Just a few more flowers

So these are just a few more scans from my textiles sketch book. I seem to be going in two directions, it’s either flowers (The garden of living flowers) or playing cards which I’ll hopefully have some more work on by next week so can upload some of that. But for now flowers seem an important part of wonderland as they help colour Alice’s world.

These sketches are just examples of how a simple dress could then be transformed by embroidery. This rose dress would be covered in woven roses, one of the techniques from my post below which I learned from the book Three-Dimensional Embroidery stitches by Pat Trott. I’ve learned a lot from this book and even find myself using her techniques when I’m not even sewing flowers for woven roses are a great way to fill in a perfect circle.

So for now I think I’ll keep going with the flowers but I think it would be interesting to look more into to the playing cards, using the colour scheme of black, white and red perhaps as this would create something much different and I’m finding when I try and stick to the pale blue dress my work can get quite limited and here already I’m leaning towards different colours. This is the point of this sketch book to try different things as it’s alright if it’s not perfect, I’m just exploring, but do think if I were able to make more than one dress by the time of our American Museum show to have one pale blue dress along with a red dress covered in playing cards or even just the symbols, this could then be something quite different, so I’m quite excited by this.

Alice in Wonderland

 So (just noticed that I seem to start all my blogs with so, no point changing now!) for my Alice project I'm using an old Alice through the looking glass children's book as my sketchbook. I've had some comments that the words are in the way you can't see the drawings, but I like working in a book and what I'm doing is going through the book look at the illustrations of the tale and using them as inspirations for each design. So there've been detailing in a fireplace and then I turn it into detail on the skirt of a dress. I find that it's a good thing to have something to refer to right there on the next page as I'm working as I've got my research folder but sometimes forget what's actually in there and so I use main sources of inspiration from the folder but for the smaller details I like working from my sketch book.

So I go through drawing a sketch of a garment on each possible page then look into what detail, what technique of embroidery could be used to decorate it. Here for example is a sample is of the kind of embroidery that would be used to cover the top of this dress. Different techniques such as French knots and weaving were used to create some of these flowers.

Here's another example of my work from my sketch book. This was a chapter that I choose to look into playing and the different ways to use them for designs of decoration. Then a quick sample of the type of fabric that would be used and then I used some woven roses to create the main body of the sign of a club.

Next I'm going to be continuing through the book and filling it with designs and samples, while creating some larger pieces that that I'm not just confined to the smaller size of my sketch book.