Our first weekend at The Arts Trail

I was privileged to spend the weekend with 3 very talented artisans at Margaret Connor's studio, Duckpond Cottage. Margaret's studio with its luscious gardens, is the perfect setting for the four of us to display our varied talents for the Southern Highlands Art Trail event. Margaret is a feltmaker who uses natural fibres to create beautiful one off garments, scarves, wraps and wall pieces. Also showing is Mike Darlow, a woodturner who concentrates on functional turnings. Mike's work has been featured in major American, Chinese collections, The Powerhouse Museum and Rockhampton Gallery in Australia. Carol Bairnsfather, makes stunning felt hats and mixed media jewellery.

Our exhibition wil be running again on the weekend of November 12 and 13 from 10am till 4pm. On Sunday we are holding another fashion parade at 1pm. Duckpond Cottage is at 13A Hurlingham Avenue, Burradoo. Phone is 4861 2294.

Nuno Felted Beginners Scarf Class

I know my blog is not in order however its the best I can manage at the moment. Back in September, terrible, Im so behind with my blogging, I ran another nuno felted class. As some of you are aware, I have been obsessed with felting for some years now and many of you have begged me to teach felting items other than jewellery which I have taught for some time.Nuno felting was developed by two American felters based up in a commune in Queensland. As the Queensland is quite warm and not so suited to felted fabrics they developed nuno so the material would be lighter, allowing them to wear garments suitable for that climate. One of these American ladies, was Japanese. Nuno is the Japanese word for fabric. Nuno felting is taking fabric and combining it with wool in a very fine application to create a felted fabric. 


I ran two nuno beginner classes in September and judging by your fantastic feedback and results, I will do more! If you are interested email me on kathy@versacreative.com.au. Ive included some photos which are only of the second classes work as my photos for the first class got accidentally wiped. Sorry guys!

Cloth, St Josephs College, Hunters Hill

For 5 glorious days, I was immersed in multi disperse transfer dyeing taught by the amazing artist, Marie Therese Wisnowski. I can hear you asking whats Cloth? 
It was a 5 day conference organised by Glenys Mann - founder and owner of Fibre Arts Australia . Glenys organizes five-day textile/fiber conferences throughout Australia, which feature highly talented international artists and designers, who share their knowledge and practices.


Other international tutor’s, who shared their valuable knowledge, techniques and informative lectures included: John Garrett (Experimental Fibre Constructions with Alternative and Recycled Materials, USA); Sherrill Kahn (Mixed Media, Collage/Applique and Composition Techniques, USA); Cherilyn Martin (New Dimensions in Surfaces & Stitch, A Journey of Discovery, Netherlands); Cherrilyn Tyler(A Little Bit Of Frippery, UK); Els Van Baarle(Transformation through Wax, Netherlands). 



At our Cloth workshop we created our own fabric by applying paint, textured, printed imagery onto papers with disperse dyes and then we  transferred the prints to polyester and blended synthetic fabrics to create a suite of color and pattern studies via an iron or heat press. Each student from all the classes offered at Cloth participated in an exhibition on the final day.

My experimentation for scarf fabric

Part of my studies to make scarf fabric

Carolines exhibition piece - Marie Therese's class

Diane's exhibition sample- Marie Therese's class

Example from John Garrett's class

Example from Sherrill Kahn's class

Polymer Silkscreen Printing with the Wollondilly Arts Group

On October 22, I was invited to teach polymer silkscreen printing to the Wollondilly Arts Group who are based in the Wollondilly Shire of the Southern Highlands of NSW.This is a not for profit group compromising of artists and crafts people from many disciplines such as painting, ceramics, sculpture, leadlighting and glass art, woodworking, photo media, textiles, paper making, performing arts, printmaking, poetry, writing, bonsai etc. Polymer silkscreening is much like any other form of silkscreening where you make up artwork, expose it to film then print from the film. With polymer we use a special film known as photo Ez film which can also be used to print on paper and fabric. It was a great day with 14 energetic ladies and one gentleman. Only one person in the group had played with polymer before. Here are some of their results.

OMG Its been far too long

I must apologise for being off the air since April. Where has the time gone? I took three months off from teaching and markets which began in June. It was a wonderful time to do some exploration although not long enough to do all I wanted. One of the areas I was itching to immerse myself was that of natural dyeing. To me the guru in this area is our own India Flint, who lives in South Australia and has a Latvian heritage. You can check India out through Google she has a wealth of information on the net. Im lucky enough to be attending one of her workshops down in Melbourne, later this year. I feel like a mad alchemist . Nothing in the garden has been safe from my cutting shears. You name it, Ive tried it. Even drove around for a week with material wrapped around vegetable peelings and floers until it just got too smelly. It was worth that effort though as I created a gorgeous scarf. Heres the picture for that piece.

Easter and Monoprinting

I hope everyone had a good Easter. I accompanied my husband to an airshow in Temora. While he salivated over the latest in small aircraft I happily sat in the sun and made kumihimo braids. There were a number of men wanting to know what I was making. When I explained that the Japanese braiding I was doing is used by NASA to make extremely strong ropes which are used by the astronauts in space they seemed very impressed! Everyone was happy, while Michel, my husband did not return with an airplane, I did return with some more kumihimo cords to add to my collection. Heres one made up on my faux turquoise piece I created in our workshop on faux turquoise. I also loved the way I could make the hours pass by very quickly in the car with my kumihimo disk. Of course I was not driving!

Last Thursday, I spent a wicked day learning to monoprint at Jean Collyers studio. Jean is an amazing Southern Highlands textile artisan whose work I have admired for many years. I had to wait for almost two years to become a student of Jeans. Jean runs workshops each month, with many of her students having attended for 10 years now. As Jean decided to start another class, I was very fortunate to take up one of these places. My first workshop with Jean was learning the art of monoprinting. Monoprinting is a form of printing where images can only be made once. We took acrylic paints and applied these onto a glass surface. While the paint is wet we pressed paper and material onto our glass surface to make an image transfer. Here are some of my images. Watch this space as I will be embellishing these with stitching and other forms of textile embellishment to create my masterpieces.At each class , Jean teaches us a number of hand embroidered stitches. There is something very meditative about handstitching. I love it!

He's Back!

The talented , wonderful Hector Vera, and a good friend of mine, returned recently to Studio Amara and taught a workshop in making faux polymer turquoise. Ive always steered away from making faux stones in polymer as I thought " Why would you? "Now, those of you who know me or have attended my classes know Im a polymer addict, its one of my favourite mediums for creating so this might be difficult to understand my thinking. I suppose I thought that the real stones are just so beautiful and one should not try to mess with this however I 'm happy to say Hector has changed my life! Being able to make your own stones gives you the opportunity to have a piece of jewellery with the stones, stones exactly the shape , size and color you want rather than making do with what you can source. Being a control freak this is a nice option to have.
In the class , we used another kitchen tool. This time it was the food processor. I was extremely happy as I had just bought another one from our local Reviva store. My preloved Breville Whiz set me back the large sum of $ 8.00. These days, I almost have as many kitchen gadgets in my studio as I do my kitchen.
With the room looking like a cooking class as we all busily chopped our clay into tiny pieces which were then shaped into gorgeous stones. Here are pictures of what our students made that day.

Thank you Hector and all who attended that day. Hector will return later this year to teach a complex caning class. Apologies that my finished piece is not shown yet! Im working on this at the moment. I will post once completed.Promise.