for this project i wanted to do something i hadnt done yet because i have the most time before may to cock it up and save it :) i want to make something BIG AND TEXTURED AND COLOURFUL and i wanted to pick something that would make my brain hurt
i summarised all the set briefs to make it easier to pick and i must be very stupid because the idea of doing something about digital identity makes me want to rip my moles off and i ALWAYS do briefs about belonging so i went for MATERIAL BRIEF YAYYYY :0.
once id picked my brief i decided STRAIGHT AWAY i wanted to use vr and make a massive replica of my head that people could go inside and walk around my brain and see all the colours and textures whioch is BAD because i do this with every project i need to calm the fuck down and read lots and gather information before i start picking the final outcome of the project WHEN WILL I LEARNNNNN however it is a fun idea so maybe this happens maybe not kristian said he'd help me set up the VR part so it will be a magical mystery whether it happens or not :0
synesthesia - neuropsychological trait in which the stimulation of one sense causes the automatic experience of another sense.
after kristian told me about synesthesia i did some INVESTIGATING and i think i have the personality = colour one and i sometimes know what colour and sensations are for songs but that might just be my brain having fun. i wanted to do an experiment and see if i associated colours with personality types subconsciously, like the colours i associate people match to other with the same personality.
looking at this all laid out i can figure out why i associate people with colours a little bit! i also think of textures and objects when i think of people so ill make a little colour key to explain what each colour means in my head.
green - leaves, trees, moss, no loud noises, friendly, chill, terrarium, would be interesting to see inside their brains, cold breeze, sun when its freezing, teapots, rain, wet logs, reading, good listeners, apples
dark red - scary resting face, chocolate cake, evenings in winter, crazy backstory, pepsi max, wet pavement, coats, reserved (excluding ruby lol), refillable drink machines, dark wooden tables
dark blue - computers, chips, showing people things on their phone, savoury food, february, having a collection of tshirts, telly on fridays, full-fat coke, lizards, googling symptoms, 2010's, cold baking trays with crumbs on them, clever about specific things, think lots
purple - wine, glitter, sequins, magical, chinese takeaway, dressing up for the pub, re-useable water bottles, holey socks, bread, caring, fun drunk, chatting at night, staying up late, cold nights in summer, automatic porch lights, grapes, music
pink - cherry flavour, particular, superstitious, make-up, prosecco and chambord, going out for tea, meeting in town, photographs, pretty hair, would love to be them for a day, rainy spring days, flowers, perfume, saving presents, baking
mauve - hugs, tea, familiar smelling houses, sleeping on setees, biscuit tins, reed diffusers, warm, autumn, wooly hats, driving past churches, shopping at 8pm, M&S, christmas, twinkling stars, earrings, straight hair, walking boots, virgin radio, sparkly jumpers for new years eve.
yellow - september, cry at dogs trust adverts, lemonade, raincoats, fun days out, pubs, cider, holidays, candles, sundays, old clothes, putting washing on the wirlygig, sound of fridge beeping, fireplaces, blankets, english puddings, going to the seaside when its cloudy, hot donuts
light blue - hot chocolate, excited, snow, meadowhall, weatherspoons, chips, instagram, beanbags, shower gel, tic tacs, watching films on laptops, sunday dinner
orange - banana bread, fields, video games, fruit juice, clever, dogs
after tutorial with everyone kristian recommended i look into why im so interested in this, and do as much research as i can and the reason im so interested in how texture and material can tell a story is because im interested in how everyones brains process and see the world differently. i think it stems from my sister (shes doing graphic design 2nd year on floor 8), she got diagnosed with dyspraxia and dyslexia when she was 18 and she sees EVERYTHING completely different to me. i find things difficult that she finds easy and so on. i always think we'd be good on race around the world because im good with directions and being independent and she was a very friendly face and demeanor so could get us lifts. knowing how differently she sees the world compared to me even though we've had almost the exact life experiences makes me curious about how people with different experiences see the world.
