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Month: May 2012

Silk Paper

Silk Paper

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Over on the Felting and Fiber Forum, we’ve been talking about silk paper on and off over the last few weeks. It started when Pam showed us this gorgeous silk vase and then a beautiful silk box made from delicate silk hankies, threads and Angelina fibres. Then Karen was inspired to try making silk paper and after finding some silks work better with different methods, made some gorgeous pieces.

Once all the hard work had been done 😉 I thought I’d give it a go too. I decided to just jump in and try it with spray starch. I’d read a few years ago that it was possible to make silk paper by spraying a layer of silk fibres with laundry starch, adding another layer of silk fibres and spraying that, then covering with baking parchment and ironing until it was dried. Well, it’s almost that easy. It’s hard to get the spray from the can of starch onto the fibres without blowing them away, so it takes a bit of practice to get the spray to ‘drizzle’. I found it helpful to spray first, so after a few trials, I got an old piece of cotton cloth and layed it onto brown parcel paper, sprayed the cloth with starch, added a layer of silk, drizzled then sprayed starch onto that, then added more silk, more starch, then covered with another layer of cloth, another piece of parcel paper and ironed it on both sides until it was dry.

The results were mostly really good. A few times, the layers wanted to separate, but then I had two layers of finer silk paper. I used one of these thinner layers to test out the silk paper before I made more. You can see a photo of before felting here, and after felting here. These are some of the silk papers I made, they are mostly dyed mulberry and tussah silk.

I did a small trial piece of felt using the tufty bits from around the edges of the silk paper. From this, I realised I needed to use bolder colours for the background so the silk paper could stand out more for the result I wanted. For this second piece, I started off with a layout approximately 34.5 x 34.5 cm

It shrank a lot from top to bottom, and finished up roughly 22 x 33 cm. I didn’t particularly position the silk paper pieces so that the fibres were running top to bottom, and a lot were two layers, so I’m not really sure why there was so much uneven shrinkage, but I’d noticed it on the trial piece too. Both pieces had two even layers of merino tops.

There were a few pieces of the silk paper which were thicker or had a lot of starch on, which took a little more work to felt in, but as you can see from this angle, the silk paper felts in well to the surface.

Lyn from rosiepink recommended the book ‘Handmade Silk Paper’ by Kath Russon, so I’m hoping to have a read through that soon and try the wallpaper paste method of making silk paper. Have you made silk paper or paper from any other fibres? Do you use it in felting or something else? I’d love to hear about it or see photos if you have 🙂

How To Approach a Gallery – Part Two

How To Approach a Gallery – Part Two

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Now that you’ve done the leg work, researched the gallery and gotten an appointment to present your work as I discussed in Part One of Approaching a Gallery article, what are the important things that you need to discuss at your meeting and what should you bring?

The most important thing of course is to bring your work that you wish to sell. If the gallery has requested specific items, make sure to bring in a good selection. You need to have at least five to seven of each item to make a nice display. You can also bring more with you and leave it in your car. Then if you are asked for more pieces, you will have them readily available. You should have an inventory sheet listing all of the items, how many of each you will leave with the gallery and the retail price of each item.

Each of your items should have a hang tag that tells your story but it should not have any of your contact information on the tag. Galleries do not want customers reading the tag and then trying to contact you directly. The tag should have room for pricing but you’ll need to work with the gallery on whether you should price the items or whether the gallery will price the work. Bring a few extra hang tags just in case one gets lost. Also bring business cards and any other information cards that need to go with your products.

If your items need to be displayed in a certain manner to sell well, you might consider bringing a display rack that the gallery will use to show your work. Again, you will need to discuss this with them but many galleries will appreciate the offer. Think about ways to make it easier for the gallery to sell your products. Do you have signage that will help sell your work? Bring that along and see if they want to use your signage. Some galleries will make all their own signage but many don’t.

