Homework for design course - 'weaving'

Once again, I have returned to one of the activities I used to love doing with my school teaching. It was a fine motor skill activity, paper weaving.

I did a very rough one first, just to see if I remembered all the steps correctly. Not that there are many steps.
It was lucky I did though, as I had tried to do the two pieces of paper the same, by not cutting right through to the edges of the paper. That didn't work!  So I maintained one piece with intact edges and then cut the other piece into strips.

Then I chose two random bits of fabric that I had lying around.  I decided my day needed brightening up, so I chose loud ones.

I ironed on some fusible stabiliser first, then folded the orange piece and cut from the middle, doing random cuts - not trying to do straight lines at all.

Then I cut the strips from the purple piece, once again doing random, unplanned cuts. The two pieces of fabric were not exactly the same size. I had thought about cutting them the same before starting but decided that it wouldn't hurt to have some left over in case I thought of something clever to do with it.

So far, no clever ideas.  I suppose it could be used as a background for more work. I'd probably have to use more muted colours for a background - depending on what I wanted to do.

Actually, it reminds me a bit of some of the Zen Doodling and Zentangle stuff that I have been browsing (here and here) on the internet recently. (I have resumed doing a daily small one in the last few weeks and find myself colouring in alternate blocks, a bit like the colours above do.)

Our homework brief is to do some 'weaving' using fabric and to try to play around with the idea, not do anything textile predictable. I'm not sure this is all that different but it is the start of me giving it some thought.

Melding various aspects of life

I have been working with a student on her handwriting lately.  How to make this interesting???
Then a brainwave - I used to love doing the fluency patterns (not sure how the kids in my grade liked them, but I loved them).
So I had a play around with that.

Then I realised that some of the patterns had a remarkable resemblance to doodle and Zentangle patterns.
I still try to do a pattern every night before I go to sleep.

Recently I have been trying to do patterns that have the direction and shape that is used for the letters a, c, d, g and q. They all start the same way.

Then I had the brilliant (I thought) idea of making an alphabet for the youngest member of the family (trying to make the exercise meaningful) and that developed into D for Dog.
So I got a picture of our dog,

put it in Photoshop, traced it (because I don't think I can draw - common story), hid the original image, printed out the outline

and then filled it in with patterns.

I decided that I didn't need to do all c-based patterns, I could include some straight lines, as that is something that so many children who are not taught hand-writing properly are not taught - to come DOWN first.
Now I am playing around with different patterns instead of my usual doodling.

Somewhere in all of this we are also playing around with alliteration, trying to make our own tongue twisters.  Sometimes I miss the fun things you could do with rather mundane-seeming learning tasks. 

Random thoughts about doodling … and other things

As I have recently said, I am taking up the daily zen doodle thing again.  I have stuck to the small format so far but am feeling a smidgin of interest in trying to produce a larger image.
I have also been in the company of friends who are artists and have expressed interest in zen doodling, so I pointed them in the direction of a couple of sites and a book I had.

Then I was given a book for Christmas (yes, I have read it already, even though it is not yet Christmas).  This book is about the The Great Tapestry of Scotland.  It is very interesting, especially given my Scottish and Irish heritage.  The tapestry is based on the Bayeux Tapestry and the Prestonpans Tapestry, among other things. None of these works are, strictly speaking, tapestries as they are not woven but they are still called that historically. They are all embroideries.
As I was doing further research about the Great Tapestry of Scotland online, I got sidetracked to my local embroiderers guild and noticed they are having classes for crewel embroidery in the new year.
This got me to thinking about counted thread embroidery I have done in the past and how you make up little patterns to fill in the spaces - just like doodling.

This has to be over 20 years old - who says I keep things a long time??

The thing about the crewel and Jacobean work is that is usually has colour and that can change the process. I don't think it matters though, it is still in the same area of design technique.

THEN I wandered off to some Pinterest sites about Jacobean and crewel embroidery.  The images are very reminiscent of doodling - no need to be making up my own designs, I think they have all been invented.  From there I decided to look for some free designs, just to see how much like doodling they really are.  I came across quite a few interesting sites. Several of the sites I visited pointed me to the Gutenberg project site and the book on Jacobean embroidery.  Such an interesting read - and source of designs.

While I was doing a desultory clean-up for the Christmas period, I also came across some designs I drew up when I was doing the blackwork workshop at the Embroiderers Guild.

As I was doing counted thread work, I used graph paper to help me.  But this is a design that is very much like the doodling patterns, I have just tried to remember what I would need to do to be sewing the designs rather than simply doodling.

I was off and running then, looking around all sorts of links connected to my current train of thought. I often come across this site when I am idling around the web - it is always worth a visit.  There are some great links on this post.
This site isn't for crewel embroidery, it is sashiko patterns but they look just like doodling patterns to me.
Here is another site I found through Pinterest.
No wonder I have liked doing the doodling thing - I have been playing around with similar stuff most of my life - off and on.

