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.

Comments

Threads of Freedom and charity shop bargains

It's Saturday afternoon, and I haven't done half the things I'd meant to. Partly because I spent most of this morning messing about with paints, stencils and the gell plate. Never mind, everything on today's 'To Do' list will join tomorrow's 'To Do' list ... it's hardly life or death if I don't haul the hoover around the room or pull up weeds in the front garden. I thought I'd show you what I made on Wednesday. I'd gone to my monthly StitchArt group, and this time we did something a little different. There's a project called 'Threads of Freedom' which is working with various community groups across the city. It's about creating little stitched pieces, some of which will be included in a textile panel to go on display at Leeds art gallery. There was lots of fabric we could choose from to sew with, and I picked this vintage tray cloth with the roses embroidery. My own embroidery's not a patch on those flo...

Another week's flown by ...

Saturday's rolled around again, and it's not been the most eventful of days. Cleaning and hoovering, a walk to the shops to buy groceries, an hour on the allotment, then home to do some odd tasks in the garden. The strawberry plants are sending out runners, so I've been dealing with those, plus deadheading the perennial sunflowers, and cutting back the gone-over flowers on the sage and marjoram. I'm sad to see those blooms gone as the bees loved them. This afternoon I spent a few hours finishing 'Dawnlands' by Philippa Gregory. It's a really good book, a page turner where you care about the characters and want to be reassured everything's going to work out well for them. Plus you become enraged about the corruption of the so-called justice system at the time of the Stuart kings and queens, about transportation of prisoners to the West Indies, and about the vile nature of the sugar trade in the 1600s and the vast profits made from it....

Folding a zine and an alternative use for a bank card

Hello again, and excuse me while I scratch my insect bites. I don't know what it is, but at this time of year I'm invariably itching like crazy because I've been bitten by bugs. It seems to coincide with blackberry-picking season, but whether that's purely coincidental I don't know. Whatever's biting me, I'm obviously a tasty morsel in their world! I might try using a highly scented oil like Tea Tree oil, see if that deters them. Anyway, let's get on to more pleasant matters - I'm having a go at making a zine style booklet. Because I didn't have any paper large enough, I joined together two A3 sheets of sketchpad paper, using torn pieces of book pages for the joining. I thought that'd look less noticeable than packing tape or similar. Having chosen my colour scheme I used acrylic paint and an unwanted plastic bank card to apply the paint. Plus a stencil, sponge and modelling paste. Applying paint with a ATM card wa...

rubykittyruby

Search This Blog