Themed school workshops

Posted in Fabric Manipulation, Inspiration, Work With Me by Ruth Singer

I love collaboration; I find it exciting and engaging both creatively and practically. Sharing skills, knowledge and expertise is vital to creating a good outcome and I always find it pushes my own creative boundaries and helps me work better and learn all the time. Whether it is working with schools, community groups or other makers, I always find it invigorating coming up with new ideas to show them as well as seeing how they take my ideas and techniques into new an exciting directions.

The school workshop shown below covered 3D fabric manipulation and appliqué techniques, following the students’ own inspiration and research, including projects as varied as fungus & lichen, decayed building, peacock feathers and jellyfish.

Ruth Singer School workshops

The images below show a session I ran for GCSE students to create weather-inspired samples using shadow trapunto techniques.

GCSE student sample

Sample made by the school’s Artist in Residence Emily Notman

I loved this school’s textile classroom with inspiration walls and a great display of dried fruit and vegetable skins.

Find out more about workshops for school groups here.

20Oct2014

Fabric Manipulation book in Spanish and German

Posted in Books, Fabric Manipulation by Ruth Singer

My Fabric Manipulation book has been translated into German and Spanish. I love the cover of the Spanish version.

With my three books, I now have been published in Finnish (twice) Norwegian, Russian, Spanish & German. I’m really quite chuffed that people all over the world read my books! I posted a copy to Brazil recently too. Amazing.

30Sep2014

Pleated dress and hat decorations

Posted in Fabric Manipulation, History, Work With Me by Ruth Singer

In my research into manipulated fabrics, I have often come across trimmings created using pleated or gathered ribbon, most often on hats, although sometimes on garments too. 18th century dress trimmings are usually made from self-fabric (strips of the same fabric the garment is made from) rather than ribbons. Box pleating is common, as are bias-cut ruffles.

18th century Caracao (jacket) from Manchester Museums collection

Caracao (jacket) from Manchester Museums collection with pleated self-fabric trim

18th century box pleats started a journey of discovery for me when I started working in textile, investigating and experimenting with techniques to create contemporary work inspired by these old folds.

Neckpiece detail

Neckpiece

Folds

Pleat cuff pattern

Folded

Antique ribbons can be pretty special items in themselves, but when they are used to create interesting decorations and trimmings, ribbons become something even more amazing. Ribbons have been used for hundreds of years to decorate hats, dresses and accessories.

Corsage by Ruth Singer using vintage ribbon and 1920s techniques.

Beautiful ribbons were woven in Coventry (as well as other places) from the 1700s which were pleated, gathered and arranged to make stunning hat decorations, taking a bonnet from basic to beautiful.

Ribbon woven in Coventry. (c) V&A

Extra-wide ribbons were made specifically for trimming dresses and millinery and their designs could easily be enhanced by the methods of folding and stitching used, as shown in this example where the stripes are manipulated to create decorative effects.

Hat ribbon trim (c) National Trust

I recently came across illustrations via Pinterest from a German women’s magazine called Der Bazar dated 1871 on Google books which shows several fantastic pleated ribbon trims which I am keen to try out myself, and you can often spot folded and manipulated ribbon trims on original garments and in fashion plate illustrations in the later 19th century.

Der Bazar pleated fold illustration

In the 1920s, pleated and manipulated ribbons had another moment under the spotlight of fashion as ribbon pleated and folded into sunbursts and stars shone out from the sides of cloche hats. Cockades or trimmings were made at home, as well as by professional milliners. A hat could be updated and transformed with a bit of ingenuity and ribbon.

Hat (c) Metropolitan Museum

I bought the vintage hat below a few years ago and was intrigued by the folded trim. It took a few goes to figure it out and quite a few more goes for the technique to stick in my head – it is not at all simple, but I figured it out using weave lines in in the grosgrain ribbon as my guide.

Pleated hat trim

My version of the technique is in my book Fabric Manipulation, called Arrowhead folds. I used this technique to create the necklace below.

Arrowhead necklace

My book has lots of other ribbon folding techniques, many of them inspired by Indian ribbon work using real metal ribbon, known as Gota.