i ALSO think im interested in how people view the world because how i view the world changed lots when i turned 17-18 :) i hope to GOD no one reads this unless its being graded but i got bullied a little bit most of my way through school and so i was a miserable 10-16 year old and i saw the world very grey and rainy and miserable and i think the happiest i ever was was when id be in my caravan far away from everyone i knew and i didnt have to worry about anyone from school seeing me. when i left secondary i went to a college far away from were i lived and alot closer to notts city centre and it did me lots of good because no one really knew me and i could start being how i wanted to be. also there were furries at this college so i was never going to be public enemy number one so i felt safe at college. by the time i started uni i had been tattooing for about 6 months and i was seeing the world in technicolour, i was starting to wear makeup and the clothes i wanted and i was a lot more confident. i saw the world COMPLETELY DIFFERENTLY than to when i was younger, i was excited to get ready for uni in the morning, i was excited to talk to people and walk around notts and i wasnt worried about people looking at me.
i also started tattooing people from school, most of them said they were happy to see me and to see that i had got the job id always wanted. there was one person from school i was terrified of tattooing because of some of the things he'd said about me in school, id hated him for Y E A R S, but when i saw him again he was completely different like i was and he was really really lovely. hes one of my regulars now he brings me cherry pepsi max and sweets and talks to me about his favourite hozier songs and it made me completely rewire my brain to stop hating people SO MUCH for things they said when they were 15. it was like taking sunglasses off after wearing them for ages and so much pettiness and hate evaporated out of my head because i realised all these people i was scared of were just other random 15 year olds that hated school too. i wonder if everyone met the 4 people they hated for things whether it would change their perspective too for better or for worse.
i hope all of that made sense :) how perspective of life can change for one person and how it varies for everyone FASCINATES me
ANYWAYS, while looking into all that stuff i wanted to look at why people hate or like certains things. a good place to start was food because people have very strong opinions on it. its abit of a crap video but there are lots of sun facts and summarised it baso says people hating food comes from bad connotations with the food (eg. i used to have frubes every day for school but their slogan was "rip their heads off and suck their guts out" and then id imagine blood coming out of the frubes and i couldnt eat them anymore :0), and also genetics like the genetic that makes corriander taste soap and the one that makes you sneeze at the sun
another reason for hating foods in hypersensitivity. a lot of neurodivergent people taste and smell and feel touch a lot stronger, like fish and chips with lemon on will taste like flat out lemon, and supposedly flavourless food has an obvious flavour like mushrooms!!! my sister hates lots of things like alcohol and tomato sauce and baked beans and fizzy drinks because of the texture of the food or the smell, she feels like sensations are 10x stronger for her.
i think is similar for people with textures. 1/5 people have severe trypophobia, which is similar to the amount of people that have claustrophobia. there are some theories why people are scared of holes, some people think we have a primal fear of spots because of poisonous animals, some think its because alot of diseases are associated with spots, and some have found that blood naturally accumulates at the back of the brain when looking at images that trigger trypophobia (they dont know why this happens :0).
there is also a phobia called textophobia which is the fear of certain textures. the texture that people hate varies from person to person, normally from a past experience as opposed to an innate human fear.
i finished reading this book for the project! it's about a carpenter thinking about why he was so drawn to craft and whether what he wants to make related to how he wants to be. its a really short book about 600 pages and it made me swim around my brain and figure lots of stuff out.
it made me think about WHY i want my work to look a certain way and is it representing how i am now or how i want to be in the future. Korn's career was constantly changing and his favourite times in his life were when he wasn't working as a carpenter, and he explores how dedicating his life to a craft altered how he views the world and how learning a craft has aided his thought process in different aspects of life.
i started looking at how mending changes the history of an object, and how it can tell a story! i REALLY like mending and altering clothes it is my silly little passtime when im not knitting :)
i started teaching myself visible mending about a year ago to cover all the ink marks on my clothes from work. i also wanted to mend all the holes in my white socks because i have NONE LEFT !!! i find it therapeutic and i like picking contrasting colours, and i think it makes me love my clothes more
here are some of the most recent mends ive done! i mended a bag my mum got me for my 14-15 birthday, i used it all the time and took it on holiday and then decided it was TOO BRIGHT and stopped using it. the other week my knitting needles made a big slash in it, so i patched it up green and pink (the superior colour combo) and now i use it all the time because im proud of looking after it for this long!
