Common Threads, Common Thoughts
Last week, Common Threads had the first of what we hope will become regular residential meet-ups. A number of us live within day-trip distance of both Manchester and Bradford, so have met up a few times since the end of college, but this is the first time we’ve had a chance to be en masse for more than a few hours since the beginning of June and, I suspect the first chance any of us have had to meet up with Lin since then. I can’t believe how good it was to all be together again (or nearly all, as Sally was hoping to join us for one night but wasn’t able to in the end), sharing laughs, joys, fears, silly stories, skills, experiences and design successes and failures, sorry, I mean areas for growth. In fact “Stuff it up and do it again” (ok, not quite the phrase used but I thought I’d best keep it family friendly), fast became a mantra that I personally will be adopting and applying to a number of areas of my work. More on that another time.
One of the reasons we wanted to meet up, besides giving us the opportunity to touch base creatively (and I did smile when I realised that the first thing we did was basically have a group crit, just like we did on the Saturday mornings of assessment weekends at college, and just like a number of those I had nothing but ideas and plans to share) was to look at where we wanted to go as a textile group. We had a number of possible exhibition leads to follow up and I am equally parts thrilled and terrified that one of those has come back to us with a definite on exhibition space for 2019 and to that end we have a meeting at the end of the month to discuss the remit and scope of the exhibition and where it fits in in the grand scheme of the events commemorated in that year. Yes, I am being deliberately vague at the moment, but I promise we will share more when the time Is right.
During the review of what we had done since college finished, we shared our progress on our “Common Thread” theme, looking at what we had done with the Icelandic yarn that was spun from Sally’s flock. Some of us have a Lopi-style looser spun singles yarn, some of us have a more tightly spun 2-ply. I rocked up with nothing more than the wraps per inch of the 2-ply yarn (18 wpi for those who are interested) and a coffee stained draft of an idea I want to tweak, whilst others had samples and lengths of fabric with a specific end use in mind. I really do need to finish what’s on the 4-shaft loom so I can get on with weaving up some samples with the Icelandic yarn to check out the sett and the finishing.
A number of us have not produced much since the Summer Show, (or at least not much that is new – some of us have been producing stock for sale but not any new designs) and I for one found that this week has reinvigorated my desire to return to my sketchbook and use artwork as well as photographs to develop the visual research for my next collection. I also had a wee bit of a Eureka moment when we attended the Wallace Sewell talk at the Fashion and Textile Museum – that I could develop maybe three designs in colourways based on the original source material, but then I could just select a different set of colours to produce the same designs in, in much the same way as Wallace Sewell and countless other designers who produce work on a larger, industry-based production scale do. I know this must seem like a ridiculous thing to have only just realised I could do, but since that was not an option in our college work, it just had never occurred to me. It sort of blew my mind to be honest, and has meant I have come home, invigorated and ready to actually break out the sketchbooks and make a start.
Another thing that has come out of the discussions and create review periods is a common sketchbook project. This is something that Lin has done before in a group of three and that we are taking on as a group over the next year or so. Each of us will start off an A5 spiral bound sketchbook and work on as many or as few pages as we feel like, before passing it on to someone else within the group. They will then work on some more pages – they might further develop ideas, add things to the work already in there, or go off in a completely different direction, but by the time the book returns to the originator, it will have passed through all of our hands and who knows where that cross-fertilisation could take any of us?
As you can see, I have made a start with the front cover, and am about to start playing with my new Derwent Inktense blocks, to get an idea of what I could do with them.
Game on!
