Slow Stitch Workshop & Hand Made Repeat Patterns
- Summer Hope
- Oct 5, 2018
- 2 min read
Yesterday, the 4th of October we had a visitor called 'Aviva Leigh' who studied textiles design previously at NUA. Her main interest within textiles is the 'slow movement', this reflects her lifestyle, living in a 'slow' village, she's interested in slow stitch and natural dyeing. Our workshop was mainly about slowing down within our work and disconnecting from the world, we chose between different coloured fabric as our base for our sample, then chose other pieces of fabric which we would layer on top and stitch into, my main colours were orange, blue and pink, I felt these colours matched well together. Once we started to stitch into our fabrics, Aviva Leigh was talking to us about the historical side of slow stitch and also to explain that this exercise gives us some time to ourselves to think and to be purely focused on what we're doing, this aspect made me feel relaxed and stress-free.
My colour palette for this session:
Although I found this session quite relaxing, I personally wouldn't use it in any of my personal projects as it takes a long period of time and I don't necessarily like the outcome of it as I find it quite dull and simple to look at, the technique itself is too unplanned and unorganised compared to how I like to do my work. This possibly could be because I lack knowledge of certain hand stitch techniques; I'm only using the basic, simplistic techniques. Despite this, it's interesting to layer up pieces of fabric with stitch and colour and experiment with this technique.
Example of a sample that Aviva Leigh brought in and an image of my sample:
Moreover, today we have have a workshop about repeat pattern and how to make a repeat pattern by hand, rather than digitally. This was an interesting concept to experiment with it by using papers, paints and pens. First of all we had to colour in and paint 6 pieces of paper, each being one colour instead of taking the easy option and using coloured paper, once we had all our 6 pieces of paper coloured, we then would fold 3 of them into 16 small rectangles, then draw a shape or object related to our collaborative repeat print work and draw this onto them and cut the shape out. With 16 small shapes, we then placed them onto one of the pieces of paper in a certain way, I done mine in a 'brick' pattern, this was interesting to see how this looked hand drawn/cut out compared to making them accurately when using digital design.
Example of one repeat I have done:
This session was an interesting way of looking at repeat design and experimenting with it by hand, however, I feel it's quite difficult to try and get every shape to look the same, especially when you want to add more detail to it.
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