Category Archives: textile art

Seedpods Workshop with Yvonne Habbe

This week I spent 3 fabulous days in Switzerland, in the beautiful Interlaken area surrounded by awe inspiring mountains, shimmering lakes and the sound of cow bells. I only wish I could have stayed longer.

This was the view from my chalet:

My reason for going was not the beautiful scenery though, I was there to attend a workshop with Yvonne Habbe. What a workshop it was too! My head is still spinning with incredible ideas that her methods have revealed.

Initially we were set the task of making a perfect sphere, these are some of our efforts:

The title of the workshop was “Seedpods” and was focussed on creating 3D forms, here are some examples of her work that sparked my desire to attend this workshop:

Amazing aren’t they?

It was a slightly unusual workshop in that we really only spent a couple of hours over the 3 days watching Yvonne demonstrate her techniques, the rest of the time was spent exploring. I am so grateful for finding myself surrounded by such a fantastic group of students, with everyone enthusiastic to share their discoveries at the end of each day. It was revealing to see all the different approaches that we took. Here are a few of our collective works:

And these are a few of my favourite pieces that I created:

The next step is to dye some of these pieces but I will save that post for another day. 🙂

These pieces are primarily sculptures but I also have a few ideas for some unusual bags that I am itching to try out…. watch this space!

Linking up to nina-marieoff the wall Friday

Alien Invasion Part 2

I finally plucked up the courage to work on my monster “alien signpost” piece again, needle felting some details into the surface and fulling it. It spent yesterday blocked on some children’s play mats and drying in the lovely weather we have had this weekend. I blocked it face down to ensure the face was not distorted by the hanging sleeve on the back. This is what it looks like now:

When I started it my plan was to make it into a triptych and trim the edges, hence they are more untidy than ususal but now I looking at it and think I like the wavy edges with the bars of prefelt “threatening” the escape the frame.
It is still an enormous 1.9m x 1m (6′ x 3′)  despite being quite firmly fulled (I don’t want to full it any further for risk of losing the details and muting the colours).
I also quite like it in the other orientation, I especially like the wavy edge at the bottom, it reminds me of ripped paper…

If I trim it, I expect it to look something like this:

And as a triptych –
Version 1 landscape:

Triptych version 1 portrait:

Triptych version 2 landscape:

Triptych version 2 portrait:

I am racked with indecision about where to go with this piece. What do you think? Do you prefer the portrait or landscape orientation? Which of the triptychs is most aesthetically pleasing? Or should I scrap the triptych idea altogether and revel in the torn paper effect?