Memories of WW1 Textile

The WW1 exhibition is up at the Norris Museum in St Ives and will be open until the 28th of September.  As promised I have some more pictures of the show. Young people from the history and textiles departments of the Ivo school researched the war on a visit to the    Huntindonshire archives

We used images, letters. newspaper articles which they selected to create these 3 panels.

This one focusses on the stories about local men who went to war

This panel is the story of the VAD's (nurses), of the music that was played during the war, and features a local school's log book recording the news of the Armistice

This  panel is about the women and children at home, in and around St Ives and their role in the War Effort

So, each panel has  number of pictures which the young people and museum volunteers transferred onto fabric and embellished with stitch, applique, buttons and other ephemera

... like these of the Hunts cyclists

and this assemblage on Ivor Day, which includes a poem written by his brother on the event of Ivor's sad death in action.

Here is a lovely composition, found in a school book, written by the young girl pictured, describing how children can help in the war effort.

Many of the local women  became VAD's

I pre-dyed many of the fabrics using natural dyes to match the muted browns of the sepia photographs and to capture the sombre mood of the war.  We used touches of red as a highlight, here and there.

Scattered across the panels are verses of popular WW1 songs. The exhibition is part of a larger show on the music of the Great War.  The young people from St Ivo School did these little panels by exposing the texts to the sun using cyanotype fabric - another link with history.

I have even more from this exhibition - I'll show it in my next post......

World War One Textile

This is a little preview of a community art project I've been working on with the Norris Museum in St Ives. We will be putting up the exhibition tomorrow, and it opens to the public on Saturday.
Norris Exhibitions

This picture is just a little taster - there will be more.

 The project focuses on the home front, the roles of women and children and the parts played by local people in the First World War.

Individual embroideries by young people from the Ivo School and museum volunteers.

If you live locally,  I hope you'll  come and see these for yourself.  I think this is a very special exhibition.

Transform a Textile

Every year Barbara from  the MX Dyers list, very kindly sends out an "ugly' fabric that she has dyed. Her challenge is for  the person who recievesthis fabric to transform it in some way, using Procion dyes as part of the process.

This year I got a fabric which was more boring than ugly- A textured pale peach fabric and this is the story of what I did to it:

So, this is what I recieved.

First I hand painted it roughly with some dyes I had left over from other work, allowing the peach to modify the colours and show through in places.

Thinking it looked a bit like a rusty screen,  I screen printed on some 'graph paper' using textile paints to give it a screenlike texture

Next, I screen printed with some thickened dyes using a photoscreen I made some time ago from some marks I had made with charcoal.

And finally, I selected a motif from the larger screen and printed with a discharging agent to give some added illumination to th ein between spaces.

Detail of the final surface.

After an intense week of teaching summer school, it's really good to be challenged to do some work of my own,   - so thank you Barbara!

Cottenham Summer School 2014

Whew....another wonderful, creative, energetic week.  Here is a small sampling of the work made by the very talented and hard working summer school, "Sensational Screenprinters"

Sarah R   see fab fabs  for more of Sarah'a work

Amanda - removing colour with her own thermofax design

Betty - lovely tablecloth, being printed

David - designed for clever registration!

Jean J another exquisite textile print from Jean. See Flickr account below for some of her variations on this theme

Kate - fabulous winter trees.

Jean G, breaking all the rules!

Marian - her delicate grasses, layered

Sandra a true child of the 60's!

Alison, all the way from America!!

Sarah P - she really likes to print little creatures!

Ann- Look out for her cards of this print

 

 

 

 

See flickr account for more work made this week   flickr summer school  look under 'photostream' for work from this year and past years

Weaving into Fence

Fabulous Fence Weaving.  

I don't mean weaving a fence, I mean improving a boring old fence with a wonderful bit weaving.   This is the fence at mid Suffolk HOPS - an outstanding holiday play scheme which brings children and young people together who are socially isolated by both  the disabilities they have and the rural locations in which they live . Find out more about the scheme at  http://midsuffolkhops.org.uk/  

I fixed a bit of sturdy netting to the fence and the children developed the weaving.  We recycled strips of plastics and weather proof fabrics, including  sparkly foils and ripstop nylon into the netting and beyond, into the fence itself!  Some of the children enjoyed just playing with the pile of strips, whirling and twirling in the breeze.

The children knotted in the offcuts from silver balloon manufacture to create a fluttery centrepiece. The final touch was adding pompoms and bottle top 'buttons.' I am expecting more will be added to the weaving as the summer progresses.

And thanks to the Reimagine Resource Centre for the sturdy, sensory materials we used. see Reimagine

Grove School Screen Print in Action

 Here's a really cool  little movie made by Karen Thomas from Kettles Yard last week at our screen print workshop at the Grove school:

screen print video


When you get there, click on the image to get it to play.

"Welcome" Banners Primary School

I have just spent a very happy 2 days working with Kettles Yard  at the the Grove Primary School in Arbury, Cambridge.  We made "Welcome" and "Hello" banners in different languages to hang in the new reception area of the school.

The best part of the project was the children volunteering their knowledge and sharing the words they knew.  Other children popped in from the playground and from their classrooms to help out with different languages and spellings and texts, so there was a lot of communication and discussion. And a lot of discussion about, and pride in the different nationalities of the chidren and their parents.

Banners in progress

 

Swavesay festival

Printing bags at Swavesey Festival..........great theme:  "Childhood Sweets".  Ellen from START  did a guess "how many sweets are in the jar" competition and we printed these great bags with an old fashioned sweety theme.  Good nostalgic childhood memories for me.

And the same sort of project a couple of weeks ago at Sawston

Arbury carnival

Some more active pictures of the carnival! I hope these capture the happy spirit of the day:

Arbury carnival

And  a couple of pictures from the making workshops for the carnival which I've shamelessly lifted from the Arbury Carnival Facebook site

Dyeing fabric for bunting

Wonderful  Sandra Scott helped the children with making this wonderful mask - see her blog for details of her current exhibition in Cambridge

And now the banners:

As you can see these were truly community banners done by the children with just a little bit of cutting out help from the grown -ups;

and very festive they were, to suit the spirit of the occasion!

Arbury Carnival

Sandra Scott, Cary Outis and myself have been working on the Arbury Carnival Parade.  It's community project organised by Kettles Yard.  We made costumes, masks, banners, standards and a giant lion king puppet.

The kids were great and they worked really hard over weeks to make all the bits that went into the parade.  But the real stars were the volunteers who got together determined to make this event a success.

see Arbury Carnival  to see some great pictures ofthe event.

Meanwhile here is one of our own more amateur photos:

Lion King Puppet

I just realised that although we have lots of pictures of the wonderful costumes we made, I don't want to put them up on the blog because I don't have photo permissions.  So you'll just have to trust me that they looked brilliant!