The homecoming from Duxford signaled the last show of the year and it was a real pleasure to hunker down with some of my favourite students in the cabin yesterday, for a pleasant day of colour, creativity and sewing. We combined that with a home-made simple lunch comprising of my favourite Carrot and Coriander soup, warm bread straight from the oven with lovely fresh butter, and fruit and Greek yogurt to finish…
The workshop was all about colour. I asked the students to bring 2 coloured images which they loved, which they stuck each to a piece of decent paper. I got them to draw some circles, and out came the polychromos – let the colouring begin!
The idea was to isolate colours from the image, between 10 and 20, and fill in the circles with these colours. The first 5 or 6 jumped out easily but subsequent ones were more subtle, and harder work for the eye to find. I encouraged them to choose a mixture of light, medium and dark, because we were later going to translate these colours to fabrics from the scrap box, with a small scrappy quilt in mind. And we know this is the magic formula for a quilt; to include light, medium and dark.
The scraps were laid out and added to, each student contributing a little something to my offering, and then the real fun began, linking the pencil colours to fabrics. They cut strips, squares, simple shapes from the motley assortment of sizes available, and squares and log cabin blocks gradually emerged…hexagons would have been a nice hand sewing option.The Sizzix machine with square dies made quick work of tiny scraps, we were all keen to use as much as we could.
This was a play day, no intention of producing a finished piece of work, rather a launch pad to share a fool-proof method of finding confidence in selecting colours and fabric; because fabric is expensive I find a lot of students get quite anxious when it comes to putting colours together, because they don’t want to make wasteful choices that may not work. By referring to an image produced by a painter or photographer, they are having the benefit of relying on an already trained and selective eye. Before long, the students can make the jump from the image to the fabric without the colouring, and they all found this very rewarding, as did I. Here are a few images of the work we did.
Oh and a little chook popped up on my desk from dear Trish, who couldn’t resist her at a craft fair, knowing my predilection for chickens…
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Maggie it was lovely to see you at Duxford last weekend and thanks for all your support. Please let me know when you are next doing a colour workshop as this is what I need so much. I know the colours I like but I have no idea of how to use colour to make my work interesting instead of dull and boring. The Liberty fabric I bought from you is waiting to be used. I just love looking at it. The new webiste is just lovely.
Hello dear Petra, it was lovely to see you too, and I’ve been working very hard ever since! And thoroughly enjoying it, and although I’m having a few teething troubles with the nuts and bolts of the website, I’m gradually winning…
I have sort of sketched in Saturday December 4th for the next colour workshop, does that suit you?