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Workshop: Textiles – 14th-15th September.

Delighted to kick off my workshop experience with the textile rotation. Wow! What excellent machines – I want one….. free sewing is such fun! Not that I don’t appreciate my sturdy little Singer that I got in exchange for an enormous number of Tiger Tokens way back in the late 80’s! Forgive me a little nostalgia here….. they looked like this.

Image result for esso vouchers

Workshops began with the instruction to ‘bring images relating to the theme for your brief’ – we would use them to develop pieces using applied fabric techniques. With my ‘ars moriendi’ theme in mind, I took images of poppies that had been worked in textiles … they have a remembrance connotation but more importantly, reference my late father and a poem about poppies and blue flowers that he wrote back in 1975. My idea has been to combine significant fabrics (e.g. remnants from my wedding dresses) with the poppies and blue flowers ideas to make a 3D embroidery piece – perhaps a scrap-book cover or fabric page – to commemorate the loved ones left at death …. or perhaps … loved ones lost, with whom to be re-acquainted.

Initial ideas – textile workshop.
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‘What You Have To Do’ 1.

‘Create a comprehensive mind map or tangible evidence that you have explored a range of ideas connected with your subject theme. You should explore a comprehensive range of possibilities and limitations in response to the project brief.’

This is potentially a huge ‘question’; mind mapping will I hope, help to narrow a focus and a personal hook for my explorations. I have begun with mind mapping from a simple vocabulary based search for meanings and ideas.

Scraping around for layers of meaning. (scrapping).

While I’ve been thinking about all these words and drawing and cutting and sticking and collage-ing my mind maps, the TV has been on. Most inspiring and quite pertinent to developing a subject/event for my brief, has been Grayson Perry’s series of programmes about rites of passage.

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/grayson-perry-rites-of-passage/episode-guide/

I have already done digital scrap-books of my wedding and honeymoon – I don’t want to re-do these, and as a mature student on this course, it seems that many of ‘the events’ that others are talking about in terms of doing this brief, are ones, that for me, are passed and gone. I have strong feelings about ‘end of life’ processes and feel quite interested in basing my project in the context of ‘ars moriendi’ ….. a sort of expression of my desires for how I might wish the ‘end’ to be resolved. I thank Grayson Perry for this little bit of inspiration.

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‘Scrap That’.

From a collection of briefs; for my project, I have decided to select the ‘Scrap That’ brief. It directs us to doing research about Scrap-booking and Artists’ Books while working towards producing a book documenting ‘an important event in your life (real or imaginary)’. While the project is developing across the 6 week ‘exploratory phase’ of the Foundation Course, we will engage in a series of workshops – this experience should be reflected in the investigations, experiments and outcomes of the project.