TVCQ meeting

We had a great day yesterday. It started with Gabrielle Forshaw talking about the inspiration behind the work she did for her recent degree. She is inspired by items in museums and did quite a lot of research on the history and development of the "cabinet of curiousities". This eventually came to be what we know as museums. In her research, she was specifically interested in the sorts of things that were collected having to do with everyday life.

This resonated with alot of us since we are looking at an eclectic mixture of items from households through history from the Slough Museum. Gabrielle uses a lot of intense stitch, but in a sparing way which adds to the antique feel of the pieces she has created.

Following a long lunchtime where members discussed the progress of the projects they are developing for the Museum Project, we had an excellent workshop led by Vicki Chambers.

There were a few demos of how to layer and what was needed to fuse the layers.

Then we got busy doing our own variations.

Some of which looked like this.

Some left the paper to dry that way, so they could stitch into it. Others followed the idea of draping over a form, pulling the fibres into shape and then leaving it to dry that way. The result can be used as a very ethereal vessel. you can put LED lights inside to give a lovely effect. And if the form was large enough, you can put a tealight inside.

Other variations on the theme of the day included this fascinating piece. We had been encourage to trap things between the layers. Many of us used coloured silk threads or coloured versions of some of the fibres.

Susan chose to cut words from her newspaper!

Here are the dried results!

What a great day!

I will show you my dried vessel tomorrow. I need to wet my paper again because the non-sticky fibres weren't mixed enough with the sticky ones, so it is not holding together well at present.