Category: research
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Themed school workshops
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…
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Interlace on show in Craft and Conflict at Bilston Craft Gallery
Work by Interlace is on show in Craft and Conflict at Bilston Craft Gallery until 22nd November 2014. We created work specifically for this show, using white petals instead of our usual colours. By creating fragile textile forms fixed into concrete, we explore making the ephemeral permanent and preserving memories set in stone. The…
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Old Textiles at October’s Sew Sociable
This month’s Sew Sociable will be all about old textiles. I’ll be giving a talk about my love of antique textiles, about museum collections, about my own collection of textiles and how I take inspiration from them to create my own textile art. Anyone coming to the event is enthusiastically encouraged to bring along their own…
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Pleated dress and hat decorations
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…
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Natural Dye: local plant bundles
After a year or so of experimenting with natural dyes, I’ve had plenty of disappointments alongside a lot of happy accidents, although very few ‘turned out just how I planned’. I am not a precise, measuring, recording, repeating kind of dyer. I read a lot about dyes and then I experiment, break the rules, mess…
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Fabric Manipulation : Stitch & Slash
Would you believe that ripped jeans of the 1990s are simply harking back to the 16th 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.…
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The Business of Embroidery ecourse
I’ve just started Mastered ecourse on the Business of Embroidery taught by the amazing Karen Nicol. I’ve been looking for a while for an ecourse to take as research towards developing my own ecourses and had been pondering one of the Mastered embroidery courses, though I knew they weren’t quite right for me. It has been…
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Family Stories
After my Grandad died (aged 96) in late 2012, I cleared out a huge amount of textiles from his house, along with masses of curios and generations of junk that he had kept. His second wife’s family ran a small laundry business, and it was the ex-laundry buildings where Grandad kept all sorts of interesting…
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Trapunto Quilting
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…
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Embroidery commission for Jan Garside
I recently completed a small embroidery commission for my friend, the weaver Jan Garside, who I’ve collaborated with before. She asked me to make some pieces based on Elizabethan embroideries at Hardwick Hall for a commission she was working on. Jan & her finished pieces. Find out more about Jan & her work here. This…
Ruth Singer 