Bring any other written information that you have such as an artist statement, brochures, postcards or resume. You may not need any of these items but it will be useful to have them in case the gallery does want the information. You might also check to see if they need any digital photos for adding to their website. You can bring those on a CD or offer to e-mail them to the gallery after the meeting. You should also bring your own consignment form just in case the gallery doesn’t have one. Most will but if they don’t, bring your own already filled out and ready to sign. If they won’t sign it, I would not put my work in that gallery. You have will have little recourse at all to get your work back if you don’t have a signed agreement. You can find consignment agreements online. Here is one I found at Law For Art.

Once you’ve shown your work and the gallery has decided to take all or a portion of your items, you need to ask questions about how they handle consignment. What is the percentage that the gallery takes? When do they pay for items that have sold? The standard is to pay for items sold in the following first week of the month. So if your items were sold in June, then you should be paid no later than end of the first week in July. What happens if a customer damages an item or if one of your pieces is stolen? The gallery should be responsible for any damage or shoplifting and should pay you the amount that would have been due if the item was sold. All this information should be in the consignment agreement. Take the time to read it and make sure you understand it before you sign.

Where in the store will your work be displayed? If items sell, how often do they want you to bring in new work? Check to see if it is OK to come in periodically to rearrange or switch out work that isn’t selling with other pieces. I think it is important to stay in contact with the gallery. If you live nearby, check in occasionally to see how your work is selling. Get to know the gallery staff. The more they know about you and your work, the better they will be at selling it. Developing a good relation with the gallery is key to selling more of your work.

Ann had asked about why a gallery/store takes your work on consignment versus buying it wholesale. Some galleries only take work on consignment. Others do both. Many times it is in the way you approach the gallery. If you are tentative and don’t specifically say that you sell on a wholesale basis, the gallery will often tell you that they will take your work on consignment. This is less of a risk to the gallery because if the work doesn’t sell, they can give it back to you without any investment lost. If you want to sell you work on a wholesale basis, then your approach to the gallery should be made in a professional wholesale manner. You should contact them and give them information about your work with a wholesale price list and make it clear that you want to sell your work to them wholesale. If the artist tells me that they only sell their work wholesale and I want their work, I will buy it wholesale. If I am not sure that the work will sell well, I will either not order it or I will offer to carry it on a consignment basis.

I would love to hear any of your experiences in approaching a gallery and if you have any questions, I’d love to find an answer for you. Also, if you have any specific topics you would like to hear about in future Marketplace Mondays, let me know.

Over Dyeing a Shrug Jacket

Over Dyeing a Shrug Jacket

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I’ve been dying some shrug jackets this week. I made all the fabric white then sewed them with silk thread before dying. this way the thread will get dyed with the fabric and it will match.

This one I did spiced pumpkin. I would say it came out of the dye pot pumpkin without any spice at all. So, it needs to be over dyed.

Orange shrug before over dying

I decided to add my own spice. i found a reddish brown to use. I mixed it up and poured it on in stripes across the wet jacket.

Orange shrug with dye poured on.

Then I rolled it up and popped it the microwave for a few min to get it started. I wanted some of the striping to remain and not have the dye just disperse into the water and dye the whole thing. for plastic I used half a cheap plastic drop sheet. the are nice and thin but huge.

Orange shrug ready for the microwave.

Here it is after cooking and drying. It’s not a great picture because it is a really bright sunny day.

Orange shrug after over dying

You can see some of the stripe but it’s not a rigid line and the orange has gone  a little spiced and not quite as blinding orange.

Book Review

Book Review

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I thought it would be fun to go through my library of fiber art books and do a review of some of my favorites. I don’t have any other books by Jan Beaney and Jean Littlejohn but I have seen some of their other books. I have to say that I would recommend anything written by them. They are a great team and pack a lot of useful information in their books.

If you click on the photo above it will take you to Amazon. I think the book is out of print because the new copies are really pricey but you can buy them used for less. Or look in your local library, maybe you’ll be lucky enough to find this book. I love this book. I refer back to it frequently and have read it cover to cover at least three times.

