Studio Saturday (not)

Instead of pots being made, preparations continue for the MSF fundraiser, which starts next weekend. But pots, and a return to the ceramics studio, are very much on my mind, especially after the visit to Ceramic Art London....

"Sewing companions" for sale -

 12" square quiltlets, mounted on canvases -

 6"x12" pieces mounted to fit A3 frames -

 7"x10" quiltlets mounted to fit A3 frames -

They contain "travel lines" fabric, screenprinted in 2011 when I was doing the art MA at Camberwell -

Folded secrets - thread books

Do you know about the folded thread "books" made by the Miao peoples of China? They are quite magical, and a search for images finds many, including these -

using traditional patterns (via)

from the collection of Sarah Foulks (via)

(via)

Here's a version made following the instructions set out by Ruth Smith, who researched these in China and wrote a book about the technique (and is teaching it) -

and another, from another blog -

The Chinese name for these books, I learned here, is zhen xian bao (needle thread pockets).

Binders Keepers again

In progress

Done - all that's needed is filling them with craft tools...

...like this

And then the next step is to add them, on a new page, to the Travel Lines website.

(This post is linked to Off the Wall Friday.)

At the craft fair

Starting to set up

The doors open before I'm ready

Friends, visitors, customers

My display included a tablecloth (mis)printed with Travel Lines

Thanks, first of all, to blog readers who sent good wishes - and to friends for coming along. Although it was only six hours, the fair was fairly quiet and time passed slowly. I did ok in terms of sales and the day produced a profit of (let's not be coy) of about £200 - which of course is risible in terms of hourly rate, given all the work involved not just in the making but in all the peripherals, an hourly rate in pence rather than pounds. Anyone who has ever gone the "handmade" sales route will recognise the situation, it's a common problem.

This was definitely a learning curve, so what have I learned? It was a question of "sight unseen" both in terms of previous craft fairs at this venue and the venue itself, so Lesson 1 is: be prepared for anything, be flexible - and make sure you have a setting-up toolkit with you. (I'll be adding those to my product range!)

Nothing could be done about the lighting level, and it was chilly. Lesson 2: wear warm clothes, bring extras, keep moving.

Nor could anything be done about the position of the table - the pillar at least was useful for displaying the price list! There was space behind the table for one or other of the sellers with tables on either side of the pillar, and on balance it was better to have the chair at the end of the table - fortunately I was at the end of the row, not in the middle. Lesson 3: if possible, request "table next to wall" or "table at end of row".

The display itself gives you lots of options. To get some "vertical impact" I used small wooden cabinets, opening the drawers for display - with storage in the closed drawers. For a screen that gave hiding places for untidy items like a coffee cup or notebook, I used A3 pieces of foam core, cutting them carefully so the backing would act as a hinge, and mounting examples of the Travel Lines, as well as a few short paragraphs giving "the story". This elicited no interest whatsoever - hey ho! 

I was able to use the Lines printed on the tablecloth as a talking point, but feel that the pattern made the tabletop look too cluttered. it could be "reconfigured" to go around the sides only, to be pinned in place.

As for talking points - I was taking this opportunity to practise telling people about the Travel Lines, what they are and how they came about and all that, but haven't got it right yet. It's an ongoing project… I did get to write some "soundscape lines" during a bout of singing - the young ladies in the barbershop quartet were really good, but their words were lost in the hubbub of general conversation.

Lesson 4, then, is along the lines of "less is more" - things will be more eye-catching if they have space around them. (The table alongside me was piled high and spilling in both directions…)

All in all, it was a good atmosphere at the fair, with mulled cider and tasty cakes and freshly-made sandwiches, and sellers with a range of goods. Very child-friendly too. I hope that next year there will be more publicity and more people will come!

To end, the seasonal decorations of the house across the street from the venue (photos by Tony Wallis) -

The final needlebooks

Fused covers and woolly pages - ready to sew

Sewn - the red threads need tying off, concealing, and snipping

Colourful hidden pages!

This is the final batch for now - these will debut at the craft fair tomorrow, sotime has just about run out and there seem to be a million little things to do so that all is ready.

The rest of the sewing kits

The final one is having some stitching added to the ribbon - after which I'll have a good selection for the craft fair next week.

The week's tasks include making larger needlebooks (lots of small ones are ready), finishing and printing and folding the little pamphlet showing embroidery stitches, and getting together all the things that are needed for the table. Not to mention ... figuring out how to display it all.