the jeans were my mums that she wore after she'd just had me and my sister, she gave them me a couple years ago they fit SO WELL which is rare for me so i wore them to RUIN i took them on the uni eurorail trip and had lots of strong beer and fell over a few times so they needed a heavy duty mend so i can keep wearing them to get drunk :)
the pages below are showing the two main mending techniques i know, sashiko and darning. i love them both and i love how sashiko is pattern-based while darning is colour-based in terms of visible mending and they both have different fabrics that they work best on.
we ALSO did a task in the studio where we had to make a picture and then destroy it so i made fish in a net and ripped them up in water and turned them into MORE fish so now the fish are freed and i want rainbow paper for all my sketchbooks. making things into paper is a different kind of repair because its repurposing used paper by taking it apart and rebuilding it into a altered version of its original format. i used a fountain pen for the lines because i like how it spits ink like my machine and its unpredictable and the lines give the fish emotions.
the colours from the paper are what reminder me of my nail polish cloth!
i was re-reading the brief and thinking about how materials can tell a story on their own. i've used this scrap bit of tshirt to take my nail polish off for the last two years. you can see where i've bought a new colour and used it alot, and you can tell when it was summer and winter and you can ALSO tell im almost out of space lol but at least i've saved lots of cotton from the bin :) this scrap of material is an insight into my life and is like a map of how i live it. it shows my favourite colours and that im a person how likes to customise themselves. im interested in finding other materials, from other people too, that act like a map of them as a person.
BROKEN a really GOOD book, i like knowing what has motivated all the artists to start mending. they all view the damage to objects in different ways, most of them seeing the damage as an addition to the repair and not what they need to cover. my favorite artists in the book are Celia Pym, Linda Brothwell, and Bachor.
these are all my favourite quotes from the artists out the book :)
this was another favourite quote from the book:)
i might feel completely helpless in the light of worldwide events, but what i can do is impact my immediate environment - paul scott
repair mends and heals, and repair returns us us to a place of comfort, nurture or solace. repair completes us. repair calls us home - John wackman & Elizabeth Knight
the act of repair suggests that if a damaged object is worthy of repair and csn be function or beautiful after its been fixed, then perhaps the person mending it can see themselves as worthy and beautiful again - katie treggiden
where holes happen (2018), celia pym plus some of my other favs of hers
ive admired celia pym for ages, she was one of my main inspirations when i started visible mending and ive followed her on instagram for years without ever really looking into her work! this is my favorite project of hers, she set up a mending station in the V&A and would fix any clothes that people brought in. while she mended she would ask them to sit and chat with her which most people did and enjoyed talking about how they made the hole/tear to someone who would listen. she would then duplicate the mend onto a black tracksuit so it became like a map of how we wear through our clothes. its like a map of the human experience and i like that all the mends are in similar places because wow were all very different but we wreck our clothes in similar ways.
her sock mends are my favourites. i love socks i love making them and mending them. i love pym's colour choices and her technique with darning, she always uses chunky embroidery thread and big wobbly shapes and i always think it looks like the thread has come to life and its burrowing itself into the sock like a worm or a mole. its nice to see someone take mending with a relaxed stance.
another artist i found in the BROKEN book was Bachor. he's a chicago-based mosaic artist who fills in potholes with fun little images. i love the pigeon one the most, roadkill makes me feel weird because my cat got run over at the end of my road and i had to hold his little cat body and carry him into the vets, but i do think pigeons have pretty jewel-tone colours and dead pigeons are everywhere so i think it's nice to immortalise one in all its beauty in the mosaic. it's like a gallery and a solution at the same time. i have an obsession with potholes because there are 2389398402394t934 on the road up to my house and they're a n i g h t m a r e, but i do think potholes are pretty and i think they can be mended in a way that adds to the road rather than replaces it. also mosaic materials can be harvested in lots of sustainable ways ADDED BONUS.
