Silk – Agnes Ashe

A Silver Lining

My online shop has been up and running for over six years now and about three times a year I place an order for plain silk blanks. I use three different suppliers depending on what type of silk I require. All three companies offer plain scarves with hand rolled hems ready for dyeing. The two European suppliers, one in Belgium and the other in Spain, list my favourite silk twill including the classical 90 x 90 cm squares. The third company I use is based in the United States and they sell excellent quality flat crepe pieces.

Earlier this year I ordered 12 neckerchief sized squares and for only the second time in my years of painting silk I noticed one of the scarves had a fault in the weave.

Now you’ve probably guessed I do own one or two scarves that I have painted myself – actually most of mine are over 30 years old and date from the time when I was a fashion/textile student. Amongst my own collection the only red I have is a full 90 x 90 that was originally a peachy pink. It had been a gift to my mother and was returned to me on her death. She was of the generation that often wore their scarves pinned with a brooch and when I came to overpaint the peach with red (peach is not a colour for me) I noticed several of the pin pricks had become small holes. It was good to experiment extravagantly and boldly with red dyes, but I still didn’t have a wearable red scarf.

As you can now see, a faulty blank has given me the opportunity to get the red dye out again and go for it big time. The design is looser and has more swirls than my usual style with plenty of red and a dash of very bright fuchsia. Naturally, this neckerchief with a fault isn’t for sale (mmm, fortunately, it seems it’s fine for me though!).

But, as you may have already gathered, I do like this combination. And indeed, so much so I have painted another similar version on pristine silk. It, too, is the neckerchief size. A size I think works well when you feel like some bright colour, but not too much. An accent.

And, here’s the finished piece now available on my shop.

Layering some Summer Colour

Now I am a fan of the colour green. In one way or another it has been a colour I have used in painting different rooms since my first house back in 1996. Of course, there are greens and greens. I remember the first time I used green it was a bright apple green and in a south-facing room it definitely had a hint of lime about it. At the same time I was painting the walls the plumber was installing the central heating and he could barely conceal his revulsion!

Back on the frame adding new gutta lines and shapes.

It appears that lime green is not a popular colour in our northern light and as we have so few days of summer sun when it looks really good, I reappraised the one lime green scarf on my shop and decided to give it the layer treatment.

Painting another layer filling the new shapes with pink, orange and pale turquoise.

Now, regular perusers of my blog will know that amongst the tools in my ‘creative process’ box layering is a technique I use to change my work and give it more depth.

I did like the flat pattern of the original, but I can see that the very nature of the flatness made the lime green less appealing especially in the photographs.

Over-painted, steamed again to fix the work and newly photographed and now uploaded to my online shop. I think it is definitely a more interesting piece.

A Larger Version – Lisette Red

It’s one of those elements to be taken into consideration when shopping on the Internet – size. It is so easy to simply assume you have a rough idea of the size of anything you are looking at, but checking the measurements is essential.

I recently painted a set of neckerchiefs, my Hudeca series, inspired by Lady Drury’s Hawstead Panels. The design worked for the neckerchief sized squares (50 x 50 cm) and so I thought I’d paint a larger, 90 x 90 cm crepe de chine scarf. You might guess from the above picture that they were the same size. It’s only in a photograph containing other points of reference that you see one scarf is almost double the size of the other.

Even in this video it is difficult to judge the overall size of the scarf with just my hand and a couple of paintbrushes flitting about.

Usually at some point during the designing and painting of my work, a scarf acquires a name. This is important as it helps me keep my work in some kind of order especially if I paint roughly the same design in several different colour combinations and use different silk of different sizes.

This painting sequence doesn’t give any indication of size – is this a 50 x 50 or 90 x 90 cm?

At first glance my naming process may seem random, but it is usually linked in some way or other to the original source of inspiration. This time I wanted an Anglo-Saxon girl’s name beginning with ‘H’ for Hawstead and chose Hudeca. The 90 x 90 cm crepe de chine (a really gorgeous, 14mm weight piece of silk by the way) painted with my ‘Hawstead’ design became Lisette and not a Hudeca. I arrived at ‘Lisette’ from Elizabeth for the bigger scarf as Lady Drury was the mother to two daughters, neither of whom reached adulthood, and one was called Elizabeth.