And the week after - research towards the next session of the museums course - that'll make a welcome change!

Production line

The week's six sewing kits are all cut out and ready to sew at once. They have migrated from the cutting-decisions area to the supplementary work surface near the machine, which is near enough to lay things on when sewing, but still requires standing up to use the iron. (It's not good to sit too long at a stretch.)

Unfortunately, when many complex items are being made at once, it's easy to get confused about what goes where -

Here's a semblance of order, ready for further steps tomorrow -

In a few hours, what looks like an unruly mess can be transformed into something beautiful and useful - that's what I like about sewing, and other forms of creating ... but oh the many steps and actions and decisions between one and the other!

A week of intermittent sewing

Only just managed to reach my target of six sewing kits -

Some good pieces of wool for the pages of the needlebooks have surfaced, but I haven't been able to start using them; those started last week are finished, though -

As they are made from printed fabric sample swatches, these books are quite small, 6cm high - to fit nicely into a pocket of the sewing kit. I'm also making a larger size (from larger swatches), 9cm high. The inside of the cover is usually silk or linen.

Does your workspace ever look like this?

Yesterday I revisited the drawer in which all the fabric I printed at college is stored, sorting it as it came out into the light of day -

That doesn't look particularly sorted, does it? That's because most of the sorting is taking place in other parts of the room - on the workbench, for instance -

and on the ironing board (that tablecloth on the chair will come in handy at the craft fair) -

At this point I was so overwhelmed by "everything, everywhere" that I took some photos and went into the other room to escape. But it's at the point where everything is most muddled up that it can start to get so much better - you're ready to do something drastic, and often doing something drastic is exactly what's needed. In this case, it was a simple matter of quickly writing down the ideas and putting everything away tidily.

What seems to happen is that you see these forgotten fabrics and get ideas for projects that ALL seem to need to be worked on at once, starting now - hence the befuddlement, the loss of sense of purpose. Yet you have only one pair of hands and there are only so many hours in the day... It seems to help to say to yourself, "I'll work on this right now, and do those later." Which sounds self-evident - but it can take years to come to that point!

Here are some of the fabrics I'd forgotten about - they quickly got put back in the drawer for another time -

During the turmoil of sorting, another idea for the "All in a Day's Work" CQ challenge quilt (due 1st Dec...) emerged - a sketchy version is laid out at the far end of the workbench in the photo above, which doesn't give much away does it! Lots more fabric for the little needle-books appeared, too, but the search for the perfect fabric for their "pages" goes on - or rather, I'm trying not to delve too deeply in search of it, because what will happen is a repetition of the turmoil of today.

This week, my goal of six sewing kits is still far away - but a red-and-yellow one is laid out in preliminary compostition stage on the ironing board -

and most of those fabrics will be used to make one or two others in a similar colourway. It's grouping the fabrics that is the big job for each of these little objects.

The deconstructed drawer is wonderfully tidy; the workbench (and floor) is clear. I can think again, and am motivated - empowered, even! - to keep sewing.

This week's sewing kits

Week 2 of The Big Effort - amid a lot of going out to exhibitions/cafes, the quota has been reached -

Here's a glimpse of the inside of some of them. The pix are intended for my website (and eventual Etsy/whatever shop) and need considerable editing - or maybe it would be simpler to rephotograph them after the craft fair -

Also I've started making small needle books using the "travel" screen-printed fabric. The tiny samples are perfect for this; they came in two main sizes, small and larger. The needlebooks are lined with silk or linen, and have "pages" of wool or felt -

Button, button

It is a truth widely acknowledged that any woman who owns a sewing machine also has a button collection. Those of us who are averse to collections happily call our button collections "repair tools".

In the search for buttons for the sewing kits currently in production, out came the button boxes. Some are chaotic, others vaguely organised and even labelled - "green buttons" for example -

I love getting them out - and putting them away -

Here's a selection for use in the sewing kits. Only singelton buttons are acceptable for this (sub)collection -

Strategies and quotas

My goal - call it a quota - is to make 6 sewing kits a week for the next 4 weeks. It was slow starting this week, and sometimes every surface was covered with mismatched fabrics, but by sifting through "the big box of fabrics for sewing kits", they started to take shape. The photo shows the outside and inside of one in progress - it was inspired by neon-green ribbon (the camera doesn't quite capture its shocking luminosity, and the colours are somewhat off...). In case you're thinking that the inside and outside bear no relation to each other, please remember that both sides aren't seen at the same time - opening it up is a transition experience -

What really helped getting faster at finding the component fabrics was an aspect of Good Studio Practice - namely, putting things away at the end of the day. Back into the big box went all the fabrics, in no particular order, except that the groupings of the day might still be together. On getting the fabric out the next day, it seemed that different things that happened to be next to each other sparked off ideas in a different way.

