Saturday 5th February - Raya Brown - Her creative journey

Raya Brown is an artist and feltmaker. She started her lecture by telling us about her journey which started in St Petersburg where her mother, who was an artist influenced her early work. Raya showed us her early art work. She studied at art school and then University to study fine art and textiles

 

She came to this country and then 16 years ago she discovered wool.

Raya started wool painting using merino wool tops, together with viscose and silk to create highlights and lustre. The technique is a dry technique where the fibres are arranged on a fabric background and then are trapped under glass. The mages are created in watercolour first and then translated into wool painting.

  

Raya also uses dry and wet felting techniques . As with her pictures she incorporates other fibres in her pieces,

She makes sculptural pieces with needle felting, where no stitch is used.

Her work includes clothing, bags and shawls which are made using wet felting techniques

 

Raya has also been doing Nuno felting where the wool fibres are incorporated into fine open weave fabrics.

Raya has certainly been on quite a journey both geographically and artistically!!

Thank you for guiding us through this journey . I know several of us are looking forward to her workshop in a couple of week's time.

 22nd January Printing with Annie Bowden

We had a brilliant day with Annie , learning to make printing plates with easy to find materials. We made collagraph plates where we used various papers including textured wallpaper which were then glued on to a card ( cereal box) base with waterproof woodwork adhesive. These were then sealed with Knotting solution to make them more durable. 

Mountboard and gold card were etched using a sharp pointed tool, creating a groove to hold the ink.

Some of us also etched into a gloss photo, where the etched line also held the ink.

We finally made lino relief prints.

Here are some of our plates that we made.

    

   

          

 We then worked the ink into our plates with a toothbrush and the wiped of the excess before having the excitement of putting them through the press. Annie showed us how it worked and then disclosed the first print - how exciting!!!

.... and here are some of our results

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Thank you Annie for a wonderful day 

 Saturday 8th January Serendipity, Printing and Sewing - Annie Bowden

We were treated to a very entertaining afternoon with Annie.

She started by showing us some of the colourful quilts she has made, astonishingly all worked by hand.

Also this photo shows a beautiful hand embroidered cap inspired by one at Sunnycroft, which was made for Charles 1st

  

 

         

She then talked about some of the 

different printing plates that she uses including collagraph with card which are shown on the next few photos

  

       

She also uses traditional lino cut plates which when printed she has also interpreted into stitch

  

  

One of Annie' s latest techniques is to dry point etch into photographs and then use these as printing plates

Beautiful work.

We look forward to an exciting workshop.

Thank you Annie

 Christmas workshop and Chair's Challenge - December 4th

We had a lovely day last Saturday creating our first Artist Trading cards with a Christmas theme. This will be our ongoing project to replace the Travelling books.

I am sue everyone was delighted with the one that they received when we swapped our finished cards.

Here are some of the finished cards

We were also able to vote for our favourite entry in this year's Chair's Challenge, entitled Together.

The winner was Judy  and this is her piece

The other entries were as follows . Well done and thank you to everyone who took part