The next step

This is the design I came up with inspired by that piece of Japanese artwork that I showed you yesterday.  I really like how it turned out, now to try and translate it in to stitch.......watch this space as they say.

Getting Inspired

My doodles are all stitched up and have been added to the sketchbook. Time to move on to the second resolved sample, and last piece of work for module one.

First to look to this fabulous painting - 'Pottery' by Patrick Caulfield for inspiration.

I ended up with this sketch ........

..... which I was pretty pleased with as far as it goes.  But something is still missing for me.  The original painting is so bright and vibrant and my resulting sketch just didn't seem to capture that somehow - even though I drew the shapes and colours from the source painting it somehow misses the mark.

Time to look elsewhere for inspiration ......... I looked through a tonne of art books (I liked the idea of taking inspiration from a piece of art) and was just about to give up and go back to the Caulfield painting when I came across this image in a book on Asian art.

I'm pretty ignorant when it comes to most kind of art and this is no exception.  Apparently it's a ceramic Fukagawa dish, from Japan dating from somewhere between 1875-1912.  It just really jumped out of the page at me.  I mean wow, look at all those beautiful curving lines and blocks of beautiful colour.  I'm off to do some sketching, I hope I can come up with something I like from this.

Doodles almost done

This week I have been busy stitching up the rest of my doodles from the last post.  I'm almost done, one more to stitch and then I'll be moving on to starting to think about my second resolved piece for this chapter.

Online again

I'm back online again :)  So now all I have to do is make sure I get some regular stitching time and that in turn will hopefully lead to some regular blogging.

For the moment I'm still working on the initial exercises in Chapter Ten.  I've been doing some more doodles

 ...which it goes without saying get turned into stitch.

Submission of Work - Module One, Chapter Nine

I finally managed to get a picture of the missing page, so this is my formal submission of chapter nine.  A couple of the pictures are the wrong way round again, they need resizing I think, but as I'm grabbing time on the computer at a friends house I don't really have time to fiddle around and do that now, so this will have to do :)

Inspiration everywhere

I can always tell when I'm into working on this course as I start looking at the world differently.  My eyes take everything in when I'm out and about and  all of a sudden a group of reeds at the edge of a pond, an amazing architectural feature on a building, or a crumbling ivy covered wall lit brillinatly by the sun become lines, swirls and textures that I want to translate in to stitch.

Happy Days :)

Naughty but hopefully nice

I've been working on the second exercise of chapter ten, some more work translating doodle to stitch.  The suggestion in the course notes was to use red and gold thread on black.  But I've been a bit naughty.  Red and Gold are a bit christmassy and I wasn't really feeling that for the new year.  I've had this lovely orange and black variegated thread that I've been itching to try out so I went for that instead....

I've chosen to go with a white background so the colours really stand out......

....  looking good so far (well I think so anyway!!)

Sketch to Stitch

The rayon threads that you saw a peek of in the last post, were used to stitch up this.  The first sample of chapter 10.

I had plenty of fun with this one.  Some of the lines were easier to stitch than others, even the ones that I found tricky at the start got easier as I tried to convince my poor brain to move the machine needle in the same way as I did the pencil when sketching out the lines ...... a skill that I certainly need to keep practising!!

Weekend Snapshot

Still no photo of the missing page ... during the week I'm rarely at home in daylight which is what I need to get a decent picture of the page.  So instead in the meantime I thought I might stick up a couple of pictures that I've taken as I've been working on the beginnings of chapter 10.

This is my weekend snapshot.   Stitching and Slash :)

Where I was living before I had the luxury of a whole room that I could devote to all my stitching supplies, my new flat is tiny so my sewing machine lives in the lounge now. I like to have music going while I'm sewing, the upside of everything being in one room is I can have DVD's playing rather than just the Ipod.

The blue and pink threads are ones that I used for the first sample of chapter 10.  I'm really enjoying the exercises in the chapter so far.

And for any rock fans out there I can highly recommend the DVD   'Made in Stoke'  ;-)

It's been too long

Wow it really has been a long time since I posted here.  I've been so busy moving and getting used to a new day job that I haven't had much time for blogging.  I'm also on limited internet access at the moment but in about 10 days time I should be all set up at my new place so things will get back to normal round here soon I promise.

Today I was hoping to do my submission post for chapter nine, I'm at a friends house using the internet.  When I came to load up the pictures I realised I have one page missing doh!!

It's getting really hard to take pictures of the pages in my book now it's gotten so fat!! 

Hopefully I'll be back soon with the post that I had hoped to do....