The next task was to narrow down my fibre choices and decide which colours would best compliment the scarf I had chosen to work with.
- Starting to select fibres and colours
The picture on the left shows my initial collection of fibres laid out surrounding the scarf, hand dyed gold silk, a 90% grey/10% pink alpaca combination, creamy/white undyed merino, baby blue merino, sunflower yellow merino some embroidery silks of my grandmothers peeking out at the bottom right and some beautiful merino and silk combinations at the bottom left. I didn’t get a picture of the silver dyed linen fibres but they were a perfect match to tie in with the blue/grey and baby blue silk of the scarf. Eventually I decided to keep things ultra simple and let the colours of the silk sing out against a natural white merino and use a little of the silver linen for additional surface detail.
Once I had narrowed everything down to the bare essentials I cut my template from 1mm plastic echoing the shape of the jewellery pouch and making sure that it was large enough to allow me lay the biggest flower motif against the template without cutting into the design. I did sketch the provisional layout of the silk pieces but decided to give myself some freedom as I laid out the bag and go with the flow if necessary, what’s new! To start with I placed the largest piece of silk right side down on the template and then started to lay out my merino. I wanted this piece of silk to be a beautiful surprise on the inside of the bag and needed it to be oversized for the impact I wanted to create. At this stage of the day I was beginning to realise that I might not have enough time to get everything laid out fully, we had to exit the building at 5pm and were to bring our pieces with us to a different venue for the morning of day 2, panic!!! Once the first layer of merino was in position around both sides of the resist I laid out some more pieces of silk fabric and covered them with a layer of plastic resist. One of these resists I covered with baby blue merino before laying another resist on top. My idea for this stemmed from a beautiful large chunk of blue lace agate that my grandmother often wore and all us girls envied. It wasn’t her most precious piece of jewellery by any means but the one we all wanted to touch and get an opportunity to wear as children, we just loved the lacy lines in shades of light blue and grey! I wanted to expose both the blue merino and the silk underneath as two seperate layers, maybe I am not explaining this well but you will see what I mean when I post the final pictures. By the end of the afternoon I had covered the resist with several layers of merino and was ready to bring it home with me to lay out the surface decoration later that evening. More tomorrow ……..
Nicola Brown Fine Art Textiles 