Art Nouveau, the Glasgow Girls and the TIF Challenge

Well, I expressed my intention to base my work for the TIF Challenge for January on the much-admired stucco artists whose creations I saw in Marrakech, but it was a premature and over-ambitious plan for a month when I've been seriously under par. So I've exercised my prerogative to change my mind: needing to create some items on the theme of Art Nouveau, I revisited the Glasgow Girls, Jessie Newbery and Ann MacBeth. I have long admired their design work and stitchery, which follows on and almost bridges the gap between my beloved Arts and Crafts movement and Art Nouveau. I think their prominence in the art world of the time was also important, mirroring the political emergence and emancipation of women which has allowed my own generation so much more freedom of life choices, education, careers, finances and opportunities. I admire the Morris women very much, but I also admire the Glasgow Girls because they owned the design process for their artistic creativity and passed it on to others. I first discovered them during my history research for City and Guilds Embroidered Textiles Part 2, and was thrilled to see some of their work for real when we visited Glasgow a couple of years ago.



I developed the following design by distilling elements of a number of designs and textiles by Newbery and MacBeth,and working it out to fill a 5" square quiltlet.




Then I worked the design up into a cartoon for the quilt, and also two ATCs which I need to make for a swap.




The process of draughting out these designs gave me some insight into how I might work them into textile pieces. My first idea was to use applique techniques, but instead I decided on interpreting them both using silk painting methods. I found some silk charmeuse which I stretched using masking tape onto an old place mat - remarkably effective. The design was placed underneath the cloth, which, in good daylight, allowed me to trace the design directly using gold gutta. Once that was dry, I filled in the spaces with silk paints.





I've painted some more silk in the pink for the back and sashing of the quiltlet, which is drying and so these projects should be completed tomorrow, very much at the eleventh hour. I guess I've not taken the design much further but I hope the GGs would have approved of my interpretation. They were not averse to a bit of gold, after all. And at least, very much at the eleventh hour, I'll hopefully have managed to complete a few challenges for January while revisiting a technique I've not used in ages.

Fabric ATCs

During the past few years i have made and swapped several paper-based ATCs (or Artists' Trading Cards, 2.5" x 3.5"). These, made for members of Unlimited Textiles, are the first ones I've created from cloth. They are a fabrc sandwich with pelmet vilene in the middle, and it's surprising how much texture and pattern can be achieved with in the dimensions.

 

The basic fabric is one I made during my City and Guilds course in embroidery, consisting of strips of neutral-coloured material sewn together using automatic sewing machine stitches, then cut up and reassembled a few times using the same technique. This cloth is like pastry: each time I use some, I cut and repiece the remainder to made another usable piece. Now I am coming to the end of it, and I can see that I will have to repeat the exercise to provide for future creative play.

 

For the cards, I machine-couched some copper jap to form the horizontal lines, and used the same dark red thread to overcast the raw edges. then I hand-sewed a number of tiny bronze sequins ( from Dale at the
Thread Studio, densely in the middle, and then dotted around the edges. They took together about 3 hours, not counting the time taken to make the "crazy patchwork" type base fabric. Great fun.

I'm very tired today. I was so anxious about the return to new schools that I threw myself into displacement activities, including quite a lot of housework (seriously needed) and registering us all with a new NHS dentist. Luckily, Anna and Ben had a good day and Ben had enough energy left to go and have a kick-about in the park with big sister Sarah and her bofriend, Joe. Today I am fit for nothing - this is the third time I've written this blog entry, having succeeded in erasing it twice previously before I posted it! C'est la vie.