The cover of my single sheet book of line walks
Line walks in my garden - one a day for seven days, using different drawing materials
Dye results from Christmas tree branches - lovely chocolatey browns
More Christmas leftovers - yew sprigs and holly berries from a friend’s festive table centrepiece
A ladder of dyed thread samples – these are all the colours from January’s experiments
A pleasing symmetry - a tiny woven panel of yarn dyed with oak twigs, sewn back onto one of the twigs from the same tree
My January sheet of daily drawings… last month was silhouettes, this month will be line drawings
A week of consolidation… I’ve collated all my artwork from January into my large sketchbook so I have a record of the year as it unfolds. I’ve set myself a challenge within the ‘residency’ to complete a small drawing every day - the final image above shows the completed sheet for January. I started off simple with ink silhouettes to get me into the drawing habit, and I’m moving onto line drawings this month. I’m hoping that the silhouettes will be useful source material for rubber stamps, stencils and patterns. It’s been an interesting exercise in looking more closely at plants, and it’s good to start each day with a drawing.
At the end of January I completed a drawn line walking down the garden each day for a week - they became more interesting when overlaid. I made this into a single sheet book - it doesn’t exactly follow the path of the journey down the garden the way it’s cut and folded, but it’s a more compact way of containing the visual record.
Some more dyeing experiments have been dried and catalogued – Christmas tree branches, yew sprigs and holly berries. Mixed results, but I really like the range of chocolate brown tones from the Christmas tree. It was also good to see January’s dyed thread experiments all together on a sample card. A much wider range of colours than I had realised.
Finally, a tiny panel of woven yarn (created on a card pin loom) dyed with oak twigs – I sewed it onto an oak twig from the same tree, which seemed to be the most appropriate way of displaying something so small. I’d like to make more of these, linking the dyed yarn back to the trees of origin.