Category: Studio News

If you’re like me and love to work in sketchbooks  you’ll come up with loads of lovely pages that you’d also like to see in fabric and thread. If something looks good on paper it will almost certainly look good on cloth. It might involve a change of medium and probably of scale but the same visual effect will be achievable. The great thing is though, that if you’ve enjoyed using watersoluble pencils in your sketchbook you can work in exactly the same way on smooth fabric. I’ve drawn a lily from my garden here. You know how much I always find inspiration from nature! I’ve used Derwent Inktense pencils which are permanent once water has been added and then they’ve been allowed to dry. Other watersoluble pencils can be used to colour fabrics but if you are intending to launder the item in the future the colour will probably wash away!  I have no particular connection with Derwent but I just like their pencils! Check out their website if you want more specific information. You can use a textile medium instead of, or as well as water, but I haven’t found it necessary. Sample both and see what you prefer. The medium might help prevent ‘creep’ of colour but that doesn’t bother me as I like a painterly watercolour effect.

I’ve only used a few pencils for this painting – fuschia, light olive, shiraz and tangerine. I’ve found by trial and error that it’s most effective to draw onto damp fabric rather than dry and to overlay two colours. Once the initial drawing is done I then add more water with a paintbrush and ‘tickle’ the colour around to soften and blend it. Because I like a watercolour look I’m generous with the water to encourage the colour to bleed. Of course quilting transforms the whole thing. I’ve free motion quilted quite closely, following the contours of the petals and leaves and then stitched the background with columns of pale stitch. I like the contrast this creates against the flower and of course, it adds texture and controls all the baggy, pale fabric. Once the quilting is finished I enjoy adding more detail with the pencils. A nice sharp point means I can target small areas such as the stamens. I used that shocking tangerine onto wet fabric for that punch of colour. Lilies have such pronounced stamens don’t they? I believe they are toxic to pets but I often snip them off before they drop and stain everything around them. I had quite a few emails asking for more about Inktense pencils so I hope this post has been of interest – don’t forget we’ve got lots of videos about them on designmatterstv!

Thanks for visiting my website today – I love to hear from you if you have questions or comments – Linda x

Lots of people tell me they don’t get on with watercolours because they are too difficult, too unforgiving, and they have a mind of their own. They are actually my favourite medium – I think they just need a bit of practise but if you identify with that statement then I urge you to give watersoluble pencils a go. For these examples I’ve used Derwent Inktense pencils but any watercolour pencil will give similar results. I think the most important thing to bear in mind is that they do need plenty of water to achieve a painterly effect. Hopefully you can see in the apple here that the pigments of the pencil have completely disolved and been allowed to flow across the paper just like paint does. It may seem a waste of time and effort to make colour swatches as I have but pencils have to be layered and mixed on the paper. They can’t be premixed in a palette like wet paint. If you only have a few pencils it’s very useful to try them out to see how many colours you can achieve with limited options. I’ve scribbled two colours allowing them to overlap in the middle and then I’ve dragged a wet brush down the centre to see how they mix. It’s surprising to see the difference it makes if you then change which is the top layer of the two colours.

I’ve done the same trial mix with a few pencils for my study of green grapes. I often find many paints, pastels and pencils are rather too ‘raw’ straight from the tube or stick. Mixing more subtle colours is much more effective. Don’t you find green colours of paint and ink etc are a problem? The greens in nature are usually much softer and less strident than those I find in my pencil or paintbox. I always have to modify them to suit my taste!

I didn’t need many pencils for the grape painting – just a lemon mixed with leaf green for the fruits, dark indigo and charcoal grey for the shadows and mustard with charcoal for the stalks and the brown paper bag. Hope if you’ve got water-soluble pencils you’ll dust them off and have a play soon – I think you’ll have fun!

Thanks for dropping by. Linda x

I’ve been experimenting with landscapes this week – not something I’ve seriously attempted before. I wanted to create a painting with drama so I started by layering cling film over some washes of intense acrylic colour with a few garden leaves. I’m working onto a rough watercolour paper and after peeling the plastic film away from the almost dry paint I had some interesting organic patterns. This visual texture seemed like a good background for a landscape. I’d purposely kept the acrylic paint to the lower section of the paper so the textured colour would suggest undergrowth or maybe a rocky foreground in the composition.
When the initial layers were completely dry, I added the winter trees. I used a rigger for this – the long, tapering brush let me make quite narrow lines where I wanted the branches to become more twiglike. Some of the finest twigs were made by dragging the wrong end of the paintbrush out of the wet paint.

