Inspired by tyres? Maybe not as weird as it sounds ...

This photo will make sense in a while ... but before I get around to that I'll show you my latest charity shop finds. It'll probably come as no surprise that I've bought yet more books.

The Quilting Arts Idea Book in particular is a fab bargain. Full of inspiring photos and techniques to experiment with. Someone once paid twenty seven U.S. dollars for it, which makes me wonder how it ended up in a West Yorkshire charity shop.

Another two novels can be added to my To-Be-Read pile.

All four books for a mere £2.50. I also picked up these bottles of drawing ink, which I've not tried using before, taking my total bill to £4.49. I left the shop with a smile on my face and change from a fiver.

Now, to explain that photo at the beginning of this blog post. Wednesday was the day for my monthly stitching group at Leeds Art Gallery. This month we were looking at ...... tyres. Yup, tyres. Burst car tyres.

To be honest, this is the kind of modern art display I'd normally walk straight past. Probably with a sneer on my face and a scornful 'Huh! Call that art?' But the StitchArt session was themed around using found objects in your textile work, so we were encouraged to look more closely at the tyres.

To look at the shapes made by burst tyres. The texture of what's inside that outer layer. The colours.

And you know what?

I started to see something interesting about these otherwise mundane objects.

Seated around a table we began stitching, using metallic embroidery thread, wire, black netting, crumpled paper, muslin, all kinds of things. It was so interesting to see how many variations on a theme there were when our efforts were collected together at the end of the session. Some people based their pieces on the colours of the actual tyres. Others didn't and went their own way. One lady concentrated on slashing material to reflect how the surfaces of the tyres were slashed. Another made a kind of 3D sculpture with wire and paper.

This was my effort. I layered a light brown material with a black cotton fabric, then crumpled and gathered up muslin. I added netting, plus bronze coloured wire that I couched down. I stitched with silver coloured thread and cut up pieces of black rubber in order to make beads out of them.

It looks kind of mad, but I think we all thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, and maybe ended up being more creative than we thought we'd be.

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