This textured vessel wrap is my response to a workshop by Emily Notman.
I used textile strips and stitching, adding texture with textile scraps and thread.
I loved adding vibrant colours with ecoline paint.
The sun is created with a silk yarn, and the whole piece is enforced with backing fabric and iron-on adhesive.
It has turned out a happy sunny piece!
In 2018 (you can read the blogpost here) I dyed some yarn with onion peel. 4 of the skeins, all of a different shade of yellow, I knit into a piece with wide stripes.
This piece I washed on a high temperature and high spin cycle, to get it felted. It worked : the fabric is firmer, smaller and thicker now.
And this week I decided to make it into a handbag of my own design.
I chose a nice fabric for the inner lining. It’s all hand-sewn, because I wanted to do some slow, meditative stitching. The wooden handles fit perfectly, in my opinion.
This project is is a good example of slow crafting: hand-spun and naturally dyed yarn, hand-knit and hand-sewn into a bag. It reminds me that the journey is so much more important than the goal. That it turned out to be a nice handbag is a bonus š
This piece came about through a workshop led by Stewart Kelly.
First I made a still life drawing. Then I used a view finder to look for two interesting parts I could use. It was like looking at the still life from different perspectives!
These two views I tried to capture in textile, for one of them using only embroidery and for the other adding appliquƩ as well.
They look quite interesting together, so I sewed them onto one background.
I very much enjoyed the thinking and exploring that came with this work!
I love glass and beautiful bottles I tend to keep.
Here is one of these bottles I decorated with a piece cut off a felted wool sock. I embroidered some abstract flowers onto the fabric. The yarn is a Nepalese hennep cotton blend, naturally died with walnut.
The result is quite stylish I think...
This textile collage is again composed of textile waste material. Every piece of fabric has its own story: my son’s old sweater, a napkin from my grandmother, our old worn curtains, the fabric of a lampshade,... It’s these stories that make working with textiles so worthwhile for me.
After juggling with different combinations and sewing the pieces together, a lot of stitching has been done here. I chose neutral tones for a calm atmosphere.
The reading woman is inspired by the stunning engravings by Gwen Raverat.
I have been working on this hat for quite some time. It was my travel knit and since we are not travelling at the moment, there was little progress for some time. But at last, it got finished, just in time for some cold spells this spring. It's a Purl Soho pattern which you can find here. It's a double-layered hat : you start knitting the first hat from the top down with colour 1, then continue right on with the second hat in colour 2, bottom up. You tuck one inside the other and connect them with a little tassel. It's reversible, so two hats in one!
The yarn I used is Ashford Tekapo 3ply (brown and off-white). I bought it at Wolboerderij Blij Bezuiden, a small sheep breeding farm in the South of the Netherlands. Besides their herd of merino sheep they have a wonderful, friendly shop and lots of knowledge and energy. Here I learned how to spin and I’m so happy with this skill, it’s a very relaxing thing to do!
This is a textile map of my childhood home.
I used sheer fabrics and small scraps of recycled fabric and layered them. Some of the sheer fabrics I painted with ecoline paint (which was fun to do and gave me lots of ideas!).
I also added embroidery and some woolen thread.
This piece is inspired by the work of Valerie S. Goodwin, who makes the most wonderful cartographic art quilts.
To me this is a great way to capture memories. I quite like wandering through the past in a visual way like this.
In an earlier post I mentioned that I joined some speedcrafting sessions, hosted by Helen Robertson. One of the projects we did was knitting these tiny houses (or as they say on Shetland: peerie mootie hooses)
I truly fell in love with this project and ended up knitting 10 of them! 3 I filled with a match box so they can easily stand on their own and make a tiny village. The other seven I filled with some yarn scraps to give them some body and turned into broches. To the faƧade of each of the brooche-houses I added an embroidered flowering climbing plant.
I used the yarn Helen sent for the project and also some HotButterYarns colour mini balls DK. This is beautiful , locally sourced British wool. I bought them at Tribe Yarns in Richmond-upon-Thames, a truly lovely shop with great customer service!
This is by the way also a lovely way to use up any leftover yarn!
I had some skeins of Garthenor Organic number 3 in my stash, including 10 mini skeins. I could make a fairly big project with this. Lots of different natural colours require a simple and pure pattern, I think, and so I searched for something with a lot of garter stitch (which I love!). I chose the Herb Garden Shawl pattern (very easy and free pattern on Ravelry). I could already see myself strolling around in the garden, warmed by this shawl and a cup op tea...
It was lot of knitting, but with this DK yarn things went on fairly quickly and all the different colours made the project interesting.
Garthenor is a small Welsh company that has been producing breed specific organic yarn for over 20 years. Their customer service is great and there is such a positive energetic vibe around them! I found the yarn great to work with, it is sturdy and soft at the same time. The natural colours are lovely and work well together.
I ran out of yarn and still wanted the shawl to be a bit bigger, but instead of ordering more yarn, I decided to look through my stash (However much I love to support Garthenor and other sustainable businesses, I also try to use up my stash where possible, which also contributes to sustainability) and found this skein of Bleetingbecka Derbyshire Lopi, a very rustic wool from Derbyshire Gritstone (they don't have their own website, but you can find them on Facebook). This is the white top edge of the shawl.
It turned out to be the lovely warm big shawl I imagined, so let's go for a walk!
the shawl, almost finished:
the lovely (and interesting!) card I got with my order from Garthenor:
the Bleetingbecka yarn:
I love Sabine Kaner's work and was delighted to hear she was hosting a workshop on TextileArtist.org.
She designed this great and simple technique to create an abstract composition, using a crumpled piece of paper. You base your design on the lines that arise on the paper and transfer this onto fabric. With appliquƩ and emroidery you can then create a unique composition.
This is what I made of it, not a totally abstract piece, since I never quite can suppress my love for a narrative of some kind. My abstract became a mountain scenery. I chose muted colours, with one lively exception, a green segment on the bottom.
The piece is framed with a loosely cut piece of corduroy from an old shirt.