on friday 121 with kristian i showed him all the research and bits and bobs that id found that was fun and we looked at alot of celia pyms work, and we talked about what motivates my work and i showed him my animation from the summer about selston and THEN we were thinking about how communities mend themselves, like selston would have had to after the mines shut down. kristian wanted to know why i liked mending and the idea of fixing things so much and i had a few surface level answers ( sustainable, grew up having lots of second-hand clothes, busy hands). then i was walking to the tram stop and through MAYBE im drawn to the idea of mending because it was talked about alot when i was younger with my heart and my lung :)
not me dw this is off google lol but this is pulmonary hypoplasia
ELLA LORE - i was born with a hypoplastic right lung which meant it never developed when i was in the w o m b, so when i popped out i had one normal lung and one grape-sized one and a big gap where it should have been. my heart moved across into the gap meaning my heart's on the left rather than the right (partial dextrocardia)! so if i get stabbed in the chest i might survive HORRAY. the interior wall of my heart is curved (scimitar syndrome like the knife) meaning one sides smaller than the other, and because its pumping blood to a lung that doesnt work, my heart gets high-pressure blood pumped back to it rather than low pressure so my little hearts working like a steam powered engine very fast. i also have scoliosis and webbed ribs :0
ANYWAYS when i was growing up i had to be carefully monitored and had to be all healthy so that my heart and lung was and strong as possible, and then when i hit puberty they were worried the high pressure blood might get abit too much and they were thinking of taking my little lung out so i had lots of tests done between 12-15 years old and they decided that my body and FIXED itself theres the link lol
they decided that because i was born like this my body had just rearranged itself to work together happily and they didn't want to intervene in case they cocked anything up. i think of it like im a 21 year old terrarium that you can't open. maybe because i spent alot of my life hearing the terms mending and fixing in relation to my body and conditions its made me drawn to it in my life now.
the repair cafes in amsterdam is a massive commitment to limit waste and fuel a cyclical way of consuming. each cafe specialises in a different category (tech, fabric, furniture) and they are normally run by volunteers so are only able to be open a couple hours a day. i saw one of the cafe ( i think it was the textile one) when i was in amsterdam with uni and it has FASCINATED me ever since i wish there was something like this in notts MAYBE I COULD START IT???
i have a fun little plan to do a mending day at uni where i sit in 907 all day with my stuff and let people bring me things so i can mend them and write how it makes me feel :)
another method of mending is TATTOOS YAY!!!! coverups have become more common in the last decade or two, because they are a way to cover something you regretted in the past. since coverups have become the norm, there have been a few different styles of them :)
the one of the left is called a blastover, where a new design is plonked on top of an original one, not necessarily to cover it but to add a new layer of meaning to it physically and in terms of the tattoos layering. blastovers are really new and can be done in any colour ink so they can look VERY COOL
the one on the right is know as a rework. its similar to a coverup, but it normally means just redo-ing a bad tattoo but with a good concept. the lad i tattooed had gone to his neighbour for the first tattoo and he was unlicensed so it did not go well :(, he sent me the reference he had originally asked for and i just did my best to make it look like how it should have!!!
its like visible mending for humans.
im really happy with all my feedback all of it makes sense to me and i've booked onto the bio-kitchen induction because i love the idea of making bio-silicone to patch up elbows and knees. id like to have a go at making bio-leather for patching up shoes and furniture too !!! i also know i need to explain how the materials i use are sustainable (second hand and from chazza).
in tutorial we'd been talking about the front of my sketchbook relates to the project, i normally pick a print that fits the brief out of my collection of postcards and then over the course of the project i add things that relate!!
the one on the far left is my sketchbook for this project, i think the mirror slaps identity ON THE NOSE and then i added dana's drawing of my head (because thats someone elses perceived identity of ME), shell because i want to live by the sea, and a little worry doll from when i was little because how you were as a child to me is about 50% of who you are now and i was a WORRYING CHILD.
the middle one was my sketchbook when I went on holiday this summer. I was going on holiday with my boyfriend so I could bring all my colourful clothes and all my colourful make up and I don't have to worry about my mum having a go at me :0 I chose a print that was multicoloured and said 'what are the rules there are no rules' BECAUSE IT WAS A RULE-FREE HOLIBOBS. I got the print from Kew Gardens which is one of my favourite places ever and I also put on some fun foamy stickers and some fish because I was going to see some fish in Italy and i like the seaaaaa.
