Shelter: the finished piece

Shelter: Nearly there....

Just needs the floor...

Stitching together the pre-felted floor sections

Building Shelter

 Degree show set up with my wonderful mum as a second pair of hands

Bender Trial

I finally have enough straight Hazel and Rowan rods gathered to try out the bender build.

I marked the size of the structure back in Feb by the simple expedient of drawing a circle in the snow with a walking stick held at arm's length. This gave me a circle approximately 3 metres across which feels big enough to be spacious but small enough to be cosy. Human scaled.

Today was idyllic weather for a change, and I loved working in my outside studio with a big pot of wild-gathered nettle soup cooking on the open fire ready for lunch.

It's interesting how as soon as the skeleton of the structure was up there was a clear feeling of inside as opposed to outside.

It's also interesting to find that rods I thought were really straight in the woods turn out to be very wonky when I try to bend them.

Sampling Fleece

top to bottom: 1, 2, 3.

 Felting trials to see which fleece felts best and the different qualities: texture, colour, density, and ease of felting.

Fleece 1 felt wonderful when it was un-felted but was very hard to felt well.

Fleece 2 was quite wiry and was nearly as hard to felt as #1.

Fleece 3 felted like a dream with the same amount of rubbing and rolling as the other two.

L to R 1, 2, 3.

Fleece Heaven!

Second trip to get fleece from the Aladdin's Cave of the Wool Grower's depot. See what I mean about the wonderful huge bins full of fibre?

So much wool, so many shades and tones of colour = so hard to choose! I wanted to take it ALL home but returned with a sensible number for the huge project ahead. I limited myself to fourteen Moorit fleeces, mostly from Shetland sheep though some may be other breeds.

I also treated myself to one lovely soft brown Blue-faced Leicester fleece for spinning because it was just irresistible!

Moorit Fleece

Teasing and Carding

Moorit: a lovely warm brown with sun-bleached tips that occurs naturally in some sheep breads. This is my chosen colour to work with for felting a shelter cover.

I am buying my fleeces from the Evanton depot of the Scottish Wool Growers: first visit was really exciting, all those huge trolleys full to overflowing with wonderful raw fleeces and the freedom to rummage through and select what I like. Very heady!

The feel of lanolin-rich wool and the smell of sheep are strongly reminiscent of my childhood: my family had sheep and I helped tend them and shear them from a very young age.

Each fleece has to be teased out by hand and then carded on my drum carder before I can start the felting process.

Gathering Wood

 Lovely long rods for building a Bender...

Watch this space!

Very Wild Berry Mead

Raw local honey
Blaeberries (Vaccinium myrtillus)
Brambles (Rubus fruticosus)
Geans (Prunus avium)
Ling Heather flowers (Calluna vulgaris)
Water
Wild yeasts from all of the above

The alchemy of wild fermentation transforming and interweaving these wild ingredients into The Blood of Life

The smell wafting from the airlock is promising, the outcome utterly unpredictable and unrepeatable... Only time will tell if this is something wonderful or something minging!

Blaeberry Mead step 2

Straining off the must

 Fermentation is properly under way and I have strained the the juice out of the berries. It's smelling good, looking good and bubbling through the airlock convincingly...

First ferment with airlock

Blaeberry Mead

Fermentation slowly begins...
Perhaps the wild yeast is shy? I will be patient, wait and watch, keep it warm and stir regularly.

Fine Art Foraging

Expanding on my exploration of primitive ways, a new aspect of my art practice this term is foraging. As I found last year, it's the Process that is the Art, any object is just evidence of the Work.

My plan is to make a Blaeberry mead, using wild yeast off the berries to start the process, local honey for extra sugar and some heather flowers for extra flavour... The magic of fermentation transforming ordinary to extraordinary. Another form of alchemy.

As usual while out gathering, my eye is open for anything I can work with or eat. This time I picked up a young Birch Polypore off a fallen branch, thinking that I would have a go at making tinder or a knife strop. However, as I dinged my finger off of something it came in handy as a first aid plaster instead!