It seemed that the smaller the scrap, the more likely it was to gather other fabrics to it. Often those would be fabrics from the drawers, seen in the rummage for fabrics for the previous sewing kit.

This kind of work becomes cumulative - the more you do it, the easier it gets. Six are ready (the pink binding id now teal, much better), all with beads at the ends of the bindings -

I'm still having ideas about how the design and the making can be improved.

Starting again with sewing kits

In order to give myself a deadline, I signed up for a local xmas craft fair next month (more details later) - it's an experiment .... No idea whether it will be financially worth while, but it gives me an impetus to be doing something productive in the studio, rather than sifting through piles of fabric and unfinished projects, unable to decide to throw them out and get rid of a little of the burden of "use me, finish me" that can get in the way of new (and meaningful) work.

I had forgotten how long it takes to make the selection decisions for each sewing kit. It's taken an hour to come up with just one ensemble, and I'm still not sure about which ribbon to use -

Fabrics for the inside are at top, for the outside at bottom

The process is easy to describe -- I rootle through my big box of suitable fabrics and choose 13 or so for each sewing kit, configuring the outside according to the size of the scraps. In any session I gather fabrics for several items, then start the next day by sewing them up, which fortunately takes less time than the fabric selection, in fact is quite routine.

What would make the fabric-choosing quicker, of course, is some sort of production-line mode - make each outside to the same pattern and cut standard-size pieces of a limited range of fabrics - but where's the fun in that?

The aim is to make another two dozen in the next four weeks; six a week seems little enough. Some (a dozen?) are already on hand; as backup I have various "travel bags" [could make more of those] and some tee-shirts printed with my travelwriting lines.

I'd also like to make some little (A7 size) books to sell at a very reasonable price, either a set with half a dozen recipes using a "theme" ingredient in each, or a book with some embroidery stitches shown on its half-dozen pages. They'll be a variation of the "secret book", printable on one sheet of A4 paper each, and will have jolly, bright covers, possibly made from xmas wrapping paper.

For the possible stitch book, aimed at beginners, I thought the stitches included - one per page - would be chain stitch, cross stitch, french knots, stem stitch/back stitch, blanket stitch, and running stitch on the same page with "how to thread a needle".

Having set out the programme, I'm wondering if this is such a good idea - but it's an experiment, it's an experiment...!

And even more sewing kits

On the left, stitching added to the screenprint, and a velvet ribbon;
on the right, a glitzy fabric with a fancy bead closure

Yet more sewing kits

Another made with "tape  measure" outer fabric; in the other one, fabric from Australia is used to bind the pockets as well as on the outside, and it closes with a bead from Kenya.

More sewing kits - and a note on pricing

The tape-measure fabric seems totally appropriate!

Trying out the pieced-cover idea used in the Binders Keepers

Pricing is always a problem, isn't it - not too high or no-one will buy, not too low either - the low "perceived value" will make people not want it either, it's just not desirable if it's not "worth something". So, you need some good marketing talk to make the item desirable and worth buying. As for affordable, people will convince themselves they can afford something if they want it badly enough ... they will convince themselves they "need" it. 

The Binders Keepers sold at the book fair for £15, and at the open studio they and the sewing kits will be the same price. If/when I do the Etsy thing, it will be £20, to take into account the extra costs.

Is this an adequate pay-per-hour return? If I could get quicker at selecting fabrics, it would be! The sewing part goes very quickly now that I've had some practice. It's the fabric selection - the "creative" part - that takes the time, especially as it includes so many fabrics, some of which are scarp-sized, from my stash. 

But I don't look on making these small items as "work" in the drudgery sense - it give me a chance to catch up with radio and tv via the bbc iplayer, in the background, without feeling I'm totally wasting time. Also they are a project and even perhaps an example of structured procrastination - something to do while my subconscious is incubating the inclination to get on with a Proper Art Project.

All this may ignore the important issues of market value, income maximization, recognition of the value of craft-directed labour, and probably one or two other things I'm ignorant of.