Unravelling Intarsia, and exciting news from Rowan

I absolutely love colour and am fascinated with different colour combinations and how colours play against each other for different effects, so I was in my element last Saturday with my Intarsia Unravelled Workshop. We had a great time getting to grips with yarn bobbins and the like, and the group were a lovely bunch so there was plenty of fun and banter to be had too.



 


And talking of colour, Rowan have recently launched Pure Wool Worsted, 100% superwash wool which comes in an amazing 50 different shades. To celebrate they are also about to launch their first global Knit Along to make a fabulous mystery Afghan designed by the wonderful Martin Storey - you can see a video about it here. The knit along starts on 21 April and you can find out more about this on Knit and Purl Garden's Blog,  the Rowan website and on Ravelry

Road trip to Torhole Bottom

My friend Jane & I headed out to the wilds of Somerset on Saturday for a textile workshop with the lovely Judy Alexander. Titled Paper, Paint, Cloth & Stitch Judy's workshop involved a number of techniques to transform painted or photographed paper into pieces of textile art showing stitched flowers on layered paper/textiles. 

Artwork by Judy Alexander

These beautiful pieces were created by manipulating painted papers and stitching this with layers of sheers added, then heavily stitched by machine

Detail of one of Judy's artworks

My painting onto paper

First off we were thrown straight out of our comfort zone to quickly paint a picture inspired by flowers - I'm no painter so it was a little eek-worthy! After the initial horror, and Judy's expert guidance, we soon got cracking and found it to be a really enjoyable way to spend a rainy morning.

Once dry we than had fun scrunching up our hard work, and started the fun bit of adding stitch. The day went amazingly fast, and I have plenty more work to do to my piece, but I made a start and hopefully you can see what a difference the processes are starting to make.

I'm looking forward to finishing it before too long, and will definitely add some sheers to the surface - maybe I'll show you the finished item then :-) I enjoyed these techniques and can think of a number of projects I might use them on.....just need a few more hours in the day!