Empress Wu Designs with Wilma

 Background: Seam  are a contemporary textile collective based in Bath, England. We are emerging and established embroiderers, printers, knitters, weavers, dyers, fashion designers, eco-designers, makers, artists… …who want to make textiles that are irresistible, and find their way onto your body, into your house and onto your walls. We share a commitment to pushing the boundaries of our craft and making high quality objects realised in the hands and thoughts of the maker. We hope to make a sustainable living from textiles, work locally and bring textiles into contemporary focus This month, all textile artists are enouraged to share their love of textiles and respond to  30 different textile prompts for on  Instagram  during September. You can respond to as many of the prompts as you wish, this could be only a few or it may be all of them - with the hashtag #SeptTextileLove   Here is my first week of #SeptTextileLove  Days 1 & 2 - Introd...

Stitching a 'garden' background - Wilma Simmons  Using gardens as inspiration for art is long established practice in the fine arts, including textile arts. Monet's painting are amongst my favourite artworks and there is no shortage of  treatises about the gardens in art.    https://www.booktopia.com.au/monet-s-garden-in-art-debra-n-mancoff/book/ Some of my favourite textile artists ( like Anne Kelly) turn to gardens as a source of unending inspiration.  https://www.textileartist.org/small-worlds-recycled-textile-art-by-anne-kelly In a considerably more humble way, I have recently been featuring plants from our garden in my small wearable art pin series for #the100dayproject. Although we are in the winter phase of the garden where the colour palette is a more subdued, there are still some beautifully bright flowers, like the purple black eyed African daisies, late summer marigolds, tiny native violets and their potted cousins, violas. Even the p...

Chameleon rose from my garden.  The answer to "where is beauty?" seems  easy .... beauty is  all around us, but do we all see the same beauty ?  There is a Chinese saying, "Flowers look different to different eyes" Yes, we've all heard that before ..."Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."  Contemporary artists worldwide often challenge our notion of beauty and many celebrate the ordinary and the familiar, making comment on daily rituals and consumer items.  None of this is very surprising since early man recorded every day life in cave paintings  and it has been happening in the art world ever since.  Up until 1960s, household items often appeared in still life paintings, but it was the contemporary pop art movement where artists sought out the commonplace to elevate artistically. What could be more "everyday" than Andy Warhol's iconic Campbell Soup Tins ?  https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/andy-warhol-campbells-...

Each day for 100 days, I will try to create a small wearable pin, with a coloured safety pin, and add a haiku to reflect the day's feelings, observations or experiences. This project began with the idea of using supplies I already had at home and in the quantity to create something for 100 days... so I found 100 coloured safety pins and I have an even larger supply of the luggage tags as I could only purchase them years ago in lots of 500.  I wanted to make something that perhaps could be gifted to friends and family , so as "brooches" have also been on my mind, I thought of "wearable pins." The addition of  the little three lined poem, a haiku, was just an idea to fill the space on the tag! I decided on haiku because of the simplicity of its  three lines and 5-7-5 syllables formation and the recording of a "moment". Well, I did think it was simple until I tried the first, and found myself counting the syllables over and over again for each ...

Continuing  the series of collages for my October challenge... Collage #65 was taken from a photo taken in Kritipur in Nepal at a temple. I was immediately attracted by the splash of orange-red colour of the tikka on the statue in the image. I cropped the photo  to make that the focal point  and intensified the colour to give me some more defined shapes to abstract. Here is the result with torn paper and small scraps of cotton fabric which happened to be similar to the colour.  This is a short  ( 4 minutes) video of an artist  creating an abstract design from realistic drawing . I think it shows a great way of creating lines in an abstract design. 

This year, I decided to participate in The 100 Day Project - I signed up before my life suddenly got a bit busy, but I am determined to continue with it. It is an online art project which attracts thousands of people worldwide every year to create art of some sort every day for 100 days. This started on 2 April  so it's early days... Each participant can decide what he/she would like to create. I had a pile of used envelopes which I saved for an unknown project, so thought this was the perfect opportunity to use them and all the little bits of torn paper, fabric scraps and ephemera I have been keeping. My 100 day project is to create collages on used envelopes.  Did you send me a letter? You may find your envelope as one of the 100 collages. These stitched collages will be inspired by my daily walks in my neighbourhood, so it is also a 100 day challenge to walk each day, even if it only for 15-20 minutes.   Here are the first five days...  ...

For International Women’s Day 2020, the Fearless Flowers Project is raising funds for research into Ovarian Cancer. Every year in Australia, 1600 women are diagnosed with Ovarian Cancer and 1000 die. Hunter (NSW) researchers are involved in cutting edge work to improve this mortality rate but they need our financial support.  In Newcastle (NSW, Australia) an group of artists meets every Wednesday at the fibre art gallery, Timeless Textiles in Hunter Street, Newcastle East.  The Wednesday Group  will be making fibre/textile flowers and they will bloom and be sold amongst the Norfolk pines outside the gal lery on 8 March 2020 .   Timeless Textiles and the Wednesday group's previous International Women's Day Projects raising funds for various local  and overseas causes have been:  Spreading Wings  Prayer Flags for Peace  Stitch-a-thon for White Ribbon  Letting Go Flying Free  Out of the Wood  In t...