From 'Mapping my Garden'
It was a great afternoon at Harrogate Creative Stitchers this Saturday with a good attendance from our members as well as lots of newcomers. Today, we welcomed textile artist CarolAnn J Allen for her talk about her work which includes embroidery, shibori, community projects and most recently natural dyeing.
CarolAnn is an artist and educator specialising in
hand embroidery based in West Yorkshire. She
teaches embroidery, stitched shibori, English
paper-piecing and eco-printing. Her own practice explores the importance of slow textiles and visible mending, and
stitch and traditional skills. She is also the Region 14 Coordinator for the Young Quilters Guild where she has been involved in the creation of quilts for Ukrainian refugees. She completed her BA (Hons) in Contemporary Surface Pattern and Textiles in 2010 from Bradford School of Art & Media.
CarolAnn explained that one of her first big projects, was working alongside textile artist Dionne Swift in the Stitched Together Project with Rural Arts Outreach. This took place over a two year period bringing military families together through the medium of textiles, learning new skills and building community. Many of the participants created stitched 'messenger bags' as a personal response to military life and these were displayed at an exhibition at the Green Howards Museum in Richmond and later at Stitching shows at the NEC and Glasgow, alongside CarolAnn and Dionne's own work.
A section of CarolAnn's work as part of the Stitched Together Exhibition in which she felt a strong connection to as her father was in the military.
Another community project "Gargrave Mapping" in which CarolAnn was involved with Chrysalis Arts, brought local people together through photography, poetry and textiles. This focused on connection to nature, climate and place by exploring the community's response to their local area, walk or view through the window. This culminated in the creation of an Environmental Atlas which brought all the work together beautifully bound in a book by artist Alice Fox.
In the second half of the talk, CarolAnn went on to speak about her latest project "Mapping my Garden" which emerged after the Covid pandemic. CarolAnn has a beautiful walled garden which has nearby woodland and fields where she grows and forages plants to dye fabrics and incorporate into her work. This is a slow process at it takes time to collect material, dye fabric pieces and place them into her mini quilt series. She explained how she prefers the technique of solar dyeing as it uses less energy IE the sun, rather than heating over a stove. She simply dissolves a teaspoon of alum in a jar as a mordant and then tops up with the plant material, fabric and water and leaves for several weeks. She has tried dried buddleja flowers as well as rosemary, ivy, daffodils, bluebells, eucalyptus and amaryllis.
She also enjoys eco printing which is a slightly different technique where you have to soak the fabric in either a copper or iron mordant before placing the leaves inside the bundle and steaming. This gives a completely different effect, producing random pattern from the leaf prints. Both techniques have been used to incorporate small pieces of fabric into her 'Mapping my Garden" quilts and are simple but stunning.
Thank you so much to CarolAnn for coming along today, it was a really enjoyable talk and we loved chatting to her afterwards whilst we took a closer look at her work. For more information about CarolAnn's work visit https://www.carolannjallan.com/
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