Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Fish and Sticks : Art Dolls

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...

In the Pink

  At Tag Tuesday . Pinky O' Hagan is hosting a tag challenge which  asks for 'a bit of pink".... not so difficult if you like pink.  I don't use a lot of pink in my work, so it was quite a bit of a challenge when I thought only of pink - my thoughts went to pink roses, pink hearts, pink confectionery !!!  Then I referred to this week's colour prompts, #coloricombo by artists Este MacLeod.... pink with sap green, dark tea, and sea green. I'm not sure I got the colours in this palette exactly, but here is my tag, a stylised landscape  -  The collaged background of the tag has torn pieces of watercolour art rejects, painted magazine pages and a little bit of gift paper. The tree silhouette is decorated with paper  dots, cut with a hole puncher. 

STITCHED UP Exhibition

"Heartbroken" by Nancy Crawford ( Canada)  Stitched Up  is an exhibition featuring 24 contemporary international and national textile artists on show at  The Lock Up  from Friday 23 June 2017 until 6 August 2017. It coincides with the 150-year anniversary of The Newcastle Industrial School’s opening; and is resulting from a partnership between The Lock Up and Timeless Textiles galleries. Stitched Up is co-curated by Anne Kempton (Creative Director Timeless Textiles Gallery) and fibre artist Wilma Simmons, both from Newcastle NSW. .  This exhibition conceptually provides a  voice  for the 193 girls who attended the Newcastle Industrial School, translated into contemporary fibre art. "Memory Cloths " (193) by Anne Kempton, Australia  The title  Stitched Up  is very apt in two ways… Firstly, each of the artworks has been stitched – mostly by hand for many hours – capturing the story of ‘The Girls’. The artists hav...