Street Life East African Style

Street Life in East Africa is dusty, hectic, colourful, noisy and fantastic!  At a guess I would say that a third of business takes place around the pavements and streets.  You can buy just about anything. Bananas are one of the staple foods of the people in the area.  They come in all shapes, sizes and colours and are eaten in various ways.  This street vendor is typical of what you will come across and the one common factor amongst them all is the smile.

Whole cloth, fused and painted.   I stitched the background first and then went in with the fabric oil pastels and pens.

Street Life

This was a wonderful theme, and I worry I haven't done justice to it, especially after seeing everyone else's work. I had lots of ideas, but very little time, which was my own fault. I was determined to use a street scene from Castle Donington now I have moved back here, and the perfect occasion arose in October when the annual Wakes were held. This was originally a 'hiring' fair for those seeking work and/or workers, but is now an annual fun fair held in the main street of our village. I took many photos on the last night of the fair, but the weather was bad and most of the rides were packing up. None of my photos inspired me, but I still wanted to try and show the contrast between the 17th century buildings and the modern rides and lights. I decided to try an abstract version of the houses, and add the lights and colours with thread. I then managed to scupper myself by leaving the glow-in-dark threads which I had planned to use at a meeting the day before this had to be finished. The 'houses' were pieced using simple 'no-ruler' strips, and the 'lights' free-machined.

Occupy Montreal

As in many cities around the world, we had our own "occupy" site downtown.  Lots of tents, people and general good will.  It just seemed a perfect topic at the time for street life.  (Mine was well under way before the snow arrived - it would have certainly had a different look that day!)  Having just taken courses with Noriko Endo and Katie Pasquini-Masopust at Houston, and Karen Goetzinger here at home, I felt that I was able to put to good use some of the things that I had learned.  Notably the trees à la Noriko.  A little transparency with the buildings - hopefully those squares look like lights on.  A little better eye for composition but please don't tell me about the crossed lines in the middle -  a pruning error when squaring up!   A fun topic and I still have more ideas to try from it.  Thanks Linda.

Street Life: Quebec City

This challenge was a very welcome opportunity for me to work with an architectural subject. I love cities! The piece looks simple enough but there were many steps and decisions and, yes, mistakes along the way.

Four weeks ago I went to Quebec City. I printed out some of my photos taken there and made a collage with them. Working with a photocopy of the collage, I outlined the major shapes with a marker, and then traced this line drawing to a water-soluble stabilizer, which I then spray-basted to a square of gray, hand-dyed cotton. With black, 40-weight thread, I machine-stitched the line drawing onto the cotton, backed with white Timtex.

Colourful buildings are one of the distinctive features of the Old Town, so I considered applying paint to the roof shapes to correspond to the original photos. I had a photocopy made of the stitched cloth so I could preview the effect, but in the end I decided on a monochromatic palette. I may make a more colourful version in the future. I used TAP to introduce the photographic images, but they were so high-contrast that they detracted from the couple walking in the foreground, so I scratched some of the TAP off the cloth. The original collage included some beautiful stone walls, but again I opted for simplicity and decided against duplicating the texture in stitch.

There was some scorching of the cotton when I applied the TAP, and I can only guess that there may have been some residue of soda ash, basting spray or stabilizer that caused this. Also, I must remember in the future to make my sketch a little less than 12" a side, as I like to have a narrow border of the painted canvas mount showing. By making the sketch 12" square, I had to trim the edges a little too close to the photo images.

Street Life

How ironic that my own challenge title caused me more problems than any previous one I've done! It seemed that each time I came close to a resolution something inside me complicated the original idea to a point where it became unmake-able and probably unreadable if completed.
I suspect that I was guilty of trying too hard because, in the end, it was a personal response that led to this piece which was completed within twenty-four hours of my first response.
A recent trip into Manchester lasted longer than intended and I got caught up in the evening rush hour as the already busy streets filled with workers making their way home. I used to love the buzz of the city but this time I was struck by the isolation of the individuals in the crowd and my own increasing discomfort at being propelled by the momentum of the rush hour.

