Jellyfish textile photos

I’ve taken some photos of the jellyfish piece I was working on at during the insight open studios weekend (see 17 September for the photos that inspired this piece), just need to find a suitable piece of driftwood to hang it from now.

A close-up of part of the jellyfish before I’d quite finished. It is layers of organza and a fluffy textured yarn taken from another project.

Detail of the running stitches and layers of organza. The threads are various thicknesses and textures that I hand-dyed.

The almost finished piece, just a little more stitching to do and the fluffy dangling threads to adjust slightly.

This is the finished piece. It makes me think of warm summer days.

Embroiderers Guild Workshop

I’ve been to Scunthorpe Embroiderer’s Guild today, it was a workshop  called ‘The Midas Touch’ with Lynne Porter. The day went really quickly – a sure sign we were having fun.

There were 3 different sets of materials to work with, each theoretically lasting an hour, but before I knew five and a half hours had gone by. It worked really well, 3 work areas were set up and Lynne moved round every 10 minutes or so having given us a demonstration on what we could do with the materials, left us experimenting  (OK – playing) with them for 20 minutes as she showed the other 2 groups then came back with more ideas or other bits of the kit to use.

At the end of each hour the equipment baskets were moved to the next group and we started with the next kit.

The first session was working with metal shim and metal mesh.

The first sample reminded me of smocking, I’ll maybe stitch into it sometime.

This one was a  daisy stencil that I changed the layout.

I continued with the daisy theme for most of the day.

Cheese sculpture

We were up in Penrith at the weekend and went to Rheged to the Cheese Festival. I spent some time chatting to a lovely lady called Andri who was sculpting cheese!!!!! Certainly a new medium as far as I’m concerned, I plan to have a go. I’ll never look at a piece of cheese in the same way again!! Making cheese sandwiches will be taken to a whole new level. I had a tiny go when a small boy had come up to look and Andri had given him a sculpting tool, I just had to try too. It feels reasonably easy to actually carve, not that I can produce anything like the beautiful cow and calf that Andri had done.

Andrea Thwaites Cheese Sculpture