The rather splendid venue was Stoke Rochford Hall, near Grantham, Lincs. Very imposing on our arrival and even more impressive at nightime, all lit up. |
We were asked to bring a small collection of natural objects to work from either shells/coral/barnacles or seeds/pods/cones, mine are pictured above. |
The first evening was spent with loosening up drawing exersizes, working big and with the wrong, in my case, left hand. making interesting marks from our chosen objects. |
We then went on to some relaxing stitching, working with our ‘favourite’ stitch and trying to exagerate it’s qualities – open/closed, stretched, thick/thin, big/small, high/low. |
The following day we made large drawings from the marks on our subject matter |
We then went on to make similar marks on the long rolls of emulsion painted fabric that | Kay had prepared for us |
We continued to stitch on the fabric using the stitches we had familiarised ourselves with earlier. Both the marks and the stitches are an expressive interpretation of the source material. |