Black and White

Time to share some of my black and white designs which have been an ongoing body of work over the last 15yrs. One of my fascinations is with pattern and my black and white designs were born out of a time when I did not have the physical space to be creative so they were developed in A5 & A6 visual journals. I have several journals full of them and over time I was able to upscale to canvases.   I hope one day to translate some of these designs to fabrics.


These are a few of the ones that made it to canvas in 2005.

  This one is titled "Beach Party" it was one of my entries for the 2005 Margaret River Rotary Art Exhibition

 untitled 1 2005

untitled 2 2005

untitled 3 2005

All of these designs have been drawn freehand and the concentration that each one takes can be very therapeutic.  "Beach Party" takes pride of place in my living room along side my other entry for the same exhibition. I hope to share that with you too some time soon

Early Days part 2

 In 1989 while I was studying Textiles at Curtin Univeristy in Perth we had a very lovely Indian Lady visit the Art faculty from Rajistan.  With her she brought an amazing collection of Indian Textiles which were hung in the halls of our building and she also held several Indian Textile workshops. The one thing that grabbed me in all of this was the amazing stitch work.

These are the works that were inspired by the workshop with a little added inspiration from some of the work of Vincent Van Gogh.

 This one was my first piece and was a homage to 'Starry Night'. It's my favourite and all of the others follow along on a similar theme.

Early days

Recently I've been looking through some of my early work seeking some inspiration for future creations. It's all been packed away and I've decided it's time to share some of it with you....

These pieces were machine drawing samples when I was studying textile design

These were created on my old Husqvarna 2000. I think it might be time to put it into the repair shop and start incorporating machine drawing into my work again. I seem to remember that it was a lot of fun

I'll share some more early work with you again soon

Holiday Sewing Fun

I've just had a week and a half off and apart from a visit to Ikea, where my credit card took a battering, I've been sewing..... how unusual!!! I've created 8 new slip covers for  the chunky (200 page) A6 Visual Journals and Notebooks. And collaborated on one with my sister.... or rather  she designed the cover and I put it together. 

Here's what I've created

This was the first one it carried on from the last series of covers that I created and uses the inset pleated panels front and back. I call this one Belt Up # 2

 
I followed on with this one, inset panel and belt closure using a 100% Cotton Canvas. I found the wooden buttons in my botton collection. This one is Belt Up #3

 This one again has the inset pleated panel and a pretty satin ribbon to keep it all together.

Next I had a play with a denim offcut, a cute printed cotton fabric and some buttons and created the Buttons and Bubbles cover.

Then I played with insetting strips of the fabric and again incorporated buttons. This one is known as the Buttons and Bubbles cover #2

The last cover had me thinking about panels and contrasts. This one incorporates the inset panel  pintucked blue denim in a contrasting black denim.

inset pleated panel and two different shades of blue denim.....

This one features the fabric from the "Dotty Pouch" along with a mid blue denim. It's the same front and back. It reminds me of an old novel.

And finally the first slip cover designed for iheartcharlie by my sister, Catherine
Hopefully this is the first of many

This cover features, black hemp denim along with german wool felt from B&M Felt. This one is a definite favourite and aside from the amazing colour choice and the cute button, part of it's beauty is in it's slightly deconstructed appearance.

Yet again these covers have offered me some great ideas for future bags. I my last post I shared a series of Journal covers from which great ideas were born.

Here's the first Tote bag that was inspired by these 

This is the Chloe Tote Bag and it's currently for sale in my Etsy Shop