The last sketchbook on the right was one that are used on a holiday right at the start of second year. I'd taken sketchbook with me and I bought the print while I was I was in Spain and it's really important sketchbook for me because I got quite bored so I was doing drawings late at night that I turned into flash for work and they were the first flash designs that done that really took off and people liked them and I think the sketchbook was the catalyst for all my flash designs and me doing designs that I want to do, and not what I think people want. I'd got the print because the colour of the dress matches the sketchbook and shes so mysterious and magical with the crows, and that's what I was aspiring for in second year to be magical and have crows.
im on a mission to take all the books on mending out of the library and give them a big read. i got this one out because the author Molly Martin is also an illustrator and i wondered what her collection between mending and illustrating was. she went to a Steiner school when she was little so was taught to mend as part of the curriculum, so she did mending as a side-hustle while illustrating. the book goes into lots of different sections of mending and some of the philosophy behind it, but i enjoyed the history sections the most (hussifs)
Because of the Art of Repair book I started looking at HUSSIFS, which I had when I was little but I want to look at the history of them. they were a little sewing and mending kit that was part of the uniform for soldiers, but they had been around in western society since the victorian era. The hussifs were not supplied by the army then, so often it will be wives and daughters that make then for the men in their life that were going to fight in the war. That meant that they could be customised, and sometimes then have pictures in and memorabilia to remind them of home.
these are some modern hussifs !!! when i was about 7 i was given one that looked like a coin purse and it said 'sew cute' and i used it until it fell apart. these were made for women's use and modern hussifs were a lot more decorative and they utilise scraps from past projects because they only need small amounts of each fabric. I really like practical things have been decorated really tedious and illustratively it's one of my favourite things in the world, it's like having a pair of tweezers that's been engraved with flowers and the stars. i have really good memories of these from when I was little and I was wanting to make myself one and Im interested in all the techniques and patterns that could be used for them!!!
hussifs remind me SO M,UCH of pocket altars too!! these were transportable alters that became popularised in the 14th century or prayer away from church, but now they have evolved and are associated with paganism and witchcraft now. these also tickle the part of my brain that likes overly decorated mundane objects AND they are so similar to hussifs it HURTS, i think its the homemade nature of them and the scrappy fabrics and stitching that makes me connect them to eachother.
medulla textiles (Johanna Mark) makes BEAUTIFUL pocket altars, mainly to deities and nature. they have the same focus on colour, texture, and detail that the hussifs do, but with the same purposes as a pocket altar. i wanted to combine the two to create an altar for the act of mending and love. alot of people including me see mending as an act of love for people and a protest against consumerism. i love the idea of an act of protest being decorated and lovely and a part of everyday life AND i do d e s p e r a t e l y need a sewing kit oops two birds with one stone :0
in the friday session i had a look as possible ways i could make my little kit and baso i can use any net for a 3D shape and make lots of fun little patterns !! i wanted to make one that looked like an envelope because mending is like a l o v e le t t e r to whoever you're doing it for, so my little kit is my envelope for sending it!!! also its the best way to stop scraps from falling out as the bottom section folds in and holds it all together !!
on the monday morning i started winging a pattern together ! i used some old linen i had left over from previous projects to make a draft, and then started going through my scrap fabrics to pick a combo. i wanted the outside to be a plain dark fabric and the inside to be all sparkly and magical like mending is !! i had some brown and shimmery blue fabric from the charity shop, so the only thing i had brought first hand for the mending kit was the pale green ribbon!!
THE CRAFTING CROWN!!!!
i stuck lots of my charity shop buttons onto an old headband with superglue at the start of the project when i was first looking at mending, even though this isn't mending it more like repurposing. I love doing a craft and making little boring things better with decoration, a bit like how I feel about the hussifs and the pocket altars. i finished the headband and I called my crafting crown and I wear it now every time I'm having to uni work and my embroidery because it feels nice to my fringe of my face and it motivates me to do a crafting work when I have my crafting crown on. it's a bit like when you could sear fancy dress when you were little for going to the shops because wearing fun clothes made it more exciting.
i stuck lots of my charity shop buttons onto an old headband with superglue at the start of the project when i was first looking at mending, even though this isn't mending it more like repurposing. I love doing a craft and making little boring things better with decoration, a bit like how I feel about the hussifs and the pocket altars. i finished the headband and I called my crafting crown and I wear it now every time I'm having to uni work and my embroidery because it feels nice to my fringe of my face and it motivates me to do a crafting work when I have my crafting crown on. it's a bit like when you could sear fancy dress when you were little for going to the shops because wearing fun clothes made it more exciting.