Detail of blouse with gota trimming (c) V&A

Gota work was traditionally used to decorate luxurious costumes and clothing in the 19th century alongside fine silks and metal thread embroidery. The pure metal wefts of the ribbon allow it to be folded precisely to create intricate 3D folds and twists, and the ribbon could also be embossed for added effects. Nowadays, most gota work is done in inferior plastic ribbon which has neither the sheen, weight or crispness of the metal ribbon, but still looks pretty gorgeous. I’ve seen real vintage Gota ribbon for sale at Cloth House, my favourite fabric shop in London.

I found a nice piece in a ribbon stash at the school I worked in yesterday; the widely-spaced folded-back zigzag ribbon fold detail was new to me – I am working on samples using different types of ribbon for different effects. The pointed Vs along top and bottom are one of the gota techniques I figured out a while back and it is included in my book.

I taught my favourite box-pleating technique to the students at Chateau Dumas earlier this month, using French vintage striped ribbon. The day after the workshop, the students visited the local hat-making museum and decorated their hats with pleated French ribbon. What could be more more perfect?

Pleated ribbon hat trim

Pleated ribbon

Pleated ribbon hat trim

Pleated ribbon

Pleated ribbon hat trim

Pleated ribbon

Pleated ribbon necklace

You can find more ribbon work and related ideas in my Pinterest boards on Fabric Manipulation, particularly the pleating board and the appliqué board. One day I’ll have time to try them all out – in the mean time, please post links to any other interesting ribbon resources and if you have tried any of the techniques, please share them.

A shorter version of this post originally appeared on Mr X Stitch as one of my monthly textile history Pinning the Past columns. Explore the other columns here.

1Jun2014

Fabric Manipulation : Stitch & Slash

Posted in Fabric Manipulation, History by Ruth Singer

Would you believe that ripped jeans of the 1990s are simply harking back to the 16^th century? For a brief period, it was the height of fashion to ‘pink’ or slash luxury fabrics to create pattern and to reveal yet another fancy fabric underneath. That’s where the term pinking shears comes from, although they appear somewhat later.

Cutting a decorative edging to cloth goes back considerably earlier too; in the 15^th century some garments were finished with the fine, felted (fulled) wool cloth cut into decorative patterns resembling oak leaves and other shapes. Amongst the wealthy and fashionable, it was also de rigeur to have sleeves of the upper gown cut open to reveal another, fancier fabric beneath, or even a fine linen shirt or smock. This style reached its peak in the late 15^th and early 16^th century among the Landsknecht mercenary soldiers of Switzerland Germany who favoured ridiculously over-decorated clothings covered in slashes revealing bright coloured garments beneath and started added additional linings just to show through.

The slash and reveal style made it to English style, with Henry VIII often depicted wearing garments with slashing to show the variety of luxury silks he wore and the decoration could be on any thing from shoes to codpieces.

A rare early 17th century men’s suit now in the V&A is made of silk covered in tiny cuts on the bias, interspersed with stamped decoration – the silk was embossed using a heated metal tool. The cuts were probably made in a similar way, with a sharp chisel-like tool pressed onto the fabric on top of a lead block. Find out more about it in this audio clip.

Slashed garments appear occasionally in the 19th century – there’s nothing new about looking back – but it then pretty much vanished until the punks started ripping and slashing their garments in the early 1980s.

Dress sleeve, c1810 © V&A

Slashing and cutting the surface of fabric is now a more decorative technique used in textile art and quilting rather than fashion, more’s the pity. Textile artists have been using Stitch & Slash for many years, to create layered decorative finishes. In some forms it is known as faux chenille as when washed or brushed the cut edges create a fluffy finish, popular with quilters. Karina Thompson refined the technique more recently to create large-scale artworks using subtly-toned fabrics.

Karina Thompson

Helen Amy Murray, a textile designer working with luxury upholstery, developed a technique at University to pad, stitch, and slash leather and other luxury materials to create raised effects for use on furniture, similar in effect to stitch and slash, but with a more complicated design. I’ve interpreted this technique and described it in my book, called cut surface quilting and have used it myself to create geometric designs loosely inspired by traditional square patchwork quilts (left).

