global and collaborative

i know its been a while since i posted, no excuses!  here’s something that i’ve been doing to boost my 2012 creative world…

i signed up to participate in the sketchbook project, run by these nice people at the arthouse co-op

“Art House Co-op is an independent Brooklyn-based company that organizes global, collaborative art projects. Our flagship endeavor is the Sketchbook Project: an evolving library featuring more than 12,000 artists’ sketchbooks from 100 countries and counting.”

you pay a small amount to register and they send you a blank sketchbook. you can then fill it however you like as long as you keep it within set dimensions.  it has to be posted back to them by a set date (mine was 31/01/12) and then it gets catalogued and goes on a world tour!  the london exhibition date hasn’t been set yet, but i’ll be sure to let you know!  when its finished travelling the globe, it returns to the Brooklyn Art Library where people can go in and browse all the amazing work!

i signed up late in november ‘11, and typically didn’t end up doing most of the work until a week before the posting date, in fact i spent the last 3 hours before sending frantically trying to finish pages while sitting in a breezy corridor outside work

i had a theme of ‘nothing new’ as a starting point which i decided would be represented by existing embroidery ideas and techniques used in some previous work.  i made the pages out of fabric, and ’sketched’ in thread.    i set myself the limitation of beginning with familiar materials and colours (thats the nothing new bit) and then let myself be led by the work into trying different combinations and techniques

i wanted to use the sketchbook as a way of creating something new from these old ideas and to have some relevance to my fashion work, since i’m working on ideas for my next range of clothes i thought it would be a great opportunity to explore some new surface texture ideas

i didn’t end up with the sketchbook i had initially imagined as i hadn’t really allowed myself enough time to go as far as i wanted, but i am happy that i finished something and it was a really fun way to generate new ideas

Tagged as: arthouse co-op, brooklyn art library, craft, embroidery, handmade, sketchbook, sketchbook project, sketching with stitch