Revisiting a less than successful design

Every now and then I find an idea I have been keen to develop for a scarf goes awry in the painting. This was the case when four years ago I attempted a ‘bluebells’ scarf.

The finished scarf was a delicate pale pink dotted with stems of bluebells. The pink was subtle in real life. It was a soft, easy colour to wear close to your face especially for those of us over fifty. However, this scarf when photographed, well, it looked totally washed out and almost dreary. And, now when reviewing the design, I see the overall appearance was too messy and busy, and failed to be dynamic. Time for change.

Initially I adjusted my creative process making some large and bold additions to the scarf. I overpainted with broad flowing brush marks of coloured resist in order to balance the small bluebell motifs.

I then added some mid-sized periwinkle like flowers in a bluey green and created depth to the whole piece by painting small areas of the background in black.

The scarf has been steamed again to fix the dyes and the finished, more interesting piece has now been added to my shop – click pic to see.

Another colourway

I never paint the same scarf twice. The combination of my loose, freehand gutta work and then the random way the dyes flow into each other make it an impossibility. However, I do roughly repeat a design in different colours. I usually paint four or five different colourways of the same design to produce a mini collection.

My recent visit to see the Hawstead Panels at Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich, inspired me to create a design for a neckerchief. The first one in this series based on the pines and wildflowers painted by Lady Hawstead, was a combination of blues and mouse brown.

Having established this basic design and feeling comfortable with the patterned components, I then moved on to a new colour combination.

Sequence of photos showing the process of adding more colour.

This neckerchief design is a mixture of techniques with thick, coloured gutta for the pine tree tops, single colours painted into delineated spaces and some resist layering.

I like resist layering, but you have to wait for the gutta to dry. This can be speeded up by using a hairdryer. Resist layering is where you add the clear gutta resist to a pale area in a pattern let it dry, then added a slightly darker dye, then add more clear gutta patterning let it dry and finally another layer of even darker dye. You are left with a more painterly effect and even a hint of brush marks or should I say daubs.

When all the dyes have been added and all the gutta has dried, the neckerchief is rolled in protective paper and steamed for two hours.

The finished neckerchief is photographed and added to my shop.

New layered scarf, new photos and a time-lapse video too!

My painted scarf, Venus Falls Blue, has undergone the layering treatment. And, again the finished scarf is most definitely an improvement in my opinion.

I have kept and uploaded before and after pictures. These show how adding even pale dyes in large overlapping sections across the whole work can significantly change the look. In this case I used pale pink and pale blue.

Obviously, the second layer has knocked the original yellows back considerably.

Even though it is spring at the moment and there are yellow daffodils, yellow tulips, yellow forsythia, yellow mahonia, yellow primroses and even some yellow dandelions already out, I am not actually feeling it for ‘yellow’.

As you can see below, the yellow is slowly disappearing.

Time-lapse layering

And, finally after steaming again, it’s finished and in the shop.

Revisiting and Intensifying

Some time ago I painted my ‘La Donna’ series of silk scarves. Two of the five colour combinations I created didn’t really chime with the contemporary trends, however they both sold quickly. Then the green version was purchased as a gift and it was duly shipped to Singapore. It had been my favourite of the series. It is one of those oddities, for me anyway, when I take over 300 photos during a shoot how often the single best photograph turns out to be my current favourite piece.

Returning to this series as a whole the lilac and pink versions have not been successful colour combinations. I am surprised as generally any of my scarves with a fair amount of pink have sold well not least as the softer pinks are a complementary colour for wearing near the face. Mind you looking at the photographs of the lilac scarf I can see it looks more dull and dreary than restrained and muted. Although I do have to mention that lilac, in a similar way to red, isn’t accurately captured in a photograph and as with most of my work the scarves do look better in real life. Anyway, it was time to jazz up both the pink and the lilac and I think make the patterning more complex.

Firstly, I tackled the lilac one. I repainted the lilac area adding a deeper mauve that together with the new fuchsia highlights has resulted in an overall brighter, more zingy appearance. Also, I think building more complexity into the black and white areas has balanced the overall feel of the scarf.

As usual with photographing colour the resultant image always varies with the light, but happily this daylight shot (below) is a fair representation.