Warp-weighted loom

My warp-weighted driftwood loom has been part of my practice for ages now, but has been rather in the background for some time. On bringing it back into my studio after the summer away I decided to finish weaving the length of fabric as I no longer need it part done in my installation. I am really smitten with the colour and texture of my hand-spun Zwartble yarn, and the warm, live feel of it under my hands from the tensioning.

New Highland Contemporaries 2

My loom and film installation is on view in the New Highland Contemporaries 2 exhibition in Nairn this week!

 For details of times and dates please see here

Good bye third year

Time to pack up and go home

I took down, packed up and emptied out everything from my college studio today and took it all home into my wee house. I will miss the lovely space I've had this year.

A Red Thread of Words

 Here's a wee glimpse of how my studio looked all set up for marking. Sadly I haven't got a picture with the projector on the go as I was sharing it with another student. It should be standing on the white platform hanging from red cords and projecting film onto the white silk warp.

Installation view

Make-do

It's not just my jeans that are a little thread-bare after nearly two years of no chucking out and getting new. This morning as I selected colours I felt like wearing I noticed neck-lines and hem-lines in need of some rescue work.

A job for the summer holidays I think.

There is something unutterably tender and touching about the patterns of wear emerging on my long-suffering clothes. It puts me in mind of Shakespeare's words (in Hamlet I think it was) about 'sleep, that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care.' As sleep can a repair a frazzled mind, so darning can repair a ragged hem.

After a long term of intense (though fascinating and joyful) study it feels like time to do some patching and darning, resting and dreaming.











One more week of extra intense effort to get everything just as I want it (to the best of may ability) in my studio, sketchbooks, and written work, and then I can settle down to knitting up the unravelled sleeves and hems of self and clothes.

One Week Left

Just one week left before all my work has to be spick and span ready for marking for the end of year three. I've spent most of this week sorting out and tidying up, cleaning the space and making final decisions about positions of everything in relation to everything else and sorting out technical problems with light and projector and film sound.

My studio is looking a bit empty in these photos. I've got so used to all the clutter of excess branches, baskets of wool, work table, wood shavings and scraps of fleece. Today I had to get everything possible off the floor so it could be washed. I want my white silk warp to drape and drizzle on the floor and I want it to STAY white!

I still have to get something up to block the sunlight out so that my film projection is visible.... Just as well there's still one week before hand in.

Spun Silk Warp

Stitching the silk warp

Silk warp waterfall

Today I finished warping up my hand-spun silk projector screen and stabilising the top with a red thread stitched through.

The flow of the silk laid over the table caught my eye. It reminds me of currents in a river.

Silk flow 1

Silk flow 2

Boro Evolution

Left leg, 9th October 2013

I was looking through my photos today, and I was struck by how much my jeans have changed. In the first picture here the front of the left leg is almost intact although you can see where I have reinforced the fragile original material with the first layers of patch and boro style stitching.

Left leg, 4th May 2015

The second photo is of the same section of the jeans, but it's almost unrecognisable. Most of the fabric of the original jeans has eroded away and the patch that was hidden in all but the tiny cross-stitched area in the first photo has come to the surface. Many of the first lines of stitching have also got somewhat eroded. I have just added a third internal layer where all the dense red stitching is and once again my cat can't stick his claws through it and into my knee!

Exploring Twist in Wild Fibre

Fine Roots

 Wandering by the Findhorn River on a rare and precious half hour off of essay writing. I can never leave my creative practice behind though. Every where I look I see things I could spin, things that will give my fibre colour, things that make links in my thoughts with my studio practice.

The driftwood piles left by winter floods are full of roots, from the finest grass roots hanging like tufts of sheep's' fleece to huge root balls of mature trees. So many different textures and forms.

This fine wisp had a red roots in it, making me think of my Red Thread/Common Thread. The red was coarser but stronger than the black, brown and sun-bleached blond roots.

Not all make me think of spinning and weaving though. Sometimes there are strange forms that call to me in other ways, like the spoon root I found today. Formed by a tree root forcing itself between two stones then being unable to force them apart in order to grow. When compressed or restricted, life-force distorts, warps and takes on unexpected forms.

A spoon root?

Some of the exposed roots suggest other uses than spinning, perhaps this one may become a dye vat stirrer...