d had a dream about a Peacock Goddess. Interesting…. I used lots of gold gutta on this one. For peacocks, I think you can never have too much bling! I think I’ll be doing some …
[wpg] This is just a bit of mucking about with some spattered silk dupion as the background. Then I added a section of sequins already bonded onto net tulle, some previously painted silk cut out and appliquéd on in leaf shapes and circles and some ribbon printed with flowers cut out and sewn down. I …
[wpg] Following on from my obsession with Pitt Pens and loving the feel of using them, I want to try to recreate that feeling with fabric. Luckily it’s fairly easy to do with smooth silk and silk painting or fabric markers. Not sure yet how good the results will be but I’m getting there. I …