Collections and Fragments

Do you collect all kinds of bit and pieces of stuff? I do.

I see the possibilities for artiness in all kinds of nonsense and although it doesn't make my house tidy, at all, it does make a lovely weekend of messing around with textures and fragments and the joy of just seeing what happens as I play.

This heart is made on a piece of card and has all sorts bits stuck on with glue. It has broderie fabric, lace, vintage adverts, lace, printed tissue paper and pieces of tea bag.

It also has a little fragment of fabric which has been embroidered with the word MEMORIES because this would be a perfect way of preserving objects from the past. 

Little pieces of cloth, fragments of letters or a poem, a family recipe, buttons from a favourite childhood garment, photographs.
All of these could form a collage such as this and would take us back to another place or time whenever we looked at it.

The heart has been mounted on a painted page in my sketchbook. Very roughly painted to give it lots of texture, I have doodled and written onto it in parts to look like lace. It is still a work in progress.

This is also a way to add your own words to a piece of artwork to make it more personal and meaningful. 

If you are a wonderfully tidy person who wouldn't dream of collecting nonsense just share my picture. BUT!
If you are as crazy as me and have some stash, get it out and play. It is no good hiding it in the cupboard! Have fun! x

Workshop details for Chesham at last!

11th February:  Mixed Media Fabric Art books. £65

Using hand painted Calico and mixed media we will make a handmade fabric book with textile pages and pockets. There may be opportunities to continue learning additional techniques throughout the year to add to your skills and the beauty of your book.

11th March: Scrap Stitching £65

We will use hand embroidery techniques with treasured scraps of textiles, silk and vintage embellishments to make a little picture with exquisite details. Later in the year, in June, there will be a chance to learn a different set of techniques with rust dyed fabrics.

8th April: Blanket Books £65

We will use vintage wool blankets, wool fibre and hand embroidery to make Folk Art inspired treasure book.

May 13^th: Vintage Inspired Mini Quilts £65

We will use some fantastic vintage resources like antique lace, pearl and linen buttons, precious found objects and vintage photos to learn how to make tiny  hand embroidered fabric 'Quilts'. You will be able to take these home finished, to be framed or use them in a future textile project. You could also use them as pages in your Fabric Books if you are working on one of these with me.

10th June: Scrap Stitch 2. £65

We will use precious scraps of vintage fabrics and previously rust dyed fabrics with hand embroidery to make an exquisite textile panel.

8th July: Folk Art Needle felted and hand embroidered picture. £65

We will needle felt and embroider a Folk Art inspired picture onto vintage wool blanket using merino wool fibre and hand dyed, silk and wool threads.

13th and 14th October: 2 Day workshop. Altered Books. £150

This is a 2 day workshop which will introduce the subject of Altered Books from scratch and advance into adding doors with real hinges, niches and decorative 3D elements. The 2 days are packed full of mixed media materials and techniques. You will leave with lots of ideas to continue your adventures with Altered Books.

To book a place please email Paula at: paula@paulawatkins.co.uk

Altered Books in May

It is nearly time for this month's Saturday workshop! Altered Books.

On the 23rd May in Boxmoor we will be making, starting and learning new techniques to make unique little works of ART from old, unloved hardback books.

It is such a happy experience to see beautiful things  emerging from the pages and seeing how everybody interprets the techniques that I'm showing them into their own personal artwork.

This time we are going to be working with Acrylic mediums. Crackle paints, moulding paste,
iridescent mediums and paints, and resin.

We are also going to play with openings and put little doors with hinges into our books.

Each person can choose to work to a theme or just to play with the techniques.

Have a look through this blog for photos of Altered Books and there are lots on my website too. www.paulawatkins.co.uk if you'd like to see examples of this lovely art for.

Here are a few more  to show some of the techniques we will be playing with.

This first one shows some of the different mediums used with iridescent paint effects, It also shows a window cut between the pages to showcase a vintage optometrist lens which has been treated with resin and wired between the pages. 