To increase the texture, as you can probably see, I scraped a little inktense pencil onto spots of water to make speckles of colour in the indigo watercolour sky.

The setting sun colours everything with a warm glow so I flooded intense colour onto the sides of the trees facing its light. You’ve probbly gathered by now that this is not a real landscape! I usually work from a source of inspiration but I was just playing here and having fun with my imagination. I loaded my brush with luscious paint and let the reds and yellows mix together on the paper. Finally, I popped a white mount onto the painting to see how it would look when framed.

We’ve been having very changeable weather here in the middle of England – I snapped a quick picture of some of our garden trees when the sky was a deep Paynes grey but the setting sun caught all the lime green of the newly opening leaves. It’s a complete change of palette but might be my next subject to paint. Nature always does it best!

Thanks for dropping by. I’ll keep you posted – Linda x

I’m enjoying painting my watercolours again this week. The hard frosts have damaged some of the early flowering shrubs in our garden so although I’ve loved painting the emerging flowers of the magnolias their poor, delicate petals were now a sorry mess and were never going to open fully. I like to paint from life when I can but faced with sad, brown blooms I decided to revisit my photographs instead. Laura planted a few young grapevines last year and they produced the most glorious coloured leaves and I couldn’t resist. That’s my finished painting on the right.

The sheer number of overlapping leaves was quite a challenge so, to get started I sketched the main shapes using a water soluble pencil, knowing this would disolve into the wet paint later. What I love about watercolour is how it floods and bleeds across the paper but of course, this is also what you don’t want to happen when you are trying to paint separate shapes and keep colours also separate. The obvious answer is to paint leaves that don’t touch each other first, let them dry and then paint the gaps in between. Hopefully you can see how that is beginning to work in the photo below. I added a bit of negative painting in the background to suggest the small leaves that weren’t part of the vine but were growing below it.

The third image shows the effect of flooding water into semi dry paint to create ‘blooms’. They may not be exactly what I was seeing on the vine itself but I think it adds lovely, organic texture and it’s one of my favourite ways of adding interest  to a painting.

Although watercolour paint dries quite quickly you still need to be patient between layers of colour so what better thing to do than to start a second painting? While I was wading my way through the thousands of photographs I have I fell upon some I had taken of an ancient fishing boat seen on holiday years ago in Brittany. I’ve always loved these pictures and in fact have made three quilts inspired by the boats combined with quotes from Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea. Words and song lyrics often conjure images in my mind and have always been a kick start for me and my quilt designs!

It’s something of a departure for me to attempt a landscape/seascape subject as I tend to favour nature as inspiration but it’s good to step out of your comfort zone every now and again isn’t it? I hope you’ve liked seeing work in progress and my finished paintings. I shall add pristine card mounts to these and maybe even frame them for sale. A mount makes all the difference to a watercolour painting – it’s like adding a crisp binding to a quilt!

Thanks for dropping by.  Linda x

I’m flipping between projects this week as usual. I’m still in watercolour mode but also fitting in more machine patchwork between painting sessions. The scrap quilt is growing quite quickly but I can’t resist the lure of my paintbox so it’s great to be able to multitask. You need to picture me in my studio as I paint the first layers of colour of the fruit and then scoot my office chair across to my machine to make a quilt block while that paint dries. I knew there was a great reason to have a chair with wheels!

It’s easy to find inspiration for the painting – I love to surround myself with lovely things even if they aren’t particularly precious or valuable. Many people might think my collections are somewhat eccentric (I won’t share the weird things) but they give me joy whenever I see them. What better things could there be to include in my paintings? The fruit bowl is a very ordinary dish we found on a bric-a-brac stall at the local market. It is huge and holds such a lot of fruit. The shallow black bowl behind it is papier mache decorated with birds and rich pattern. We’ve had that for years and I can’t quite remember where it came from but I love it. It normally lives on the mantlepiece next to the carved wooden crocodile with the poppy seed heads in the blue troika pot alongside. I bought that pot for £6 nearly sixty years ago before it became collectable. Simple pleasures!

I thought the twiggy stems of the bunch of grapes were more interesting than the grapes themselves, which is lucky because there were more of them as I munched on the fruit while painting. It’s a good job watercolour is quicker than oils as they won’t keep much longer! I hope you can see the effect of letting one layer of paint dry before adding a second wash of colour. I’m not attempting complete realism with my paintings. Whilst I obviously want things to be recognisable as what they are, what I really want to achieve is to let the paints speak for themselves. Working wet onto dry stops the colours blending and creates the lovely edges that I like. The initial paint is wet into wet for general overall colour, that’s allowed to dry and then more washes added wet onto dry. You can understand why a second activity like quilting is such a good idea. Without my patchwork to divert me I’d end up fiddling too much with the paint.