AND THEN I remembered Dijanne Cevaal's free motion embroidery patterns that she has published recently. They, too, look a lot like doodling.

So, although I have been busy with visiting and preparing for Christmas, not doing any of my creative stuff, I have been busy in my mind.

And the hollyhocks are blooming profusely at the moment, the freezer is filling up with flowers and the pressure is on to get the them out and start dyeing. Someone very selfishly wants to use the freezer for food - as if it were summer.

Doodling again

I have recently started doing my daily doodles again.  In fact, I have had time to do one at night, just before I go to sleep, and one in the morning, before I even get out of bed! (And that is after my three pages of writing in my journal - you can tell it is holiday time, it takes ages to get out of bed.)
I must say, I am sleeping well after starting this ritual at night, it is very relaxing.
I am keeping them small and doable, it doesn't take too long to do one.

I have also started doing them randomly on the page, so I won't be too influenced by the previous one - I hope.

I use A4 drawing paper and can fit 12 squares quite nicely.

Then I decided to branch out and try a variation.  I got out some masking tape and traced the inside and outside of the shape, overlapping them.  I was strict with myself and only did one section each day. Some sections are not very big at all and were very quick to do.

I feeling inspired by a conversation I had tonight, talking about a pizza, which is round, cut up into triangles and stored in a square box.  That might be my inspiration for a new doodle. I'll have to see what develops. Maybe I should order a pizza and take a photo, just for inspiration.

I am feeling ambitious and want to try a new stop motion animation.  I was inspired by seeing a post giving pictorial developments of doodling as well as a video.  Why make a simple video? I ask myself.  Why not make it hard and try to take a photo of each stage and then make it into a movie? I'll have to work out how to set up the camera so that it takes the image with the same lighting, make sure the paper doesn't move and it doesn't need too much editing to make the image grow smoothly.  That will be a project for another day, when I am feeling a bit more energetic. Don't hold your breath waiting for this to appear.

Different doodling

I went to a sale at Zart Art late last year and there was a man demonstrating using watercolour paints and black pen for an art activity in  the classroom.
I remembered it recently and did  the preliminary work. I had got out my watercolour crayons and just put some lines on paper and then swished some water around.
I experimented by wetting some areas of the paper and not others.  The crayons just did fairly ordinary straight lines where the paper was wet.  When I put the crayon on the dry paper, and then swished water around with a brush, the colours mixed nicely and the obvious pencil marks disappeared.  But overall, the thing looked like a mess.
Unfortunately, I didn't take a photo.
Then, over the next few days, I did a little bit of doodling with a black pen.  I went around the areas of different colours and intensity.

I quite like the result.  I have no idea what to do with it now.  I suppose I should treat it like the zen doodles, just let myself enjoy the process, not worry about the end product.

Doodle sewing

I am combining my interest in doodle drawing with free motion machine sewing.  I used a drawing I had done of a tree trunk (another that seems to have the pattern of the bark going up the tree from left to right) and traced the main outlines onto soluble fabric.  Then I tried doodling it in a similar way using the sewing machine.

Surprisingly, it is not much slower than the drawing.  One of the main drawbacks is that you can't alway see where the needle is going, as you move backwards and forwards.  But that didn't matter to me in this instance.
I need to practise more and see if I can come up with more patterns that will hold together when the soluble fabric is gone. I couldn't get it quite the same as the pen doodling, not that I was trying all that hard, but I was quite pleased with the look.

Then I dissolved the backing.  It shrank much more than I expected.  I used rayon thread this time and now I will have to do some samples as much the same as I can make them to see what the difference is between cotton and rayon.  I might even lash out and get some polyester and see how that compares.

The shrinkage means that the darker, more heavily sewn areas, are quite dense and my variations in tone are less clear. Oh well, live and learn.

The final piece over the picture I had traced it from.  Quite a lot of shrinkage.

Doodling and Zen

I have been a bit slack about the black line drawing I wrote about a while ago.  Even though I really enjoyed it and had this (sort of) resolution to do some every week, I haven't done any recently, till the last few days.

I am still working on my bark images and trying to utilise them in my drawing - partly because I have plenty of images of tree trunks to use.

However, I have come across references to zen doodling, zen drawing and zentangles (which seems to be a trademark of the same idea as the other two). There is a whole lot of chatter on the internet about the meditative elements of this doodle drawing.  The recommended way to do it is more freeform than I have been doing but there is a definite similarity.

I also came across an article by Laura Wasilowski in Quilting Arts magazine about zen doodling for designing quilts. It has colour in it rather than the black and white of the zen doodling that I have seen online.  It takes the idea in a slightly different direction, one I don't want to follow at the moment.  But it is worth keeping in mind.