This little heat treated copper door has brass hinges and a fastening. It  opens to reveal the vintage dresses hanging in the wardrobe by a chain and little wire hangers. The fairies on the other page a peeking in.

This is a stitched panel on a book page using some of my collection of buttons and lace.

As you can see, an Altered Book can be anything you want it to be.

Let me know if you'd like to join us on this workshop or one in the future. We have such fun!

Monday Vintage Blanket Stitch Workshop

Tomorrow is the next sewing workshop and we are going to be working with Mixed Media and Paper as a way of adding a modern twist to our Folk Art inspired stitching.

We are then going to be stitching on these and adding elements of our own stories and memories to the collages.

Here are some more photos of the gorgeous Paper Patchwork pieces.  First Dawn's.

Judi's.

Stella's

We are also working with Tea bags which I have been saving  for ages.They are amazing to work with because they are made from really strong paper which doesn't fall apart when used with water. They are great to stitch on, they are already tea dyed, ha ha, and I'm especially in love with the round ones. 

I also just wanted to show you a finished blanket sampler made by the wonderfully talented Dawn Walsh. I need to get a bigger photo so that you can see the incredible detail. She has decided to frame this instead of using it as a blanket book cover and brought it to show to us. It looks totally amazing in a frame. I am so, so proud of my stitchers. This is amazing Dawn.

If you are free during the day once a month on a Monday, join us. Slow stitching with gorgeous materials is good for your soul  and it is so lovely to allow yourself a day just for you. We meet in Hemel Hempstead.

More Gelli Printing coming very soon! and Altered Books too.

The new workshops are booking up fast!

On April 11th I'm repeating the beginners Gelli Printing workshop to fit in all the people who wanted a place last time. I so hope you can make it for this one if you missed out last time.

There will be Gelli part 2 in the summer where we will be developing our prints with drawing and experimenting with using our prints to make repeatable images on fabric  and embellishing them with stitch so it would be great to do the beginners workshop to get some really good images to use for part 2.

The whole process is so addictive and if you have been thinking about getting a gelli plate this is a great way to try it out and buy one if you like it.

On May 23rd the very popular Altered Book workshop will be happening again.

There are lots of images from some of my Altered Books further back in this blog and also on my website: 

www.paulawatkins.co.uk

They are such a joy to make: to take an old unloved book and make it into a very personal piece of art feels like rescuing an old friend and giving her a breath of new life.

We will be learning lots of techniques for starting and working in our books. The day is suitable for beginners, experienced mixed media artists and art journallers and everyone who wants a day of playing with paint, print, glues and exciting art media.

Both workshops cost £65 for the day and include everything except lunch.

Contact me through my website to book.

Christmas Paper Patchwork

On the Mixed Media group I belong to we decided to do a Christmas patchwork panel swap.

We all got assigned different dimensions for our panel and as there were 10 people in the swap we each had to make 10 identical panels- one for each member of the swap.

At the end we each received one from each person and a diagram of how they would all fit together.

I thought I'd do a little tutorial of how I made mine because lots of people have been asking about how to make the paint effects, how to use the products and how to piece it all together.

This may take a while so get a cuppa  and lets get messy!

1. My panel is 4"wide by 5" high so I chose some black card and ran it through the Sizzix Bigshot in a Snowflake and a spotty Embossing Folder. It turned my cardboard into  deeply embossed  patterned cards and I painted them with Gold and Copper Jaquard Lumiere paints which is rich and metallic and perfect for using on fabric, card and anything you like. LOVE this paint!

I also cut some birds and reindeer in the black card with the Sizzix. I know they were all supposed to be the same but I got excited and can't make decisions when I'm excited!

  I wanted the panels to look vintage, so although the bright metallics look good I wanted more depth to the paint effects. When  you are making your own painted backgrounds you can choose your own colour scheme so I decided to make 3 different versions of vintage metallics.

The first one is Verdigris which is the look of copper when it has been aged by the weather. It gets lovely blues and greens mixed in with the copper and metallics.