The book has two sections the first is “Design to Embroider” and the second is “Stitched Images”.  The first section is about how to develop designs on paper and mixed media, where to look to find ideas and exploring those ideas. It is a good start to basic design and how to relate it to embroidery. The photos and examples are wonderful and inspiring. They show their own work as well as work of other artists.

Section two of the book is about taking your designs and making them into an embroidery. There is information about fabric paints and various methods of using them, working with applique’, stitch themes, machine embroidery and selecting a theme. This book is not a step by step instruction book. It does give basic information about how to use various fabric paint products but it doesn’t contain any projects to follow. The book is geared towards getting you to think about your own designs and how to develop backgrounds and then add stitch to make a complex experimental stitch piece.

The book talks a bit about using different stitches but it is not a stitch dictionary and limited directions for individual hand or machine stitches. What it does is give you lots of ideas about how to interpret designs and various approaches to use to achieve the desired effects. Every time I read the book, I find something new to consider. If you only do traditional embroidery from a kit and don’t want to learn how to design, this book isn’t for you. If you’d like to take a more experimental approach and learn how to design your work, you’ll love this book. All the reviews on Amazon are 5 stars!

If you have a favorite fiber art book, I’d love to hear about it. Hop on over to the forum and  tell us about your favorite book.

Colour

Colour

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I was looking through my photo albums and flickr photostream for some colour inspiration. I ended up with a large folder of photos and thought I’d share a few here:

This was an experimental piece using lots of layers and lots of pieces of prefelt, yarns, curls and coils. It eventually became a placemat and coaster set.

This is a close up of a very early piece of felt I made when I had a limited amount of colours.

This was part of the layout for a piece of felt for a notebook cover

Trying out new colour blends. I usually blend my own colours and add in other fibres that I like, but when I saw some colourful blends on World of Wool’s site, I thought I’d give them a go. They’re really nice and I re-order. I made two purses from this piece.

A very texturey needlefelted piece, made from hand dyed alpaca, coarse wools and wool locks.

Another piece using prefelts and coils. One thing I learned from my first piece was to add all the ‘extras’ equally over the piece for equal shrinkage. This was a placemat and coaster set for my girlfriend.

An experimental texture piece using lots of different fibres like silk, silk carrier rods, dyed scrim, dyed locks, bamboo tops, silk scraps.

Do you have an inspiration folder? Do you ever look back over old work and rework ideas?

What Happened to the Orange Batt

What Happened to the Orange Batt

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This is just a quick post to show you what I have been up to this week. I am selling at The New Art Festival in Ottawa June 2 and 3 . http://www.newartfestival.ca/ I am trying to get everything I want made, made by then. This week I have been working on I pad bags and  E-reader bags. I am sewing these as a better way to make sure I end up with the right sized every time. I am a slow sewer. I have my machine set to turtle. I decided this was a good thing to make with the art batts I carded up a while ago. http://wp.me/p1WEqk-AX

 

iPad bags in progress

The bags turned out nice but boring I thought. I am couching down some yarn I have to make them more interesting. The one the right everything is pinned but not sewn yet.I did two sizes one to put the iPad in short side first and the other to go in long side first. When I asked people what they prefered, it was a pretty even split.

All the bags are lined. Here you can see the yarn and thread I am going to decorate this one with.

iPad bags

Two almost finished ones. They have their decorations but I am not sure about how to close them. I was thinking a ribbon or piece or yarn and a button to wrap it around. I am not a fan of velcro. I never seen to have much luck sewing or gluing it on. Anyone else have a good idea?

Abstraction – Taking It Further

Abstraction – Taking It Further

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I was really inspired by Zed’s use of Photoshop to “abstract” her photos. So I decided to take my sketches from my last post about Ann’s challenge and use Photoshop to see what the results would be. I mainly used filters and I didn’t really keep track of what I did. But if you have Photoshop, you can just play around with the filters until you come up with something you like. If you would like to compare the original pen and ink sketches, go to this post here.