‘Squares’ hanging, 2013.

Stitch & Slash from Fabric Manipulation

A version of this post originally appeared on Mr X Stitch for my monthly column on historic and contemporary textile techniques, Pinning the Past.

23Apr2014

Collaboration with Bethany Walker: work in progress

Posted in Collaborations, Fabric Manipulation, My work by Ruth Singer

I’ve long been fascinated by Bethany’s combination of textiles and cement; the contrasting soft and hard materials, the transformation of cloth from malleable to solid objects and the potential her innovative techniques would hold for my kind of manipulated textiles.

Last year I applied to a-n’s collaboration bursary to fund our travel and expenses to develop a collaboration and we started working together in January 2014.

Our aim is to create work suitable for public art commissions, large-scale installations and projects. I wanted to explore Bethany’s techniques and she wanted to look at more organic forms, moving away from her usual square-format.

We started by simply setting a whole series of my textile and paper samples into cement to see how they worked and then moved on to making specific samples to test based on what worked best and looked most interesting.

Plenty was simply scrapped as uninteresting, or not sufficiently exciting to stand out. I wanted to make sure what I made was sufficiently different to Bethany’s existing work too. A new set of samples worked much better and gave us new avenues to explore.

At this stage I was struggling to find a theme which worked for me, beyond simply exploring interesting shapes. Our discussions lead to the idea of growth and renewal and eventually to mould, lichen, moss and fungus. We also worked on colour palettes; looking for something that contrasted well with the grey of the cement but would also work with my quite subtle-coloured work. We used Pinterest to share ideas, much like I did with my collaboration with Alys Power. Our palette became delicate pink. Bethany continued to work on new shapes and forms while I experimented with fungus-inspired growths made in textile using fabrics I dyed with elderberry.

Their success was limited but other pieces definitely worked and we have finally hit upon the perfect combination of form, textile structure, colour-palette, type of fabric and display concept which we are really happy with.

The finished work is a series of smaller pieces; potentially a lot of small pieces, so we are busy making more and more. Our aim is to exhibit the work in 2015 and use it as a basis for joint application for projects and commissions.

21Mar2014

Trapunto Quilting

Posted in Fabric Manipulation, History by Ruth Singer

Trapunto, Italian quilting or stuffed quilting is an old and rather under-appreciated technique which I am a huge fan of. Unlike ‘normal’ quiting, where two layers of fabric have a layer of wadding between them and are stitched through all the layers, Trapunto uses two layers of fabric and the stuffing is only placed in defined areas, after all the stitching is complete. Narrow lines are filled with cord while larger areas are filled with cotton or wool traditionally and often polyester stuffing these days. The old French version of stuffed quilting called Boutis is always worked in white and all shapes are stuffed with a soft, cotton cord.

The oldest known quilt still surviving dates from the 14^th century (1360-1400) and is made using stuffed quilting. This gorgeous, minimalist white linen quilt, called the Tristan Quilt, was made in Sicily, presumably for an extremely wealthy client. Textiles were as valuable, if not more valuable than gold in the middle ages, and skilled craftsmen were in demand. This, like many other luxury textiles such as tapestry and embroidery, were made in specialist professional workshops staffed by men and women, and not by noble women sitting around in castles with nothing to do. The quilt depicts scenes from the Legend of Tristan & Isolde (or Iseult), a classic bit of medieval courtly love / tragedy.

Detail of Tristan Quilt

Despite this amazing survival, showing brilliant craftsmanship, the technique seems not to have been used much since – or at least it has not survived very well. We start finding examples of stuffed quilting, often the corded kind, in 19^th century garments, such as these corset covers, though it isn’t until the 20^th century that trapunto is used regularly – I’ve seen it on elegant coat collars from the 1930s, satin dressing gowns and nightwear, on ties, dresses, and on homemade accessories like this handkerchief pouch, made using corded quilting. There are lots more examples, modern and vintage, on my Pinterest board.

