Evolve and Grow

Before I really became involved with textiles I thought it began and ended with cross-stitch and tapestry. Whilst there’s nothing wrong with either of those things I’m someone who loves to create a mess and hates to be confined doing something small and neat. I can’t do small and neat and I think there’s a lot of other people out there who assume “textiles” or “craft” should be produced in a certain way or have a certain look.

Below: Spring Art Quilt
2003
This centre piece is 30" x 30"
Layered, embroidered fabrics with light melting and beading

Be Yourself

I’m not good with kits. If I want to do some craftwork I want to do it right from scratch. I want every little piece of a project to be something I’ve created.

The Arts and Crafts Movement of the Victorian era reacted against the mass production of items, opting instead for individual items produced by humans, instead of machines. I love the idea that the pieces I produce would be really hard to replicate again. I think it’s important to constantly move forward in your craft and artwork. With all the machinery we use today I think it’s important to be able to produce objects that have flaws and show they were actually touched by other humans.

As an Artist or Craftsperson I think it’s vital to find your own voice, to be able to express what you feel, as an individual, to the world. I know that other people have used similar processes to me but I’ve adapted them to my style and furthered them. I hope you will be able to find new and exciting “tweaks” to the processes I use. The key is experimentation and, more importantly, to have fun.

I know a lot of Artists worry about their work being copied and stolen. In a way I always feel bad for the people who copy others, how awful to not be able to express yourself and have to steal other’s ideas. What is the point? Why not buy a kit if that’s what you’re in to? The chances are they’re not going to be able to come up with something that’s as beautiful as the original. They’re always going to be one step behind and can there really be any value in copying something?

This is another reason I like the processes I used, the chaotic nature of melting and layering makes work harder to copy. I feel like someone would have to be insane to directly copy one of my pieces. Even with the projects in this book it’s highly likely that your end result will be different to the ones shown here. This is great! You will have created your own work and maybe even tweaked and changed the processes slightly.

There isn’t a right or wrong answer. Creating shouldn’t be a stressful process, it should be something you can enjoy and lose yourself in. If a project doesn’t turn out how you wanted put it away and come back to it later. Don’t throw anything away, the chances are you could cut up an old project and use it in a new one.

Keep a notebook of ideas, if you’re feeling dry on ideas find an image and try and replicate it in textiles form.

Why Melt?

My first experience of melting fabric happened at college. I made a very simple bodice from the nastiest, cheapest, most synthetic white fabric I could find. I lit a tea light and held the fabric as close to the naked flame as I could, without setting myself on fire. The result was a very satisfactory bubbling (unless the fabric stretched away from the flame too much and broke open) and a nasty cough! Joking aside please be so careful whilst doing any melting, always wear a mask and work in a well ventilated area otherwise pretty soon you’ll be sounding like you have a forty- a- day habit. If using a naked flame or doing heavy melting please have a bucket of water close to your workspace just in case and keep away from any furnishings.

Challenging yourself to make a series of small samples, like the ones below, is a great way to experiment and come up with new ideas that you want to use in a larger project. These two pages of samples show my first ever experiments with melting and burning. The controlled burnt patterns were made with a soldering iron.

It wasn’t until I went to Art college that I discovered better ways to melt fabrics and if I’m brutally honest melting fabrics, the way I do now, came about because of my laziness and lack of money.

One day at Art College I realised that melting away layers is quicker than cutting away layers. I also realised that if you laid a piece of see- through fabric on top of an incredibly tacky and cheap fabric it didn’t look so cheap and tacky. Melting away a top layer was also much cheaper than using dissolvable fabric and because of the sealing properties of heat it meant no frayed edges.