September Textile Love #1, #2, #3

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 me the most options to do what I enjoy - to respond and engage with Nature , to design, to make a pattern , to collage , to stitch by both machine and by hand and to recycle materials .

Day 3 : Prompt - Current Project Day Just one? This project has hardly been started but all the prep is done . It is an interpretation of a watercolour landscape by my friend , Anne at Timeless Textiles who is curating an exhibition of textile art interpretations of her selected artworks. I am attempting a stitched shaded relief map of the area depicted in the painting . The materials I have chosen are silk , organza , metal fabric thread and beads.

Hope you will follow along with me this month.... thanks.

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12 Days .... festive or not?

Days 5 & 7 - the Gold Rush Era Stamp Series It seems so long ago now since we were celebrating Christmas and New Year.... hope you enjoyed a great festive season. I took some time out, not doing much at all but I did set myself a little challenge of doing some tidying up which meant spending a little time each day using scraps of fabric and paper to create something a little playful or as the mood took, useful! Unlike the long projects I usually undertake, this was a 12 day project ( 12 days of Christmas ) - completely random, but finishing half done projects or recycling. For example the first photo shows some collages I did on days 5 and 7 to use a postage stamp release, the Gold Rush Era series, first issued in Australia 1981 ... yes I probably have had it in my stash since then! Completing some other little projects was very satisfying .... On Day 1, I assembled a folded paper folk cube from a kit my daughter gifted to me las...

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This week I've been working on fish and sticks .... The sticks are the message stick art dolls which were very popular, attracting some attention and a few orders at the Wise Women exhibition. Each of the message stick dolls are from the Wise Women series, each with her own personality and message of wisdom, handwritten on a handmade timber tag. I gather the sticks during my walks around my neighbourhood and the tags are made from special bits of timber, some collected by me or my husband or from off cuts gifted to us from another doll making friend whose husband makes bagpipes. These dolls start off very simply with a wrap around a stick, in the general shape of a body. 'Naked" message stick dolls - strips of wadding wrapped around found sticks. Then I usually wrap other layers of fabric, wool, and/or fibres, over which I do some simple embroidery. I sculpt or mould small face masks for these dolls. I really like using "sari ribbon" as w...

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Empress Wu Designs with Wilma

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