I thought I’d finish this post with a picture of the stack of finished blocks waiting to be added to the quilt top. I’ve got about a dozen here but you can see from the heap of strips I still have a way to go before I’m done. I’ll keep you posted.

Thanks for dropping by.  Linda x

No matter how often I experiment with all kinds of different art materials and techniques I invariably return to my all time favourite watercolour paints. There’s something magical about the way they move on the paper. All they need is a little persuasion from lots of water! The garden is beginning to blossom right now and I found plenty of nature’s inspiration for my paintings. The lovely, delicate white flowers of the Magnolia Stellata don’t last for long but are a beacon of light at this time of year. They really do gleam in the dark at twilight. I love to capture their beauty before the petals inevitably fade and fall.

I encourage those strange marks which are called ‘blooming’ in the background. They are created when more water is flooded into the wet paint, pushing the pigment to the edges of the painted shape. I prefer the visual texture rather than a flat wash even if some painters view them as a fault!

The bigger Magnolia Soulangeana is only just starting to reveal her pink and white gorgeousness but even in bud makes a great subject for a watercolour. What do you think about that hot pink? It’s called opera and is rapidly becoming one of my favourite colours. I sometimes have to tone it down a bit with violet or blue so it’s not quite so in your face but honestly, there’s nothing like it for a bit of zing! I’m training myself to be patient about drying times – hard as it is to resist carrying on painting in one enjoyable and totally absorbing session. It would probably be a good idea to work on more than one at a time – that way I can switch between paintings and not feel frustrated. If I can walk away and let the first lot of paint dry it makes it easier to return a little later to add another layer of transparent colour. I find that’s the best way to build up depth of colour and add fine detail. I’ve also made a new friend with a rigger brush. Originally designed to paint the fine lines of ships’ rigging, they are long and narrow but still hold plenty of paint. Perfect for stems and twiggy branches. I know a lot of people find watercolour difficult to handle. It’s true that it can be tricky to control of you are working wet into wet but I find painting to a dry edge prevents all that uncontrolled bleeding of one colour into the next – unless, of course, that’s exactly the effect I’m aiming for!

Let me know if you have any questions I might be able to help with. I’m always happy to talk about painting!

Bye for now.  Linda x

Technically, meterological spring arrived on the first of March. There are certainly signs of it all around our garden but today, as I write this, it’s snowing quite heavily. I’ve been busy trying to ignore the weather and do my best to record the evidence that spring will arrive properly soon. ‘He Who Gardens’ doesn’t like me picking flowers when there are only a few early examples about but I smuggled a couple of our first daffodils into my studio this week. I find them a difficult subject for a painting. Yellow is such a tricky colour to work with isn’t it? It’s not so much the colour itself as the shadows it casts. Any colour you add to suggest shadow tends to make the flower look dirty. Colour theory tells you to add violet from the opposite side of the colour wheel but anyone who’s studied the flowers at close quarters would probably agree there’s more of a greenish tinge.

It’s also quite a challenge to capture the delicacy of the petals. I’ve discovered some of the yellow watercolour paints I have are quite opaque – not at all what you want to suggest transparency and fragility. Lots of water usually helps but, although I thought I had a lifetime’s supply of paint, I might have to get myself to the art shop asap. I shall forgive myself – there are worse sins than stockpiling paint!

Spending time with this year’s daffodils made me remember this larger watercolour and coloured pencil painting I made a while ago. You may remember seeing it on designmatterstv.com. A very similar still life featuring the same vase, flowers and seedheads led me to create a couple of small applique panels. That often happens with me. I start working in my sketchbook or at my easel with no other thought in my head than to try and capture something of my subject and before I know it ideas of how I might translate the painting into fabric and thread just come popping in. As we are always saying, ‘one step leads to the next’ and who knows where a few moments in a sketchbook will take you? I hope like me you are making time to be creative while we wait patiently for warmer days.

Bye for now.  Linda x

This might be on the way to being compulsive! I’ve got the sewing down to a fine art now – once the foundation squares are cut to size and I’ve got a heap of fabric strips all nice and pressed flat, I can whizz away on the machine and complete a block in around ten minutes. That includes time to stand at the iron board to press every seam. I’ve discovered that if I add a strip each side of the centre one I can get away with pressing two seams at once instead of having to go to the iron for each one. I’m often sitting at a sewing machine or an easel for hours at a time so the only way I can complete the activity rings on my watch is the make sure the iron is at the far side of the room. That’s my exercise for the day covered!