You can click on the photos to see better. This one is the mosaic filter. I really like how the background moves from light to dark. I didn’t really see that in the drawing itself.

I can’t remember what I did to this one but I really like the dramatic contrast between the background and the birch trees. This to me is a much striking composition.

This gives an almost impressionistic feel to the dogwood branches. It looks kind of cool but I think the element that catches the eye in this composition is the lines of the red dogwood branches against the background and this doesn’t really improve that.

I thought this was an interesting effect and it might be the embossing filter. I like the way the blue and the red play off each other in this one.

This is one of the outlining filters, I think. I like the contrast of the darker hill in the background. I also like the outline of black on the dogwood branches as it seems to give them more implied shape.

This one isn’t that changed but does give more outlines than the original and makes it a bit darker. I think this helps to ground the trees.

Now this is abstract. I’m sure I never would have come up with this idea on my own when I was drawing the willows. But I kind of like it. What do you think?

This is another one where I used a mosaic filter. I do like how this filter works. You can see it better if you click on the photo to enlarge it. I don’t think that you could repeat this effect very easily in felt though.

I really enjoyed playing with my sketches in Photoshop. There are a million options and it can give you some ideas that you might not come up with on your own. Which of the sketches do you like now? Which one do you think I should use to make a piece of felt? If you played with abstracting a photo or a sketch in Photoshop, I’d love to see it.

Quarterly review

Quarterly review

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It’s hard to believe that 4 months have already gone by this year, I’m not sure that I’ve done a quarter of the things I planned to do. I did try out a lot of the fibres that Karen sent me and even made a nice piece of felt from some silk threads that came off the sari silk ribbon.

I haven’t used any of the gorgeous threads that Ruth sent me, hopefully when I’ve learned a good variety of stitches from the TAST challenge I can do them justice. I’ve enjoyed learning new stitches, one I really enjoyed exploring was running stitch. My first thought was ‘running stitch?! what can you do with that?’ A lot as it happens 🙂

I haven’t had chance to explore dyeing further yet this year, but there’s still plenty of time for that. I’ve enjoyed the Studio Challenges so far, not only producing pieces for the challenges, but also exploring the themes in depth, taking photos, altering photos, always looking for things to fit the themes.

Last week after Ruth’s Challenge post, I chose some of my old abstract acrylic paintings to get some inspiration from. I started with a small acrylic in blues, greens and yellows.

And made a small felt piece inspired by it.

I’ve done quite a lot of work on my project for using ‘other’ fibres and fabrics in felting. I still haven’t worked out what format or formats it will be in, but I think that will become clearer as I go along and have a better idea of how all the info would best be presented. I’m working around a loose outline, but as usual there’s always something new to learn with each piece of felt, or a new idea forming wanting to be explored. I’m trying to stick to the outline and write down the other ideas for exploring later, but I don’t want to forget them while they’re fresh, either 🙂

I’ve already been inspired by the great felting and fibre community we’re part of. It’s great to read all the comments we get on the studio site each day and I love logging onto the forum and seeing everyone’s new projects. I really like the way we get inspired to try out new things from each other’s posts, compare our results and share techniques. I think I’m adding to my list of things to do rather than ticking them off, but that’s alright 🙂  How are your lists of things for the year? Are you getting much ticked off or are they growing, like mine?

A Real Life Example of Product Presentation

A Real Life Example of Product Presentation

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Amanda from FeltFinland has graciously offered to do a guest post for Marketplace Mondays. Take a look at her website to see some of her delightful creations that will really put a smile on your face. So here’s Amanda.