Handkerchief pouch

The most extraordinary example is a dress by the surrealist-influenced fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli in 1938. She used bold stuffed quilting to create prominent ribs and spine on a figure-hugging black dress – quite the most remarkable use of trapunto I have ever seen.

Elsa Schiaparelli – Skeleton Dress

I like to use the technique because of its subtlety and tactility. The play of light on the fabric shows up the design which can be almost invisible in flat lighting and dark colours. Outlining the motifs in contrasting thread helps to make them stand out and you can also use a sheer fabric top layer to create shadow quilting, which I’ve also seen in pre-war pieces.

Trapunto by Ruth Singer, part of Criminal Quilts series

Trapunto by Ruth Singer, part of Criminal Quilts series

The techniques of trapunto are covered in detail in my book Fabric Manipulation, 150 Creative Sewing Techniques and a few other books on quilting and manipulated textiles.

14Oct2013

2014 textiles workshops

Posted in Fabric Manipulation, natural dye, Work With Me by Ruth Singer

Just a brief outline of the new workshops to come in 2014, full details soon!

Workshops 2014
All workshops are 10am-4pm on Saturdays at Ruth Singer Studio, Leicester. £55 each or book 3 for £150

Miniature Art Quilts. 25th January

Shadow Embroidery. 23rd February

Cut-surface quilting. 22nd March

‘Squares’ hanging, 2013. More details here

Family Stories. 26th April

Handmade fabrics. 31st May

Smocking, Shirring & Gathering. ~~28th June~~ Rescheduled for 21st June

Found objects and amulets . 19th July

Photos on Fabric. 30th August

Monumental Folly pincushion 25x15cm More
details here

Wild Dyes. ~~28th September~~ Rescheduled for 20th September

Trapunto Quilting. 1st November

Transparency. ~~6th December.~~ Rescheduled for 13th December

29Jul2013

Exhibitions at Waddesdon

Posted in Exhibitions, Fabric Manipulation, History by Ruth Singer

There’s textile delights aplenty at Waddesdon Manor at the moment. I particularly wanted to see Sacred Stitches, an exhibition of ecclesiastic textiles from the Rothschild Collection which is reviews in Embroidery magazine (July / August). I love Medieval church textiles so was excited to see examples that have not been displayed before, and I was not disappointed. The small exhibition also includes some other, later, treasures including a few gorgeous saint statue robes. There’s a small book of the exhibition which has some great images and looks well-written and informative too, assuming it is similar to the exhibition text, which is pretty good going considering I know far too much about this kind of stuff already.

The house is full of interesting textiles too, mostly on upholstery and in wall hangings.

An unexpected extra pleasure was the Folded Beauty exhibition of historic napkin folding by Catalan artist Joan Sallas. Truly extraordinary and amazing!

Folded Beauty by Joan Sallas at Waddesdon

I was disappointed that the Philippa Lawrence garden artworks hadn’t succeeded. I got a glimpse of the half-grown piece on my drive in but it sounds like things didn’t work out as planned. I’ve been interested in her work for a while so will definitely be back to see it next year.

3Jul2013

Apply & Layer

Posted in Books, Fabric Manipulation by Ruth Singer

Final part of Fabric Manipulation book preview. Read about the other chapters: Pleat and Fold & Stitch and Gather

The Apply & Layer chapter covers a whole lot more than just appliqué, although the majority of the techniques are appliqué in its loosest sense. Layering up fabrics and applying shapes on a foundation have many exciting possibilities and this chapter only touches the surface. There are some well-known techniques, from the basics of hand and machine quilting (with the emphasis on using them to make manipulated fabric, not for making large quilts) and stitch and slash. I have covered trapunto quilting in depth as it is one of my most favourite techniques, although there’s a an awful lot more about trapunto that I had to leave out! I use trapunto in my own artwork quite often as I find it to be a beautiful, subtle technique that can be used in many way.

