October 2024 – Karen Turner Stitching Life

October

I say it every month but even with the extra hour from putting our clocks back last weekend, time is still flying by so quickly. It’s unstoppable, of course. Time is all we have, and it keeps on rolling. And time is what I’m trying to illustrate here. A map of time, moments in days, days in a life.

Today is Samhain, in the traditional pagan calendar the beginning of winter. The days are already short, and the nights are already dark. Some say the veil between the worlds is thinner today.

I know a lot of people don’t enjoy the dark days and nights, but I’ll take hats and scarves and boots over shorts and sandals any day. There’s a lot to look forward to: cosy evenings with good books, lamps and candles, warm quilts to wrap around chilly knees, hot soup, and (even better) hot chocolate. I sometimes wonder if the season of our birth somehow becomes our favourite time of year. Maybe having a winter birthday means I enjoy this time of year more than summer.

So far there have been falling leaves and blue-grey skies, and more to come.

As usual, keeping it simple. Little stitches marking the passage of time.

I don’t often use backstitch – I find it a bit finicky – but I do like this one, worked in a space-dyed silk perle 8 thread:

October stitch journal, detail, space-dyed silk thread

I like the other side even better. The other side of back-stitch is split stitch:

There isn’t much left of this year:

Stitch journal, looking ahead to November and December

I’m starting to think about next year’s template, of course. I only have enough of this lovely vintage linen for one more year. My remaining piece measures about 5 feet by about 3 feet, and I’m thinking about whether to make another large cloth, this time in a 3 x 4 formation, or whether to cut and join strips of it to make a long cloth.

What I’ve enjoyed most about this year’s template is the variety. I really like the way every day is a different size and shape, as they often are in reality, and the way the days fit so seamlessly together, also as they do in real life.

I’m finding myself repeatedly drawing a kind of wavy grid in my sketchbook work lately, and I’m thinking I might base my new template on something like that. The grid pattern makes me think of an enlarged photo showing the weave of a piece of gauzy fabric, like cheesecloth or scrim.

It’s very much a work in progress.

the last piece of vintage linen and the beginnings of a plan

At some point I will be ready for 2025, but not just yet.

book cover (3)

Anyone bored with sketchbook covers yet?

Look away now, if the answer is yes 😎

This one is A4 size, and it’s the sketchbook I’m using for the Laura Horn Modern Mixed Media course. So far the course content is quite different in style from what I would normally produce, but there are some interesting techniques that I might be able to adapt into some kind of landscape work. Laura is very, very good at what she does, and she demonstrates the techniques expertly.

The cover for this one is mostly layered sheer fabrics – hand-dyed silk organza, chiffon and nylon tulle, on a plain calico base. I drew some loose scribbly marks and lines on the calico first, which you can just about see under the surface, and then layered the sheers over the top to form a kind of landscape.

The scrap of poetry on the front cover, held in place under the top layer of nylon chiffon, is from ‘Home Thoughts in Laventie’ by Edward Wyndham Tennant.

The back is a little more simple, but broadly the same technique:

Sheer fabrics are notoriously difficult to photograph, so some of the colours are not quite right here – textiles always look so much better in person, in any case. This detail of the back cover shows some hand-painted builder’s scrim under the top layer of chiffon.

As usual, I’ve made a wrap-around slip cover, so the inside covers do double duty as pockets.

The Modern Mixed Media course so far has been quite heavily focused on ‘botanicals’, which I’ve struggled to render on paper without it looking like someone else’s work. The best I’ve been able to do so far is a kind of scribbly variation, which I quite like.

scribbly botanicals, pen and ink/watercolour

I’m not terrifically impressed by the paper in this sketchbook, which is a Fabriano watercolour 200 gsm. The paper has a very prominent texture, which I find distracting. You can see it particularly clearly on this page:

I’ve taken to collaging the pages before adding any paint, which I’m finding easier to handle.

sketchbook page, collaged with vintage papers

This page is ready for something, though I don’t know what yet. I could easily say the same about myself, most days. Let’s see what the rest of the week brings.

Book cover (2)

This week’s sketchbook cover almost made itself. I had a quarter yard of this glorious Marcia Derse ‘wabi sabi polka dot’ cotton quilting fabric that turned out to be exactly the right size for this one. When something is already the right size, I tend to take it as a sign that it was meant to be.

The light isn’t great here today, so the colours in the photos are a bit greyer than in real life.

Marcia Derse quilting cotton, wabi sabi polka dot

This sketchbook is quite big, with pages about 14″ x 11″ (roughly A3-ish). Unable to find what I wanted, I ended up making my own using some large sheets of 250 gsm mixed media paper and some very helpful online bookbinding tutorials. I even added header tape and a bookmark ribbon. The hard casing is just cardboard packaging covered with brown paper, which is why it needed a more decorative cover.

This book is for mixed media paint experiments, which I’d like to do more of when I manage to find the time.

All I did with the fabric was lay it on a calico backing to stabilise it and then outline each of the circular shapes with running stitch in a dark perle 12 cotton thread. I also added some straight stitches in very pale grey to the plain dark shapes along the spine.

It’s just a simple slip case, so it forms its own useful pockets in the front and back inner covers.

