Feeling better.

Thank you all for you kind "get well soon" messages. I'm starting to feel a lot better and in fact didn't mooch around all weekend as planned. On Saturday, suitably dosed with Lemsip, I went with a couple of friends to the launch of the Eastern Region Textile Forum which was held in Chelmsford. It was a buzzing lively event and there were plenty of good ideas for promoting textile art withinin the East of England. In the afternoon we were treated to a very inspirational and entertaining talk by the lovely James Hunting. He kindly brought along examples of his exquisitly stitched work which we got to handle and see up close. And as an added bonus I got to meet Purple Misses... another blogger I've known since I started blogging who was just a lovely in the flesh as she is in cyberspace! Really good to meet you Lynda.

I've not spent the entire week feeling sorry for myself either and there has been some work for the degree. I finished making my final piece of cloth - a crazy patchwork of metal scraps, made from wire mesh, tomato puree tubes and beer cans (there are advantages to living with all these men!) stitched together on the machine.

And I've moved away from the assignment on Making a Cloth and I'm now looking at Dress as a Sculptural Form in greater detail. I've become fascinated by the Japanese designers of Comme des Garcon, in particular with Junya Watanabe and his surreal honeycomb structures.

And as a result I've been exploring my own honeycomb structures - this first was made from kite fabric. It taught me a lot about the actual construction but I'm not that keen on the Christmas decoration I produced!

The next one was made from silk organdie, which is much nicer but very small due to the fabric used! This technique uses masses of fabric so given that I wasn't going to make a garment sized piece from silk organdie I investigated some other materials...

And discovered that plastic bags, although a nightmare to stitch because of the static electricity (they stick to everything!) give a very pleasing delicate result. So that is where I'm going with this assignment... dresses from plastic bags! I think my family will finally disown me!