I’ve got 40 blocks finished so far but I’m going to need nearer 100 for a super king size bed. I’ve been deliberating on how these should go together for the best effect. Those limes and yellows are really strident aren’t they? Trouble is, without them I think the quilt would lack any kind of impact.  I kept shuffling the blocks around to decide if it would be best to group the lairy ones together in the centre and surround them with quieter colour combinations or should I go with the random nature of the technique, deal them out like a pack of cards, and just sew them together as they fall? Well, patience is not a virtue I possess so having slept on it I went for the random option. Now I know it would have been sensible to make all the blocks before joining them together but since I’m able to put pretty much any colours in this quilt I know I’ve got plenty of fabric left. There’s also a very practical reason – when the blocks are trimmed back to the foundation square it severs all the thread ends and I don’t want the seams to unravel as they are handled repeatedly. The beauty of this design is that so few seams need to match. It’s only the junction of the squares that need care. I make certain to press the joining seams of each row in a consistent direction  and alternate the direction on the next row. That helps distribute the bulk so everything lays flat. Now all I have to do is dip into those scrappy strips and carry on but I know there are worse ways to spend my time!

Bye for now.  Linda x

You might have heard me say over the years that when I have fabric left over from a quilting project I slice it up into narrow strips. I have a huge crate full of these strips, all perfect for adding bindings to a new quilt, or for making quick work of log cabin or courthouse steps patchwork. Recently I’ve been adding to this stash with some hand dyed fabrics I bought sight unseen. These turned out to be a very lightweight cotton – too thin for regular patchwork but excellent for anything worked onto a foundation. So, I’ve cut a number of eight inch foundation squares from some cotton blinds I recently replaced. I love to recycle! The first strip is laid from corner the corner on the square and the second lined up on top of it. My strips are different widths but none narrower than one and a quarter inches or wider than two inches. I’ve also been consistent to place the first strip as a dark blue/grey on every block. I press every seam and continue adding more strips either side of the first untill the whole of the cream foundation is covered.

The block looks really untidy at first but I flip it over and use a rotary cutter to trim the excess fabrics back to the edge of the foundation. This keeps everything nice and square and stitching onto the foundation prevents distortion at the same time as making the fabric more substantial.

At the moment I haven’t decided how I’m going to join these blocks. I’ve just plonked them on the floor for the purpose of these photos. The colours are pretty randomly placed except for the consistent grey strip at the centre of each block. In the arrangement here those strips create a suggestion of a grid which I do quite like. There are a number of other things I might do with the blocks though. They could be sliced in half and sewn to plain fabrics to make half square triangles for instance. Maybe I could sash them with a single colour to make the overall effect more controlled? I think I’ll have to make lots more blocks before I can make up my mind. It’s a good job they are so quick to do. I’m always such a control freak with my quilts so it’s hard for me to use so many random colours and to have so few seams line up. Wish me luck!

Bye for now.  Linda x

I think when you like making ‘stuff’ you like to have lots of different things on the go at any one time so that you’re never bored. That’s how it is for me anyway. When I casually mentioned to my daughter, Laura, that I fancied knitting a cosy hat but I needed to get some yarn she took me to her stash and let me have my pick. These are all luxury blends of merino, cashmere and nylon that she hand dyed a while ago. All gorgeous but not huge quantities of the same colours as each skein was intended for making a pair of socks. Of course had I stuck to my plan of making a hat this would not have been an issue but somehow we were lured onto the free patterns on Ravelry.com and I found myself considering something a little more ambitious. Instead of a simple hat that might have kept me occupied for a couple of evenings in front of the TV I discovered a boxy sweater pattern I fancied. I don’t have the recommended yarn so I’ve knitted a test square – this is completely out of character, usually I just jump straight in accepting that whatever I make will fit somebody if it doesn’t fit me! I suspect this project is going to take me a while – I just hope it isn’t high summer by the time it’s finished.

Now I don’t want anyone to think I’ve just been sitting watching TV all over the holiday. I have been working into another handmade book. This latest one is a collection of plant printed papers that I asked Laura to bind for me. The papers are all shapes and sizes but I think that’s more interesting than a sketchbook with completely regular and uniform pages don’t you? As you can see from the photos, Laura’s attached the pages to folds of sturdy watercolour paper with rows of machine stitch. Some of the lines of stitch are functional and some purely decorative to add texture. When she presented the book to me the pristine white of the watercolour paper was really distracting so my first job has been to lose the white! I’ve got lots of little bottles of acrylic inks in golds, bronzes and transparent raw umber that I think are perfect to complement the colours of the prints. The inks may look a little bright right now but I’ll be working onto them with drawing, painting and text so that will tone them down a little.  The book doesn’t have its hard covers yet but I’ve found a piece of cotton fabric I printed at the same time I made the plant prints on paper. It should work really well but it’ll be the last thing I do – have to finish the pages first.

