Helen Parrott is a textile artist whose work I've admired for a long time and when I learnt that she was giving a workshop following on from her talk to London Quilters in September I was the first to sign up!

The workshop on mark making and hand stitching started out with exercises in collage, then critiques of everyone's compositions.

The next exercise was to draw 'blind' - that is, to draw with candle wax or white crayon, making bold and gestural marks roughly on a theme you've picked, or not.  The drawing was then painted over with a solution of Brusho and water, resulting in deep colours which revealed the image.  I found this liberating as I think the images are rather looser than they might have been if I could have seen the marks as they were being made.  They look rather crude but may well be inspiration for a new body of work I am planning to make                                                                                                                                                                        

We then explored running stitch and its variety and texture depending on the type of thread, the fabric and the length of the stitch.   These are my samples, highly textured and evocative of landscapes
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The ICE group of artists' next show is at The Bramble Patch 5 - 19 April and the title of the exhibition is 'Taking the Rough with the Smooth'. 

The theme is very wide and open to interpretation literally and/or metaphorically.
My objective is to explore both concepts.  To take the literal first, I have made a textile wall hanging incorporating silk, cotton, scrim and jute which I have dyed, rusted and printed.  I have quilted it with straight machine stitched lines to let the fabrics speak with their rough and smooth textures.  The stitching will be simple, perhaps both by machine and by hand.  I have some letter press blocks and might print words onto the piece - this is a decision I will make when it is almost complete. 

I am also making a textile triptych using the image of a pot as a metaphor for life - a whole pot, a shattered one and one that has been mended.  For these pieces I used Markal Paintstiks, one of my favourite mediums, and will do a separate blog showing the processes once the exhibition is up and running.

One part of the show is a display of work mounted on 12" x 12" canvases incorporating two specific fabrics, a cobalt blue batik and an open weave jute scrim, in any style and proportion.  It will be interesting to see how we have all chosen to interpret this.

My final piece is going to be an A3 book made of khadi paper and incorporating paint, textile, collaged paper and stitch, all exploring the theme of rough and smooth.

Any form of printing on textile will generate a mess and the consequent clearing up can be disheartening.  However, it is possible to get excited by this as the cleaning cloths can be incorporated in textile work.

I have a stash of odd cotton pieces - bargains bought at various shown, old clothes, cut offs and, my favourite, an old Masonic gown rescued from a skip.  When printing I keep a selection of these fabrics handy - to wipe down screens and blocks and to wash them.  The cleaning fabric is then left to dry and the patterns and strength of colour are a pleasant surprise.

Here are examples of three colourways after a block printing session:

These fabrics will be torn into strips of varying widths and randomly stitched together - a new textile is created out of what is basically a washing up rag.

The same technique can be used when cleaning up brushes and palettes after using acrylic paints.  The fabric irons well even when paint-laden though I would hesitate using it in pieces which are intended for washing - but this is only because I haven't yet tested acrylics for colour fastness.

I'll post up pictures of the new fabrics shortly but, in the meantime, enjoy the cleaning!

I had great fun making the sari silk pieces then wondered what to do with them.  My original idea was to create a textile book but this was rejected - each piece measured about 7" x 5" and if I had mounted it onto a backing it would have become too big.  I also thought of making a wall hanging but the weights of the backing silks differ and could distort so that idea was also rejected.  The pieces are rather fragile with wispy bits of silk and I wanted to keep them safe.  I painted pages in an A4 spiral sketchbook then hand stitched each silk piece onto its own page. 

The pieces will be a reference for future work as I'm thinking of creating some abstract silk wall hangings.  Watch this space!

Some years ago I bought a delicious bundle of sari silks in vibrant and clear colours.  They have mostly been torn into strips with wonderful frayed edges which are crying to be seen in pieces of work.  I also have a rather large stash of silks in yards and fat quarters, which have been carefully stored whilst I have been waiting for inspiration to strike.

At last, inspiration has struck!

I have been drawn to hand stitching recently, something I have not done for a long time.  I like choosing pieces of silk in vivid colours, laying them onto a neutral backgound fabric and then just sewing.  I have always loved Kantha stitching, with its simplicity, rhythm and texture, so most of my pieces use this stitch with a few others for variety.

Here are pictures of some of the pieces I have been working on, still in their embryonic state.  I will post more pictures as the pieces get completed.  Then I need to decide what to do with them.

Here is an embryonic quilt.  I tipped out my boxes and bags of scrap fabrics onto the floor and had a glorious time sorting through them, finding inspiration with unusual colour and print combinations.  The technique is shown in Rayna Gillman's book, Create Your Own Freeform Quilts.   Fabrics are layered and cut freehand without rulers which gives an organic quality once stitched together.   I am still playing around with placement of the blocks and have yet to decide on the final design but will keep working on it, now probably not until after February.

Markal paintsticks can make beautiful shaded bands of colour on fabric.  I coloured fabrics by painting onto a roughly torn mask, then brushing the paint onto the fabric.  Old toothbrushes work very well!  Here are some examples of the painted fabrics:

This is the finished quilt.  It was cut and fused onto its backing fabric then machine quilted using variegated threads.

It was only after I finished it that I noticed the white line across the quilt and could have kicked myself.  So - I will be cutting it up into at least two pieces and reworking with layered images.  I hope to have the new work at my exhibition in February so watch this space for further developments!

I used to put tea bags into the recycling bin but now they sit on a shelf to dry and are then incorporated in artwork.  Of course, the tea is first removed!  I iron the bags onto fusible web to be used on fabric and paper and once so stabilised they can be successfully stitched.

For this piece, the teabags were stitched down with lines of quilting.  I then screen printed the teasel images onto the quilt.  There was further stitching to highlight some of the outlines of the images and to give depth.

The reason I like using teabags is that the patterns made by the tea are random but there is a unity in the colours - sometimes very pale, often dark and all in a beautiful palette.

The various stages of preparing a teabag hanging:

London Quilters, to which I belong, organised a two day workshop with Gwen Hedley whose work I have admired for some time.  We worked in black, white and another colour of our choice on a very small scale using A6 sketchbooks.  We made marks, painted, cut and tore up paper,  wove it, then isolated a small part, enlarging and stitching it.  These exercises made one look carefully at seemingly random and haphazard marks where interesting patterns emerge.  I will shortly post images of some of my work