Intro to Applique Sat 3rd August, 2-4pm Explore exciting, quick techniques to apply decorative fabrics to garments, cushions or other sewing projects using simple embroidery, machine sewing and bondaweb. £20 including materials Please book in advance here

Green pebble hoop (sold)

‘Squares’ hanging, 2013. More details here

Cut surface quilting is my interpretation of a technique used by designer <Helen Amy Murray to create stunning textured leather for upholstery. I have adapted the technique for a variety of materials and tried out a number of variations. Since I wrote this chapter, I’ve made a large piece of my own using a version of this technique.

Applied decoration is very popular on contemporary couture fashion, and has been for some years. The techniques are generally worked by hand and are often very time-consuming, but the effects are stunning. I got the idea for looped strips from a couture coat I saw a picture of years ago. Dresses from the 1830s-1880s are also good for innovative appliqué. You can see examples in my Pinterest board. Personally, I particularly love Petals and Split Circles. I made a huge framed artwork using vintage fabric in the petals technique a few years ago, and more recently revamped a blouse using split circles and embellished a jumper with delicate trapunto.

The scalloped edges technique is one I keep coming back to in my own work – it has such potential.The orange piece below is the first piece I used it in – inspired by roof tiles on a Victorian building when I was artist in residence at Bilston Craft Gallery in 2007. Simple scallops are used to edge the cape project, made during the same residency and it also uses shadow work reverse appliqué.I currently have plans for a large quilt using cut-surface quilting and definitely more trapunto.

Tiles panel. 40x40cm deep-edged canvas. Layered silk.

3Jul2013

Stitch & Gather

Posted in Books, Fabric Manipulation by Ruth Singer

Part two of Fabric Manipulation book previews.

It is quite hard to define and name this group of techniques – Stitch & Gather is the best I’ve come up with. This part of the book covers a wide range of techniques where thread is used to create shape and structure, often by gathering with simple machine or hand stitching.

Monumental Folly frame, detail

As with pleats, gathering techniques have been used to create decoration on 18^th century gowns. Wide strips of bias-cut silk fabric with decorative pinked (zigzag cut) edged are swirled and stitched down the front of gowns and stomachers. Using bias-cut strips allows you to curve the fabric beautifully, See Single Edge Gathers p78 for how to achieve this look.

Rutfle scarf pattern

I’ve played around with this technique many times and have found bias-cut fabrics to be perfect for making draped scarves and ruffles. The scarf on p81 is made with 3 different fabrics layered up together before gathering. I’ve also used the technique to make embellishments for cushions and interior décor.

The Pattern Stitched Ribbon Ruffles (below) technique as shown on p82-83 is traditionally used to make fabric flowers and I first saw it in a 1920s book on ribbon art. I found the same technique, used on fabric as a detail on a couture dress made by Mainbocher for Wallis Simpson in 1937 and now in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The collar centre-back seam is gathered using the Zigzag shirring technique on p87.

Other well-known techniques in this section include Suffolk Puffs, shirring and smocking. I love Suffolk puffs immensely and have used them for several years in my own work, creating new ways of using them in textile artworks. I like to create the puffs in fabric that matches the background and hand stitch them to create a seamless effect. I enjoy creating movement and variation in a repetitive design by using different sizes of puff and added stuffing behind some of them to create added dimension.

Betty Panel (sold)

I created the Circle Edge Gather (p103) technique as a development of Suffolk puffs and have used this technique to make the draping scarf below.

I came up with the idea of Stuffed Bobbles (p106) in the same experimental phase and later discovered that it is very similar to the effect created by Japanese shibori stitching. I enjoy the organic, irregular quality of this technique which I have used on wall panels as well as garments and accessories.

Buy individual patterns here.

Creative Textiles Course. Oct-Dec. First and Third Thursday of the month starting in October 10am-12pm £20* each session or book all 6 and get one free (£100 for 6 sessions) This is a social and relaxed workshop exploring creative textiles techniques. Learn a new technique at each session and explore lots of new inspiration, design and creativity. Techniques include fabric manipulation, embroidery, appliqué, fabric printing, quilting, smocking, pleating and much more. You will also have access to Ruth’s library of sewing books and magazines for techniques and inspiration. *Some sessions may have a small additional charge for materials (£2-3). October 3rd, 17th, November 7th & 21st, December 5th & 12th (brought forward). Please book in advance here