Empress Wu Designs with Wilma

  Another week of  sharing love for textiles with the Seam Colelctiv'es social media cahllenge #SeptTextileLove....  Day 4:  PLAY  Most days , I play with materials , but I do love art and craft play dates with my grandchildren. All four of them and I have enjoyed creative play - these pics are ten years apart(2022-2012), so they suggest I am still playing and fabric dyeing has obviously been a ‘messy’ favourite . The tie dyeing kits are great for easy play - the squirt bottles can be managed by all ages. and the results are instant! Day 5 : PATTERN Over the last couple of years I have been experimenting with a technique which uses the decorative pattern stitches on a sewing machine. Using overlapping and layering different colours and patterns on scraps of fabric, with varying distances between the rows of stitching, a completely different patterned fabric is created. So, in a sense I use various tiny patterns to create a whole pattern . I am using this technique more and more

  Postage stamps feature a lot in my textile artwork.... and I have a lovely collection of old stamps. However, I also belong to a small group of artist friends who every three months, challenge one another with gifts of first day covers or stamp series.  A few months ago, I interpreted a series of stamps from New Zealand ...  In this round of challenges, I received a beautiful series of Australian stamps, depicting wonderful locations in different states.  At first I was at a loss of what to do with them to show them off... and at the time, I was stitching some backgrounds on my sewing machine.... The background is a collage of scrap fabrics and then overstitched  and overlayed with rows of decorative stitch patterns . I really liked one of these backgrounds for these stamps as Australian colours were all there..   After stitching the stamps onto the background, I "couched " contour lines in a random way.... this map does not depict a certain place. It is an invented map. 

  It’s September - the month of #SeptTextileLove , sponsored by the Seam Collective , when we are prompted to share our love of textiles each day on social media. Each day, a prompt is given and participants are asked to respond in a way which highlights textile art, especially our own. Day 1: Introduction … my name is Wilma Simmons and I live in Lambton , a suburb in a beautiful city, Newcastle NSW Australia . I am a textile artist continually practising and working to ‘find my thread’. I love to stitch by hand and machine , I love to collage and I love to use various materials including snail mail ephemera, recycled and found objects . At this very moment , I have just stepped away from my sewing machine, from a small experiment with stitch and postage stamps… Day 2 : Discipline/Craft  I find it difficult to name one speciality area of textile art I enjoy the most. I chose images of my stick dolls ( Garden Threads series) as examples of ‘doll making’ as a discipline which gives