romance of gardens

I have a joint exhibition coming up next month with the wonderful mixed media/textile artist Maureen Kennaugh. The title of the exhibition is The Romance of Gardens. We are exploring gardens in history, poetry and especially gardens that we have seen in our extensive travels. I have concentrated on my first love which is hand stitching using a great variety of  threads dyed by myself using natural and procion dyes. There is also some mixed media work on brown paper coloured with acrylic ink, bonded to painted nappy liner and then distressed. Hand stitched goldwork motifs have been added to this based on 1960's floral wallpaper patterns. I have also procion dyed lint bandages which took the colour very well and on this I have hand stitched small images reminiscent of Japanese gardens. I take a lot of photos during my travels and these have been the inspiration for a lot of the hand stitching, the trips included visits to Kew gardens and the Floriade in Venlo the Netherlands in 2012. I have also included new plant dyed felted works.
For a very interesting blog about all things wool and felt send a request to be added to the e-mail listings at robson.deborah@gmail.com

Textile residency

I have just had the most incredible trip to Iceland for the North Atlantic Native Sheep and Wool Conference in Blonduos. It was  such an emotional experience meeting not only our wonderful Icelandic hosts but also delegates from all over the world. The standard of lectures was extremely high, much more on this to follow on later blogs. We also travelled over a large area of Iceland visiting to name but a few, the Istex wool factory, the Ullarselio wool centre in Hvanneyri where we were tempted with beautiful wools and jumpers plant dyed and hand spun by the ladies of the area who join together to sell their crafts and the most memorable part of all, the end of the round up of 15,000 sheep from the Highland summer pastures. Some pictures of the round up and the beautiful Icelandic sheep are below. Many thanks go to our hosts, Johanna and Palmi, the people, including the Mayor of Blonduos and our incredible guide, Olafur Dyrmundsson who knew every patch of land we travelled and all the people working it. The Conference next year will be in September in the Faroe Islands.
There are spaces for residencies at the fabulous textile centre in Blonduos. See the link below.
 www.textilsetur.com

stitched butterflies

I bought an Indian handmade light box from the wonderful Fair trade shop Shakti Man, a link to this later. It reminded me of the boxes used by butterfly collectors so I decided to make handstitched butterfly brooches to go in it. These were exhibited in my recent exhibition 2 Connect at the Hodgson loom Gallery. As 2 were sold I have replaced them with 2 new brooches to go in the upcoming show that starts on the 9th October at the Isle Gallery. The show is a joint one with 4 other very talented textile artists. These are all based on actual butterflies from around the world and are hand stitched with single thread cotton using a beading needle. The bodies are made from wrapped wool, they also have beaded eyes and metal thread antennae. As the stitching is done on calico and wire, the butterfly wings can be posed in different ways. The link for Shakti Man is shaktiman.co.uk

Lichen textiles

My exhibition held in conjunction with my very talented friend, Sheena Quayle, the other half of 2 Connect is now in its second week. I will give some details of a number of the works seen below.

These first two pictures are from a piece of work based on photographs I took of lichen and mosses on a tree. Most of the threads, braid and muslin are procion dyed The background is tyvek and tissue paper both painted with diluted acrylic inks. I then made layers which were integrated using hand stitching in both chunky and fine threads. My favourite stitches which I used were French knots, fly stitch and couching stitches. I wanted a sense of depth and also flowing and sinuous lines. It is surprising when studying the bark of trees that there are a great variety of colours and shades which can be quite startling on an old tree.

The 2 pictures above are based on photos of lichen and moss from a different tree. As in the other work the background was acrylic painted tyvek and tissue paper this time the tyvek was heated after painting to concentrate the colours and to give added texture as the tyvek warps when heated and forms interesting holes. Procion dyed muslin and threads were then applied, this time the stitching involved French knots, couching stitches and lazy daisy stitches.

Berries

I am able to catch up on my blog at last as my exhibition with Sheena Quayle at the Hodgson loom Gallery is now open for the next two weeks. Pictures from that to follow in the next post.
I have been busy for the last month picking berries from my Forest Garden and have some new additions this year. The biggest crop has been summer fruiting raspberries which have been very well flavoured this year; the autumn fruiting raspberries will be ready in a couple of weeks. Sadly our strawberry crop has been a failure as I didn't renew the plants to replace the ones that have been hugely productive over the past 4 years. A job for next season.
The redcurrants mostly were eaten by 6 blackbirds but as my garden is mainly for wildlife I don't mind too much. The blackcurrants and gooseberries have done well though. My favourite berry is blackcurrant which I prefer to eat straight from the bush. As I made 50 pots of jam last year, thankfully, I don't have to make any this year so the fruit is going in the freezer to be used in the winter with yogurt for my breakfast. I  make a lovely desert by crushing digestive biscuits in a ramekin dish, cover them with my raspberry puree with a teaspoonful of whisky and then put Creme Fraiche on top....yummy.
I also grow loganberries which are now forming strong canes, Tayberries, Blueberries and Salmonberries, the latter unfortunately are taking over my garden.
The latest additions are Japanese Wineberries, a beautiful plant, pictured below and Balloon berries which grow on canes with nasty spikes and the berries are a strange black with white which gives the appearance of mould but isn't. My Nepalese raspberry plant grows rampantly over the ground but as it has been there for 4 years and produced no fruit I threatened to dig it out. The next day one flower appeared but no berry yet so it lives for another year!

Biological forms

I am about to put on another exhibition with the hugely talented Sheena Quayle under our exhibition name
2 Connect. I have been studying biological forms and Sheena has been looking at form and function.
Most of the work in this exhibition for my part has been hand stitched, my first love. I did sketches from my forest garden at the end of last year and used some of these as the basis of several pieces. I run a U3A herb group and several framed works are of herbs. I have used a wide variety of media with the stitching including watercolour pencils, paper, painted fabric and glass paints. It has been a great pleasure working for this exhibition and if anyone living on the Isle of Man would like to see it, the details are below along with a couple of pictures of my work that can be seen at the gallery.

I have also hand stitched butterflies which I hope to turn into brooches. I found a wonderful box, hand painted in India which is padded inside and has pins which I can use to display the butterflies in the manner of a collector. These will also be on display at the gallery.
On the right is a piece of work based on plantain with watercolour pencils, hand and machine stitch. Below is a photograph of lichen printed onto tissue paper and then machine and hand stitched.
Both of these pieces of work have since been sold.

Art Society exhibition

As usual, the isle of Man Art Society's Easter Exhibition was a hugely popular event with over 400 paintings for sale, none of them having been seen before. This year there was a trial run of a craft stall and there were prints available of some of the paintings. I exhibited 3 pictures, all of them sold. They were mixed media, photo transfer onto tissue paper and then hand stitched. The subject matter was my trip a few years ago to Marrakech. I had so many wonderful photos it was difficult to decide which to include.The 3 I chose are shown below. One is of a lantern shop in the Souk with a wonderful array of lamps in many shapes and sizes. Whenever I see them for sale at home it brings back immediate memories of Morocco. Another picture was of a shop that sold hand woven carpets, paintings and wonderful jewellery. I bought 2 silver bracelets there, one for myself and 1 for my daughter and my friend Jenny who I travelled with bought a carpet. The final piece of work was a fortunate spotting of a pot in a window down a small road in Marrakech, it just looked so perfect in it's setting that I wanted to do some embroidery on it.
All three woks have now been sold.