These are my options for what am I embroidered on the back of my mending kit, originally had the idea of the bird but has no relation to mending at all I just like drawing birds :0 my mum came up with the idea of the butterfly because it signifies change and renewal which I thought was a good fit and then I added the hands because it's like my hands are the cause of change and then the little man is me sharing all my love out into the world through mending.
I went with the butterfly because that represented why I was making a mending kit for me and I wanted to include my little chubby hands. also knew that id make more of these and that I was happy to do the other designs another time. I was I think the butterfly for the kit was the best because of the fabric that was using would need to be hemmed so I will have a little bit less space, the butterfly left the most room for the hems to be done right and give the embroidery the space it needs. I bought some water soluble stabilise the fabric for the embroidery for this project it means I'm able to draw straight into the stabiliser fabric and trace off my iPad as opposed to ruining the real fabric with a ballpoint pen. it also makes for a cool video when you put it in the sink !!!
this is what the stabiliser fabric looks like when it dissolves :0 so fun
and this is the finished thing!!! i'm going to hire out the photo studio once i have a few more of my creations to take some proper pictures of them but im really happy with it!!! i love the colours i used and the beaded sections, and it folds up nice and small so its handy. if i was to redo it, i would be careful with the corners of the pattern, you can see where the fabrics puckered and not caught in on the bottom inside corners, hence the green thread, and i think i would make the scrap pocket bigger to hold the fabric more securely. i also think id like to have a better pocket for my scissors because they fall out sometimes and are SHARP.
i had THE MOST FUN EVER making this, ive always wanted to combine my love for textile crafts and uni and i hadnt found a way to do it yet but i think this is the START of lots of fun ideas and be branching out of 2d illustrations to make something tangible and practical. i want to use this so much that it needs mending so that it all comes full circle :0
in tutorial I showed off my mending kit and all my research into pocket alters and hussifs and kristian was talking to me about what an altar would look like if it was about me, or what it would look like if it was about Selston, so it's not really an altar but it has the layout and the same amount of detail and care put into it as an altar would, abit more like a textile storybook or timeline. its more the act of making and spending the time to decorate it expresses your love for the subject.
i like the idea of scavenging for all the textures and materials and messing around with beading more, and making myself a big embroidered thingy, this is L I T E R A L L Y my dream project so i'm having the time of my life thinking about all the things i could do and make :)
after doing my mending kit i wanted to experiment more with beading embroidered, so i kidnapped one of eves bags to fit that was W R E C K E D to the highest degree and she had lost her keys with that bag and we love eve so we've MUST MEND. Because your fabric on the bag was so fun and it was fish themed and I love fish. I felt bad that it got a big stain on it so I covered the stain with a beaded fish that i traced when the original ones from the pattern and plopped it over the top! i also experimented with some different darning techniques, the perfect square ones are my normal favorite because i like the checkerboard from the different threads, but looking at celia pym's darning i had a go at her more relaxed style and it works really well for small holes!!
i wanted to mend eves bag so i could write about how it feels to mend something for some one u lovvEEEEEeEEeeE teheh hi eve ;) the bag took me about 4 hours to mend completely and my eyes hurt by the end of it but the whole time i was thinking YAY eves going to be so happy when she sees the little beaded fish and i want her to be able to use all her things again, i like doing things for people because i like seeing them happy AND i feel good for saving something from the bin. i think everyone gets joy from using their skills to help people it's like having magic powers and choosing to use them for good rather than evil. i don't know how i could embroider for evil but ill find a way. its also free, and i dont know if its because most my friends are creative, but i think people appreciate something made with your hands as opposed to being brought.