I’m not often attracted to something this bright, but I really like everything about this fabric – the varied mark-making behind the shapes, the painterly/collage style, the patterns in each circle and the colour palette. I wish I’d designed it.

I love being surprised by fabric. Looking forward to getting started in this one.

Book cover (1)

I’ve been having a tidy-up in my workroom and trying to round up All the Sketchbooks. Turns out there are a few more than I thought.

Some are complete, some are nearly complete, and some are completely empty. I do like a well-dressed sketchbook, so you know what’s going to happen next.

I have a little 6″ square Seawhite sketchbook (140 gsm cartridge paper) where I put paint scraps – leftover paint from another project, not enough for a new thing but too much to pour away. Then I go back in and add marks/other media, with no real plan. However hard I try to keep each sketchbook to a theme, they always end up being a fairly random collection of colours and marks.

The cover for this one is made from hand-dyed silk organza and dress net, roughly cut into circles and rings, layered onto some plain calico. Then I’ve covered it with very sheer nylon chiffon and stitched some simple lines and marks over the surface to hold it all together. I’m very bad at stitching text so I’ve sandwiched a small piece of handwritten card on the spine between the chiffon and some net.

mark-making sketchbook cover (front, detail)

mark-making sketchbook cover, in progress

If anyone’s interested in the contents, here are a few pages showing how simple it can be:

I recently got some Roman Szmal watercolours to try, just a starter set of five, and I really like the Caput Mortuum and Aquarius Green:

Roman Szmal caput mortuum and Aquarius green with fine black and white pens

Mostly this book (so far) consists of various rings and circles, hence the design on the cover.

watercolours with walnut ink, marks made with cotton bud (q-tip) and cocktail stick

watercolour with Derwent drawing pencils

There are lots more books needing covers, so there’s more than enough here to keep me busy over the coming months. If you’re in the northern hemisphere, do you have long/ongoing projects planned for the coming winter?

Sketchbook Revival

Quite a few links in this post; I hope they all work.

Firstly, a huge thank you to Fiona, who told me about the free online Sketchbook Revival course hosted by the wonderful Karen Abend. I’ve been following along, and it really has been an exciting and inspiring two weeks. If you missed it, I think the classes are still available for another couple of weeks or so. And another huge thank you must go to all the amazing artists who so generously shared their time, experience, and processes.

I kept a sketchbook (more of a notebook, really) to remind me of the content, and I had a go at most of the projects – some more successfully than others, but then you generally learn more from your ‘bad’ art. I stayed pretty close to the techniques and images presented, but made enough notes to be able to attempt something similar in my own style, and I think I’m still learning what that is. Shown here are just a few examples; this particular book is actually full-to-bursting now.

Sketchbook Revival 2024 notebook, front cover

I added pockets to the notebook so I can write extra notes to myself. I have a lot of sketchbooks, most of them constantly in progress and nowhere close to being finished, and I often struggle to find enough time to use them meaningfully.

As Karen Abend so wisely says in the last session, however passionate you might be about your creative practice, it can be very difficult to be consistent with it, and it’s true – life gets busy; often I don’t know what to do in the sketchbook so I end up not doing anything in it; and then there’s the potentially overwhelming problem of the inner critic and imposter syndrome. After these two weeks of brilliant classes, I’m more determined to maintain a daily sketchbook practice. There are lots of mixed media ideas I want to explore, and I can now promise myself that I will find the time for it.

inside back cover, pocket (envelope) for notes to self

Usually these days my drawing consists of abstract mark-making, and it’s been a while since I’ve drawn ‘things’ that can be recognised as themselves, although lately I do seem to be drawn to flowers and leaves. A few of the techniques demonstrated in the classes are somewhere between abstract and realistic. I really enjoyed this poppy meadow session, hosted by Tamara Laporte:

There was mark-making by Joy Ting, using twigs as drawing tools – I already do this quite often myself, and it’s been reassuring to see and hear artists voicing my own thoughts about processes, using similar techniques.

trees drawn with sticks dipped in walnut ink and acrylic ink

There was a bit of mixed media collage, with Lynissa Hayes:

And some proper drawing – upside-down thumbnails hosted by Linda Germain:

upside down thumbnails (left) and how to draw anything (right)

The right hand page shows the exercise presented by the utterly brilliant Suhita Shirodkar, who demonstrates how to tackle a complex street scene, featuring architecture and crowds, in pen and watercolour. This one was a bit out of my comfort zone – not something I would even think about drawing, usually – but she makes it very accessible and it was actually a lot of fun.

And then there were mixed media pockets and tip-ins (not a term I’ve come across before; from the context it seems to be an extra page that you stick into a journal or sketchbook) hosted by Roben-Marie Smith, and also really enjoyable.

And there was drawing over (and under) collage with Julie Fei Fan Balzer:

There’s a LOT more in the course than the handful of examples I’ve given here – there are more than thirty sessions altogether. I learned a lot, had lots of fun, and am immensely grateful to all the artists who took part in this.

Next up, I’m doing a mixed media class with Laura Horn, and am looking forward to getting stuck in. Maybe it’s something about the autumn that makes me want to go back to school. It’s probably all those Septembers as a child, with a pencil case full of new pens…

Month: October 2024

October

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