Do you see what I mean about being easily distracted? Why work on one thing when you can have several different ones on the go? Oh and I never even mentioned I’m returning to oil painting too – a medium I haven’t worked with for a long time. No time for boredom though!

Bye for now. Thanks for reading today! Linda x

I always like to have a hand stitched project on the go – there’s nothing worse than twiddling your thumbs when you could be sewing or knitting is there? I had some time to kill recently and having enjoyed making the samples for our Running With Stitch online course so much I decided to start another piece but tweak it a bit. I stayed with the idea of a simple landscape (and being my work there had to be a moon up there too) but I choose fine cotton fabrics rather than the transparent and loosely woven fabrics I’d demonstrated with during the course.

I’m lucky that I have a stash of fine cotton threads that Laura and I have dyed over the years. You can see I’ve sorted out some colours that I think complement the fabrics but there are lots of lovely hand dyed threads available online if you don’t dye yourself and would like to achieve a similar effect. It can be unpredictable to know how the colours will appear if your threads are variegated like mine but when the thread and fabrics are high contrast I think it adds a spark to the finished piece.

I’ve included a photo of a detail of one of the landscapes I made for the course just so you can see how much stitch I like in my work and how those contrasting colours of stitch really sing. This new piece will be just as densely worked but I’m bringing in some herringbone and fly stitch alongside the running stitch. Fly stitch is a great option to represent grasses and leaves so I’ll be using that in the foreground to add colour and texture. If you look really closely at the left hand corner of the first image you’ll see I’ve made a start with the first row!

The red and gold image is a detail of an appliqué of mine that you might have spotted in the shop on my website. I’ve included it here to show how I created little spots of colour with French knots and scattered straight stitches – those might have a part to play in the new piece too. The final image you may remember from our Inspired by Banjara video workshop. I love the idea of weaving a thread through a grid of running stitches and am wondering how I might adapt that technique to my landscape without it looking too regular and formal. Maybe using a single colour of thread that matches the fabric might be the solution? This is only a small piece and I don’t want it to be too busy with many different elements – I shall proceed cautiously! So, lots of ideas floating around at the moment. I’ll get to work on some stitching and let you see how things evolve.

Hope you are all making time to be creative – if you need inspiration browse the www.designmatterstv.com website as there really is something for everyone. Running with Stitch is available in Online Courses for £25. You can watch as many times as you like and take as long as you like to make your own landscape piece. Get stitching and lose all sense of time in the process – or is that just me and my obsessive personality?

Talk again soon – Linda x

I’ve been busy painting and stitching – nothing new there you might say. There comes a time though when everything starts piling up as I finish one thing and move onto the next project. I have begun to realise (again!) that unless I move some of my work on to new homes I risk being  buried alive. So, I’ve been sorting through some of the heaps of work I have and listing them here on my website. Several of the newest pieces have sold straight away and I’m very grateful to any of you who have supported me in this way. This little acrylic cat painting was really fun to paint and I’m glad someone else liked him as much as I did! I’ve also added a couple of the quilted and embroidered pieces that were featured in Quilting Arts Magazine a while ago – you can find them in the shop.

I’m happy to say the wren and the blue tit also found a new home last week. It’s quite liberating to work small sometimes – many of my quilts take weeks or months to create so it’s satisfying to tackle something that can be achieved a bit quicker than that. I do spend quite a few hours on my paintings because I love the fine detail but pincushions are a little less demanding. As well as being a useful object for anyone who loves to sew, they provide the opportunity to combine lots of colours, imagery and techniques and can be completed in less than a day. You can try things out just to see ‘what if’, without the stress of maybe making mistakes with a more important piece! I’ve got lots of pincushions and I’ve just listed these two in my shop today.

At the moment I am experimenting with oil painting after a gap of quite a few years. It’s a slow process and a steep learning curve so I appreciate being able to turn to a small project in-between waiting for layers of paint to dry! The smell of oil paint and turpentine is something I remember from my student days. I LOVED it and was immediately transported to another world as soon as I went into the studio!! Nowadays we are a lot more aware of the dangers of inhaling such heady substances so I’m substituting low odour mediums. Not so exciting but probably more sensible! If I can master the oils I’ll let you see what I’m painting – if it’s a disaster it will never be mentioned again!!

Hope you are all making time to be creative in these difficult days. I know from experience it does help.

Bye for now – Linda x