The border fabric was chosen to represent my discomfort and the photograph was Colour mapped in Gimp to match the fabric as closely as I could. The photograph was then bondawebbed, slashed and attached to the backing fabric.

In the end I enjoyed putting this piece together and thanks must go to Michele for suggesting an offshoot from a previous piece!

You see life on the streets

Thanks for the theme, Linda B.  As some of you already know my first (wicked) thought was a rat disappearing into a drain pipe!  But I had foolishly promised to try a new technique this time and I would have reverted to my usual style.  My second idea was to try out the collage effect that Heather and Michele are so successful at - I have loads of images of doors and architecture from France to play with.  But it was the third idea that kept niggling and developing in the back of my mind.  So here it is.  The skill level is zero and there are loads more things I 'could' have done had I had the time - and who's fault is that?  Anyway, it was fun and I thoroughly enjoyed this one.

And yes, Dianne, it was someone with a bag - but you couldn't see the bag  in that little clip - good guess!

The figures were sketched, scanned and printed onto old fashioned typist's copy paper and only the main lines stitched through the paper.  Then, with paper removed, the blocks of coloured fabric were fused in position and the rest of the lines stitched free-hand.  The border is first satin stitched then four colourful yarns twisted and attached with the serpentine stitch (the multi stitch meandering one).

Now I can't wait to see what you all have come up with.

Hilary

Street Life

This is my piece which I have given an African theme. The graffitti means "come" in Zulu and I have used Shwe Shwe fabric for the dress the flower seller is wearing. This is a very South African 100% cotton which is used extensively in the quilting medium and also is an extremely popular garment fabric. We have come a long way with this fabric and you can read all about the history of this if you google the name. We had a wonderful show of this at the Birmingham Festival.

Looking forward to seeing eveyone's interpretation - its always exciting to see what everyone has done.

Course

These are some of the exercises that we did on Karen's course.  Each person's is very different which made the class all that more interesting.

 This one was meant to show the effect of colour placement and how colours affect each other.  The pink and orange are very bright and don't show well in the picture, but you get a sense of size of the centre squares - they are all equal, but don't look it.

 I've wanted to play with trees for a while, and we were given a series of words and told to choose one and portray it.  This is growth.

More colour exercise.  The top left is an assembly of different pieces to show how to make transparency.  The other 3 were meant to show the effect of colours on other colours.  I think some of the effects have been lost in the photographs.....the best one is the diagonal slash - it looks  different with the different backgrounds but it's the same colour in both.

Another Teaser!

Just to make me feel I am getting there ...... my teaser! Need to shut myself in the room and get down to it!

Happy news

I am happy to report that both Heather and I will be showing work from our previous posts in a juried exhibition at Stewart Hall Gallery in Pointe Claire. This is a show called The New Collection 2012 and will include drawing, painting, photography, and mixed media. The annual exhibition is showing this year from November 26 to January 22nd with the vernissage on Sunday November 27th at 2pm. The works then go into a rental collection(also for sale) available for the year from the rental and sales service on the second floor library. One of my blue Day in the Life Series will show and two of Heather's Tuscany Series . We are both very pleased to participate in this show.

Colour and Design

Our Text'Art group (minus Pam, plus Katherine who didn't get in the picture unfortunately) met for 2 days with Karen Goetzinger, a textile artist from Ottawa.  She led us through all sorts of exercises  on colour and design with the intention of improving our understanding how both work.  It was rewarding and fun.  And much appreciated.  It will hopefully allow us to better critique our own work, and perhaps give us a more knowledgeable eye to look at others'.  

Thanks also to Helena for letting us use her wonderful gallery space.  For those of you who don't know us:  l to r  Helena, Colleen, Dianne, Heather, Michele.  

A little teaser...

Here's a tiny snippet from my Street Life.  Doesn't the fabric look rough close-up?!

Hilary