To Tell a Story with Cloth: Impressions, Connections, and Memories: Word Impressions

Barbara C: Barbara's pieces focused on her memories of London, where she lived for over 20 years. She recently visited and was struck by how much she loved the architecture...and one building in particular...which she found out used to be the home of T. S. Eliot. She decided to include a poem by Eliot as part of her memory cloth series. On this piece, Barbara combined hand painted and hand stitched lettering along with appliqued fabric "bits".

The fourth theme we covered in To Tell a Story with Cloth: Impressions, Connections, and Memories was Word Impressions. For this class, I asked students to bring in poetry, personal correspondence, favorite family sayings or to choose words that appeared in their journal (for example...words from their Mind Map from Class #2). We talked about different ways to get words onto fabric including: writing with permanent marker (such as Micron pens), printing, applique and stitching.

There were so many possibilities that most students worked on printing techniques during Class #4 and stitching techniques in Class #5. I'm including both in this post and will feature finished work and works in progress in the next (and final) blog post.

Ann Z.: Ann used adhesive foam letter stamps for some of her words and incised others in craft foam. Her pieces focused on memories of the beach.

Printing techniques included carved Speedy Carve blocks, incised craft foam, embossed aluminum and freezer paper stencils.

Alice A.: A quote referencing a Mary Oliver poem. Alice used embossed aluminum.

Judith K.-P.: Japanese for "creativity"...part of Judith's continuing series on Japan. She used incised craft foam.

Jan B.: Jan's father was a math teacher. This was one of his favorite sayings! Jan used foam letter stamps.

Jan B.: While going through some old papers, Jan found this page of math problems handwritten by her father. The other side is a set of mimeographed word problems (also handwritten)!

Jan B.: Incised craft foam block prints based on her father's diagrams.

Judy M.: As part of her series about her grandmother and the cottage on Lake Michigan, Judy decided to reference some of the poetry that her grandmother used to read to her. This print is made from an incised craft foam block.

Karol L.: This is the title of the book that Karol's mother wrote. She is planning on including it as part of her piece about the Eastern shore (see the link to the post below on Significant Object Portraits). This was printed with embossed aluminum.

Karol L.: Karol also incised the book title in craft foam.

Stitching techniques included turned and raw edge applique and reverse applique. I made some samples to inspire the students.

Julie Booth: Turned and raw edge applique and reverse applique.

Barbara C.: Raw edge applique letters to spell London.

I also had fun working on some stitch samplers featuring different stitches. I'm continuing to work on more samplers. Lots of potential with stitch combinations!

Julie Booth: Words using different stitches.

Ann Z: Stitched words inspired by Rachel Carson.

Below are links to some of the other posts about this class.
Color Connections
Mapping Memories
Significant Object Portraits

If you live in the Washington, D.C. area, I will be teaching this as an evening class this coming fall (dates TBA). Please feel free to contact me.