Pin cushion presents...

Hand made Christmas’s and birthday presents for my mum for the last few years – can you guess which are the earliest experiments? 

Gcse course work and exam pieces...

I’ve always preferred 3d pieces to traditional art- drawing and painting. During GCSE,  I started exploring wire work people shapes and particularly enjoyed making this modelling clay carousel based on photographs of my school friends dancing around the Maypole and the little model of me sitting on the floor texting a message on my phone.  Didn’t enjoy papemache work much, and a head and shoulders study of my little brother asleep was a disaster – he looked more like the ‘Big Friendly Giant’ with massive ears – my art teacher took one look and suggested I lost it!

 

This is the front page of my year 11 coursework sketchbook, I was absolutely fascinated by flowers and still am- when ever I get stuck on a project I can't help but come back to them!







This print was part of my flower sketchbook, this was one of the first times I'd printed so I think I managed the task pretty well.

My teacher suggested an after school felting class. Following the flower theme, it seemed obvious to try and recreate a felted rose. After a lot of rolling and puffing, with sleeves pushed up, getting hotter and hotter (and that was just me, not the wet wool fibres), I finally came home triumphant with a felted square and a rose design.




 I enjoyed felting so much, that I made a further 12 flower felted squares at home and used them to create an embellished shoulder bag as a final course work piece. I was thrilled that the fibres could be tamed to give really close likenesses to the original photographed flowers. 

I still remember the endless hours it seemed to take to roll each of the felt shapes out- by the end of the night my arms were dead!

This textiles related work was completed during my first year of art gcse, I love to look back through my sketchbooks now and again and see how my skills have developed whilst I was so unaware of my future obsession with textiles.

  

  

  

This is my final art gcse piece- a pastel drawing of my brother in his room looking into a mirror globe. 

For my exam sketchbook I decided to follow the topic 'people and places', I felt inspired by this topic and spent time looking at people in different environments from parks to doctors surgery.

After experimenting with all the possibilities I could work with, I focused on the mediums of wire work and mirror globes as I was interested by their shape, form and as far as mirror globes went the way they distorted everything.

My first cardi...

It’s all very well making summer tops, but in Wales, it rains a lot of the time, and I now needed to think about keeping warm. My grandmother is a fanatical hand and machine knitter, and she found me a ball of purple wool and a pattern to make my first stocking stitch cardigan.  I can’t remember how many times I undid and re knitted sections to make sure the tension was correct and to sort out dropped stitches.

  Finally, I got to sew it up and add buttons, and couldn’t wait to wear it out to a friend’s birthday party – imagine how disappointed I was to find that despite measuring tension, and knitting to the pattern, my lovely new cardigan was too big – should have made a smaller size.  Mum to the rescue – She came up with the idea of a half belt to gather the back of the cardi and turn it into a jacket – success – everyone loved it and never knew that it wasn’t planned all along.

Hankie tops...

Summer holidays 2010, I asked for material and proper patterns for my birthday present, and made these two handkerchief edged tops.  I learnt how difficult it is to top stitch ribbon and fit zips.  Pretty and dainty, nobody else in the world has tops like these, and they were still economical to make.

Rug Ragging...

I saw these kits and had to try them out; this cat cushion was my first try and then I wanted to go bigger and so went for a wall hanging! It took me ages as in 6 months on and off to complete so  I’m not in a hurry to do another just yet– seems a pity to walk on it after all that work.

I love the ease of knotting wool to create fringed rugs.  These rug kit pictures showed me how easy it is to blend colours and create images.

PJ revival...

And now I’m off – I wanted to replace much loved PJ’s and couldn’t get shorts in the middle of winter.  There was only one answer – make my own, and here’s the result – I was very proud of this, for a first attempt – loved choosing the materials from Treforest Textiles factory shop

My first dress making experience...

2010, I persuaded my mum to help me make a dress without a pattern, and from materials found in a bottom drawer.  The white top of this dress was an old sheet.  We cut out basic shapes and then adjusted them to my body with tucks, darts and alterations as we went.