Levigator Press

On Monday afternoon I took an online workshop on the Quilty Nook (link: The Quilty Nook) with the amazing quilting teacher Heidi Parkes (link: Heidi Parkes) focused on adding texture to your quilts using pintucks and pleats. It turned out to be immensely fun and also maybe has helped me get unblocked on a new line of work I’ve been struggling to find focus with. I immediately realised the potential of this technique for drawing, and Wednesday evening I took a stack of fabric to life drawing club and made some loose contour portraits to try combining my drawing with stitching.

Here’s my first test piece, worked in red sashiko thread on a piece of thrifted cotton bedsheet dyed with tea and iron. This is the pintuck side:

And here’s the pleat side, with its wonderful clots of pooling red in all the tight little corners and cluster points:

Exciting, right? I’ve got around ten more sketches of faces on fabric to work with, plus a few hands and feet. I’m looking forward to seeing where this new method takes me, and of course am already bursting with too many ideas.