TIME TO MAKE MY OWN ALTAR I AM GOD dont worry if i was the world would be a magical place and we would all mend our clothes and pomegranates would grow in every climate.
i liked the idea of the altar looking like an archway opening up THAT WAS MY RIBCAGE :0 i think its nice to image that inside of me there are no organs just this pink stripy land of happiness and beads and it hammers in my lungs mending themselves lol
i wanted to include the things most important to me, like tattooing and where i live and my love for being alive, and my caravan because the happiest i ever am and ever have been is in my caravan. i wanted to do a mermaid because i wish i was one i love them and id sell my other lung to have a interchangeable fish tail so i can haunt skegness and make it a cryptid site. i want to include a shark because i have a CRIPPLING PHOBIA of them and its a bit part of my brain AND a manta ray is needed to fight the shark because they're my favorite animal in the world i love everything about them.
the picture on the right is me testing out some fabrics, im trying to use as much stuff i already own as i can, so im slightly limited but i think the limits FORCE me to be more creative horray. i want to use pink and green because its my favourite colour combo and theyre the fabrics i have the most of, and im using the shimmery blue from my mending kit for the underwater sections of the altar.
I'm just over halfway done with the finished alter! I still need to add the pocket that comes out when you open it and it will have the shark and the manta ray on and i still need to add all that embellishment because I want to add tassels and important charms in relation to me and buttons. the green backing fabric I want to make double sided so i can add a quote on to the back and then I want to add a hook so you can hang it up on display and you can take it off easily and then open it.
So far this is my favourite thing that I've ever made at uni :0 I loved doing the appliqué (which is where but the ribs in the lungs are sewn straight onto the fabric and then you can embroider or bead on top and it's really secure)!!! i love beading so much and I think the heart is my favourite part that I've done so far. the pink fabric i used for the face of the heart is from a present that my boyfriend got me when I was 18, they were some skating trousers that are too small for me now so I chopped them into shorts and kept the scrap fabric and now it has a USE and its nice that my heart has a story!!!! This was also the hardest part to make because I had to tack the shape of the heart and then sew and stitch the ruffled ribbon onto the back, and then add the beading in the embroidery, so it took a while, but I think that's why I like even more because I'm proud of it and proud of my patience
I also really like my map of Selston!! I want to do a lino print for this because I wanted to look a bit grotty and lino has the messiness and it leaves little marks that's what I like. I wanted it to be in like a teal colour to match the underwater fabric however it didn't go completely to plan because I don't have any fabric block printing ink so normally I just use acrylic, but i havent used acrylic years so its all dried :( it took a lot of practices are mixing it with a little bit of acrylic ink into the paint to try and get the right consistency. I've cut the piece of linen that I was practising on because I want to use it for another project in the future. i want to patch on something as a mend. I added a bead where my houses on the village map, and I covered it in frilly pink ribbon, because it's camp and i know id get hunted down with pitchforks if i decorated selston with pink ribbon IN PUBLIC :0
Next on my list of things I want to do for this project is I want to finish this altar I'd like to make one for Selston and I want to make one for the act of amending that isn't amending kit itself. I also like the idea of making wearable altars maybe a T-shirt that opens up or a heart or a necklace. I want to set up my own mending day hopefully in the next week or two before we break up for Christmas, where people can bring their clothes on and I can fix them on the spot. This is my favourite projects I've ever done. I've loved all the freedom and ive combining multiple parts of my life into one project and I really enjoyed reading more. I've never normally read books for project and I think it's made a massive difference for this one because ive fully absorbed myself in everything about mending and why we fix things.
I've been able to explain how much I love the world and people and how much I love helping with my skill set! ive not been able to express it before this project so it's nice to elaborate on generally why I'm in a good mood and it's been therapeutic to look at why I personally love mending, and how it relates to me in terms of my history. :)
AFTER FEEDBACK!!!
heres the link to the feedback so i can look back later on :0
SO HAPPY WITH MY PRESENTATION i managed to cover everything i wanted and i think i got my point across and it was really exciting and kristian baso said to GO BIG OR GO HOME which is what i wanted to do and i was waiting for the green light to go mad and make massive tapestries!!! it was nice to know my project was making sense to other people and they could tell i was excited through what i was making :) im going to finish the current altar im making to the best degree i can and then focus on the next project for a week or two soley (i think i get the best results when i let myself be a b s o r b e d into a project, and then ill come back and make some more plans for a new altar, maybe one about selston!