October 2014 Day School - Pauline Parker 'Working With Evalon'

We had all been looking forward to attending the branch meeting in October, as most people had taken their holidays and the hustle and bustle of Summer had come to an end. It was also time to hold our AGM and we had an interesting workshop to attend.

There was the annual competition, for the 'Gertrude Goodenough' trophy and members were invited to put a piece of their work down on the table and throughout the day we would all vote for which piece we thought should win.

Pauline Parker has taught textile art for 40 years, and today we were going to learn about working with a fabric called 'Evalon'. We were told that Evalon is a very versatile fabric, as it can be cut out with a soldering iron or scissors, it can be stamped, printed onto or even painted. When painted the fabric will soak up the liquid like osmosis - just a little goes a long way.

We were all given an instruction pack and Pauline began her demonstration.

Some of us improvised and used the windows in the room, as our 'light box' so that we could get our work done more quickly. 

Before soldering, we had to trace the flower heads onto our Evalon fabric, by using a light box. We had a large lightbox for tracing our patterns, plus one of our members had kindly brought a small one of her own, for us to use.

As you will see here, we were shown how to cut out our flowers using a soldering iron on top of a baking tray.

Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves, and those of us who perhaps had not used a soldering iron before, found that some of our leaves shrivelled, and we decided that these would be 'rustic' flowers instead.

Paints were mixed with lots of water, so that subtle colours could be achieved, when painting onto bondaweb. This was done, so that we could iron the bondaweb onto a piece of cotton frabric, to give a background colour to our flowers.

Our bondaweb was left to dry, whilst we painted our flowers. Firstly Pauline showed us all how quickly paint is absorbed into Evalon, and to try a sample dot first to see how far the paint will travel. She then showed us how to colour the middle of each flower head.

As with all our meetings, those who do not wish to attend the workshop, can work together in our side room, they can bring any project that they are working on, and have time to not only catch up on some of this work, but to have a catch up with everyone else or perhaps learn a few new stitches from one of our mentors.

You can always tell when a workshop is going well, as everyone stays for as long as they can, to try to get as far as possible with their work. We all seemed to find this so interesting, and were really enjoying ourselves.

 

Pink paint was added to the tips of our petals and they were left to dry.

As our bondaweb was now dry, Pauline demonstrated how to attach this to our fabric with a hot iron, and peel off when cold. We were also asked to use a square frame, to decide where the centre of our picture would be, depending on the outcome of our paints.

Pauline began to demonstrate how to sew two of the larger flower heads together on some background material.  In this way, when the flowers are sewn onto the coloured fabric, they will stand out. The smaller flowers were to be stitched straight onto the fabric, so that they would lie flat.

At the end of the afternoon, although we didn't get all of our flowers sewn on, we have put square frames over our work to show how hopefully they will look when completed. I think everyone did really well!

During the course of the day, we held our AGM and on working through the agenda, everyone who had been on the committee for the past year, were praised and thanked for all their hard work.  We then voted in the committee for the next year.  We also received information about our next Chairmans' Challenge, which is to make a small bag that would hold something precious, something that would also be small enough to hang from a Christmas Tree. The work will be judged at our Christmas meeting in December.

We also announced the winner of our Gertrude Goodenough competition. Here are the entries

And here is the winning entry made by Sylvia Maudsley - well done Sylvia!