Just before Easter I spent a couple of highly enjoyable days at Art Van Go on a course all about creating art from Gelli to Canvas with Hilary Beattie. I went with my mother-in-law and good friend Paula Watkins, more of whom you will be hearing about as we start to talk about the book we are writing with Maggie Grey coming out soon!
I have used the Gelli plate before and love it, but this was a completely new approach for me. The way we printed with leaves and anything with texture was really interesting to learn about and I felt that I got a huge amount from it.
Hilary is full of life and it made for a really fun time. She had a huge collection of dye pots and we spent a lot of time dyeing papers and pages from our sketchbooks. I think the promise of all those pots of dyes made us all a bit demob-happy and we were frantically trying to find surfaces to dye (mainly my hands as it turned out).
I came away with a huge amount of beautifully coloured and decorated pages. It has given me real food for thought about how to take my Gelli plate printing further. I won't give all the processes away, as they are all in Hilary's book Make It Personal: Book 1 Preparing Your Palette, but we used modelling paste to create textured surfaces on our canvas, and the dyes to colour our printed papers. The collage aspect of the printed papers onto the canvas is something I didn't get to finish, and I think it needs a bit more thought and work before I'm happy with it, but using some different materials and trying out the Neocolour 1 crayons was great as I wouldn't have thought of using them before.
Also, being at Art Van Go, there were plenty of shopping opportunities, and I picked up some dyes, which I have always been too scared to attempt. But having used them for painting papers, and having an idea of how to now paint fabric, I am starting with a few colours and see how I go. I have bought some screw cap tubs to put the dyes in
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| A selection of surfaces that the class created prior to adding colour |
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| This work was by Christine Parsons and turned out brilliantly (see later picture) |
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These are pieces of work by everyone in the group. Hilary is putting some photos on her blog, which may have names on, but I can't remember whose is whose.
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| My canvas before anything was collaged onto it. |
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| This is wonderful. It's by Jill Packer. |
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| Christine Parson's wonderful finished piece |
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| Another fab piece by Christine Parsons |
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| I don't know who did this! |
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| I think this was Karen's |
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| Don't know who did this one either, but I love it. |
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| Sorry, I don't have a name for this one either. |
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| I love the colours in this one |
I would highly recommend a course with Hilary. She has a wonderfully free attitude to her sketchbooks and doesn't treat them like precious objects to be revered. She experiments, paints bits on them, uses up paint from her brush before washing and is incredibly relaxed about how they look. Looking through them, there are some wonderful pages with fantastic mixed-media work so it obviously works well for her. And I think it is a good way to free yourself up and not set yourself unrealistic goals of producing fantastic pages.
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For the lover of Vintage clothes,
the risk of finding the perfect outfit that has flaws or wear and tear is quite
high. This book is a one-stop manual for
dealing with the most common faults you might find and also provides ideas for
upcycling and updating outfits to give them unique and individual alterations.
There are illustrated explanations
for each step of a technique, and each
‘Make it Fabulous’ section includes photographs from high street sellers
and blog posts of a variety of fashion and vintage bloggers. This gives you several alternatives for a
particular technique, and ideas of how to take it further than the guidelines
given.
The books starts with basic cushions to familiarise the reader with the
techniques you will need as a starting point.
These are well-explained, with measurements and photographs to
illustrate each step. You have a basic
envelope, hand-finished, round and piped cushion to practice before they start
to be jazzed up a bit and a bit of fun is injected into the proceedings. Then you have knots, pleats, rosettes,
ruffles, buttons and ribbons as examples of some of ways that this fun is
achieved. My personal favourite was the
flower cushion which had felt flower decorations sewn onto the cushion cover
and created an expensive looking end product.
There were great personal touches on some the designs, such as a ‘Love’
heart cushion and a pleated ribbon butterfly cushion, and with several
variations shown alongside the finished cushion, you get a great sense of how
to move on from these patterns and create your own. They are all pretty designs here and you will
find that with the easy-to-follow instructions, you will be able to master a
variety of cushion-making skills in no time.
Then you will be left in the difficult situation of how to secrete them
in all corners of the house without tripping over them.
