Last Saturday we had a talk by Sarah May Johnson who describes herself as an artist, weaver and designer. She showed us some of her work and explained a little bit about how she gets her inspiration. She might start with a particular material that fascinates her or a theme, often nature, or a technique which she wants to explore. It made me think about how I start a project. Its usually because I see a picture and I love it! Then I try and work out how I could make it to suit myself with materials I already have. I'm trying not to buy new stuff so that's always a challenge. Then I might make some samples and if I like them enough I will start. Sarah May's work was beautiful and intricate and we all admired it. She was an excellent and interesting speaker.
There are some photos below of Sarah May's work. The first one shows how she developed the theme of 'Coal, Cotton, Canals'. She imagined cotton fields, coal seams and long canals and these were the colours that came into her mind and how she interpreted them as lines in her drawings and weaving. She uses colour wraps to try the colours together and then these may be saved as pieces of art in their own right. The second one is one of her finished pieces. She started working on this theme for the National Guild Exhibition last year which was cancelled and then liked it so much that she continued to develop the idea. The exhibition is postponed until next year and so she may yet use them. I also made something for the exhibition and it makes me smile to think how completely different my work is from Sarah May's! Then she went on to talk about choosing colours. She showed us a colour wheel and talked about complementary colours which are opposite each other and analogous colours which are next to each other. Also a triad of 3 colours can look good too. She had balls of wool to demonstrate what she meant. It certainly made me think about colour choice and I know some of our members have already experimented with the ideas. The colour wheel is above on the right and it shows how you can choose colours in different ways. On the left is some experimental work with combining colours using the colour wheel. This was made by Gemma in our guild immediately after the talk - she was obviously very excited about the idea! This month I have been knitting a new fairisle sweater for my husband. I have already undone about 4 inches because he didn't like the colours (I did but I suppose its not me wearing it!) and it was a bit big when I washed it. I always meticulously measure my tension samples but I can almost guarantee that it will be slightly different when I start to knit the actual garment. I wonder if other people have this problem too? The colours I am using I already had from a previous natural dye project so now I've ended up buying some more natural shetland tops to spin so that's my resolution out of the window already.
0 Comments
|
AuthorWendy Simpson, Archives
December 2021
Categories |