You have worked hard to make some great felted works of art. You have an opportunity to sell them. What you need are those extra little touches that will catch the eye of the buyer and also encourage them to return and buy again another day. Product presentation is a key part of selling. No matter how stunning your creations, if they are haphazardly piled on a table, not many people will give them a second glance. I have developed and learned a few ideas over the last 3 years of selling at craft fairs which I am happy to share with you.

Make use of all the space on your table without overcrowding.

Don’t forget you can add height – a small set of shelves, an upturned box, branches, logs are a few things I have used. I have always liked wood and wool together. 

Choose an appropriate coloured cover (sheets and old curtains are cheap options) for your table, one that won’t detract from your work. Make sure it is big enough to fall down and cover the front open side of the table. This allows you to store your boxes and bags under the table without the world seeing them! One of the photos shows how not to do it – pink cover which is too short – all the tables were set up the same by the folks organising the fair!

I also like to use baskets and basket weave trays of various shapes and sizes to display my products – this also helps to keep things together and prevents products getting all muddled.

Pricing – personally I like to individually price my items, using free-standing labels on the table top next to the items or small price tags stuck on pins then stuck in the relevant item. I do not like to put sticky labels directly onto the felt.

If you do not want to show your prices, have the costs of each item readily available (in your head!) for when a customer asks. Print prices on stout card from your computer using a clear bold font – these can easily be reused too.

Add your own personal touch – I give names to a lot of my creatures such as Aliens, Owls etc. I print them onto good quality card from my computer and these go home with their owner. Don’t forget to add to the label your company name, website etc. 

Pop one of your business cards into the bag the sold item is going home in. 

Cellophane bags work really well with small felted items and can be sealed with customised stickers. Bags are available in different sizes and cellophane wrap can also be used. Paper bags have their place but will hide your creation! Plastic bags have their use if it is pouring with rain to keep your sales dry on their way home!

I hope these few pointers will help. I found it useful attending craft fairs as a buyer and seeing how other people presented and packaged things. It gave me some great ideas but also showed me what not to do!

Guest poster: Amanda Heikkinen


Second Quarter Challenge – Abstraction

Second Quarter Challenge – Abstraction

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I have been attempting to work on Ann’s second quarter challenge but I have a really hard time with abstraction. I guess that most of my work ends up being realistic. I find it difficult to take an idea and make it more abstract. Do you find it easy or hard to do abstract work? At least with felt, it is harder to do very fine details so the process kind of lends itself to abstraction.

So I decided I would do some sketches with watercolors and ink. I looked online for photos and found one of birch trees. I took out all the background and just picked a dark blue. Then I was planning on painting the birch trees with pinks and oranges to represent the sunlight hitting them. I got to this point and just couldn’t add in the pink and orange. I tried it on some scrap paper and hated it. So this isn’t really abstract. What do you think?

Next I tried abstracting a photo of red twig dogwood in winter. Again, I really simplified the background and I used red paper cut into tiny slivers for the dogwood. I think this is a little better but I’m still not all that happy with the composition.

My local surface design group has been doing a monthly challenge where we pick an artist and then do something based on that artist’s style. This past month was a local artist, Marshall Noice, so I looked him up and lo and behold, he works in an abstract manner. I could take care of both challenges with one project. 🙂 I printed out two of his pieces and pasted them into my studio journal.

I had never really examined Noice’s work before and both of these examples are pastels on paper. I love the rich, deep colors and I do like the abstract nature of his work. So I decided I would try a photo of willow trees in winter to see if I could achieve a similar effect. Again, I used watercolors and ink in my studio journal.

Here’s the result. It seems a little anemic to me. Especially the bottom portion. But it is somewhat abstract, perhaps. I’d love to hear your critique. I am thinking of doing one of these pieces in felt. Which would you choose and why?

This last photo is definitely not abstract. Just thought I’d throw it in since it was the next page in my studio journal. So that’s what I’ve been working on in my spare time besides my stitch homework. I’ll keep plugging along with the abstract challenge. And it is a real challenge but I guess that’s the point, right?