fabric | Teri Berry Textiles

Last weekend I attended the third module of my Diploma course at West Dean, this was by far the workshop where I felt most in my element and even got to use up some of my extensive scrap felt and fabrics collection. Win-win! 🙂

Cas Holmes is an amazing tutor, her years of teaching experience were clearly evident in how she catered to each individual student’s interests and level of experience. In just 3 days she had the measure of each of us and was supporting us individually. If you get the opportunity to work with her I would definitely take it, and go along with an open mind, she has a lot to offer and is very generous with her advice.

The weekend was spent creating stamped and painted fabrics before assembling them into a collage with no predefined idea of what they would look like when finished. Working on a composition without an end in mind was really liberating and, for me, a totally different way of working, although I did have a moment of panic when I looked at this piece and had no idea where to take it.

This is where it is currently. The other students tell me it is their favourite but I still feel it needs more work.

For the next piece Cas let us select a piece of fabric / paper from a pile in the middle of the room (I pounced on the sheet music) and then she gave each of us another piece that she thought we would find challenging (mine was the dark grey paper arranged in vertical strips in the bottom half of the composition). I think Cas has me pegged a bright colour enthusiast – can’t imagine where she got that idea from 🙂

This is what it looked like after the initial arrangement.

And after some machine embroidery and couching on some more felt scraps:

What do you think, should I add the orange triangle on the left? Or something else? Perhaps some machine embroidery to the right of the orange triangle?

I liked this piece right from the start,

but I’m not sure about the flower at the bottom – should I stitch over it to make it looks less like a flower?

I also made a piece using Cas’ technique but with a predefined image in my mind. I have been working on a new body of work focussing on animals (more on that in another post) and thought these fish would translate well. These images are from my sketchbook, I was thinking of creating screen prints from them but I have already wandered back to felt and textiles 🙂

This is the piece I made at West Dean, I had intended to remove the tissue paper entirely but rather liked the textured surface and how it resembles splashing water.

However, the paper is very delicate and not very practical so I have started a similar piece using heavy weight silk instead, this is the back, getting ready to start stitching.

Over on the Felting and Fiber Forum, Judith (AKA Koffipot) very kindly compared my chain and flame hats to David Schilling’s creations. I confess I had never heard of him before this discussion, although I did recognise some of his Royal hats, I thought one of them might have been princess Beatrice’s “toilet seat hat” as Ann so aptly described it 🙂 but it turns out that this is a Philip Treacy hat.

Looking through a gallery of his work I started to wonder if some of the shapes could be realised in seamless felt….? Looking at his hats has sparked a few ideas that I hope to realise in felt.

One of them looked like a gift-wrapped box and I wondered if I could make a small stack of felt boxes set at jaunty angles. This is the block for the base of the stack and a test run to see if I could make a felt box stiff enough to keep its shape when worn:

Keeping with the resist theme, this hat used the book style resist I wrote about last week.

Adding some hand-dyed cotton:

I have also been doing some home work for the dressmaking course I started a couple of weeks ago, but I’m afraid I made a boob… cutting the last panel for my dress I forgot to flip the pattern piece to get a mirror image and didn’t realise until I had cut the piece out. Now I don’t have enough fabric to complete the dress so I will have to make some more 🙁 But I need to make some felt for Ruth’s screen printing course so I will just make a job lot 🙂

This is the dress I will be making (no changing my mind now if it doesn’t work!):

The white will create the centre panels with the blue forming the panels down the sides.

I also made a start on the prep work for Ruth’s experimental screen printing class that started yesterday, I have made 2 screens, 1 large and a smaller square one.