The second is much brighter with more of the metallic colour showing through.

The third is more like an Aged Bronze.It is darker and has a white bloom on the surface.

2.You can do a mix and match of all the finishes and stop when you like the look of your backgrounds. There are no rules and it is fun to just play with the paints.

We start by putting a blob of lime green, turquoise and white on a plate. These look quite bright but we are going to be blending them and mixing them and between these 3 colours you can make all kinds of different tints, shades and depths of colour.

You can mix the colours on the brush and on the plate but it it really important to have a really dry brush before you paint so when you like the colour you have mixed rub most of it off on to a paper towel so that it looks like there is almost none left. Not like the brush above!

3. Now really lightly brush the colour onto the texture of your card. Try to brush over just the  top of the textured surface. Add some patches of the other colours and mix them together a bit but make sure your brush stays really dry.

4. Wipe some of the paint off with a paper towel to make it look old and worn and to buff up some of the metallic colours and make them shine.

Time to make the reindeer and birdy embellishments! I wanted a crackly vintage finish on these. Ranger make a lovely crackle paint called Rock Candy which produces  transparent glittery fine crackles with just one step of painting. I painted all my shapes with a fairly thick layer of the crackle and let them dry.

Because it is transparent it doesn't really show on the black so I needed to put something over the top to show off the lovely crackles! I used Copper glitter Stickles. I put a little bit on my finger and rubbed it over the crackles which picked up the texture really well. I also used some Treasure Gold on my finger to rub over the texture and give a bit of shine..

Before sticking my shapes on with PVA glue I rubbed the outer edges of the panels with black Treasure Gold to finish them and make them look aged. I then stuck on some gorgeous bronze metal snowflakes with Ranger Multi Medium in Matte finish which disappears when dry and holds really strongly, and some little berry wreaths which I made from a berry pick that I took apart.

Here is a closer look at 4 of the panels. Have a go at making one yourself but if Christmas is too near you can use this technique all year round to make lovely textured artwork for cards, journals and scrapbooks etc. Try using different colour combinations to make them look completely unique each time.

Racing into a new teaching year!

Today I was in a meeting to schedule my teaching for the coming academic year. There are some very exciting new courses coming up!

We will be designing courses in Fabulous Felt part 1 and advanced felt which will include a seamless bag, a Cobweb felt stole  and a Nuno Felt scarf!

There will be Christmas Crafts which will include felt decorations and the White on White wall hanging that every one has been desperate to make. We will also include some fab pop up snowflake cards.

We have been planning some more Jewellery and Vintage Crafts courses too. These were really popular last year and we have lots of new techniques up our sleeves.

Artist Trading Cards are so very popular with everyone that we will be doing courses in these little beauties all over the county! I know lots of people have been waiting for the next round of these classes so they can learn new techniques to add to their collections.

This year I hope to be teaching many more Mixed Media techniques with Altered Books and Book Art of all kinds.

I will have some great things for sale too and some tutorials coming up to go with them so watch this space for all of those.

If you are interested in any of the coming courses, contact me as soon as you can. Last year so many people missed out because the classes filled quicker than we could publicise them.

My next page...

...is supposed to celebrate all the time I am going to have this summer whilst teaching has stopped for a few weeks. I was going to spend lovely hours doing some samples for next years workshops, tidying up, and lazing around watching the Olympics. Ha! The lazing around is mostly what I've been doing.

So, I have just realised that time is ticking by and I haven't really achieved anything much. I have planned some fabby days off though (days off from having days off?) and I will be going to the Festival of Quilts, The Autumn Fair Trade Show, and some days mooching around London and Brighton.

But of course all of these jolly days out are going to be very hard work (yep sure!) looking at new products and planning new mixed media and textile courses. So watch this space and see what's coming up!

Anyway...back to the time page...this is made with  tin foil and metallic card which has been embossed in the Sizzix Big Shot, coloured with inks and acrylic paints and then crackled with Viva Croco crackle.