Next I turned to the pink scarf, but felt this one already had enough pinky pinkiness about it and it didn’t need the background changing. It just needed an overall pulling together of the different design components.

This has been achieved by adding more patterning to the black and white areas and at the same time integrating the blue patterned band using a zigzag magenta border.

I had always been pleased with the design of this series and I did like the original pink interpretation, nevertheless I am much happier with this intensified more vibrant version.

Silk Scarves for Valentine’s Day

This time next week it will be Valentine’s Day. I do have a couple of red scarves on my online shop at the moment, but they don’t feel classically romantic to me. They’re too bright and, too, well, red.

Thinking about it in an old-fashioned way and despite the supermarket aisles of red Valentine’s merchandise, I find I associate the colour pink with romance more than red.

So with romance in mind for this Valentine’s post I have put together a selection of my work that features pink more or less.

The first scarf (at the top) has accents of zingy fuchsia, but the rest of this mini collection are all rather dusky, muted affairs.

In general I think that softer pinks are easier to wear, and, who doesn’t like a touch of pink lippy every now and then.

I have been layering again

You may or may not recall that last year I was inspired to work with some Tudor motifs following my visit to the splendid exhibition ‘Wolsey’s Angels‘ held at Christchurch Mansion in Ipswich. I was particularly taken with an oak fire surround with beautifully carved details that included a repeating pheasant motif which I stole and reworked for a scarf design.

Initial drawing and painting of Thomasina

Sometimes when I finish a scarf and steam it I am very pleased with the result, but this is not always so. As I’ve mentioned in the past the steaming process intensifies the colour, but it is not entirely predictable. When the scarf is finally washed and pressed I can properly appraise the results. And, I have to say I was very disappointed with this pink one.

The pale background did not deepen as much I thought it was going to during the steaming and consequently the balance between the heavy lines of the motif and the pale background was way off. Fortunately, having a very pale background has allowed plenty of scope to successfully develop a second, richer layer.

I added more darker lines to the central area and generally softened the whole design by adding pale greys and a mouse brown over the pale pink.

Adding more detail
Motif finally looking a better fit

After steaming, washing and pressing the scarf was ready for another assessment. A little surprisingly it as turned out much better than I thought, but, rather annoyingly the tonal range has also turned out to be awkward to photograph satisfactorily. You can’t win them all.

And, finally some words about blogging in general.

Another in the Edlyn series

I can’t always put my finger on why I choose certain colours for a scarf, but after painting three muted scarves in the Edlyn series, I felt the need for something a touch more brash.

After drawing out the basic Edlyn design it was time to start selecting the colours.

The colours were definitely not from a medieval palette, but they were still too pale and pastel and needed a bit more zing somewhere.

Yes, I liked the fuchsia pink and the chartreuse green and the whole design was better pulled together by adding plenty of the chartreuse to the diagonal swag.

And, mmm, yes, adding more of the chartreuse worked, but to finish off the scarf unquestionably required just a little more fuchsia.

On the frame and finished, next step will be to steam it.

‘A Nation of Shopkeepers’ for the 21st Century

How time flies – I have had an online boutique for over five years and this 21st-century way of shopping has become routine.

And, in the last decade everybody, but everybody I know uses online shopping for some aspects of their lives, but sometimes for me it is pleasant and beneficial to meet my customers in real life. This was the case the other weekend at Blackthorpe Barn. I set up my display, took a quick tour round to meet fellow artists and stood by my stall ready for the first customers at 10.00 am.

By 11.00 am the featured scarf displayed was sold to an enthusiastic customer who used to be a silk painter. Obviously, the large poster-style photograph caught people’s attention, but there is nothing like seeing and feeling silk in real life and I hope she enjoys wearing it.

British Crafts at Blackthorpe Barn is a good venue to attend, but there is a newer, 21st-century form of selling. Since the first experiments in Los Angeles, the ‘Pop-Up Shop’ phenomenon has spread across the globe. Pop-ups in all sizes, selling all types of products, from all types of venues temporarily open their doors to the public. And, in my little corner of East Anglia a local artist transforms her charming house into a Christmas Pop-Up Shop for three days selling work by fellow artists from the surrounding creative community.

The Pop-Up Shop at East Cliff House, 24, Harwich Road, Mistley, CO11 1LQ, will be open Friday 7th from 3 pm to 9 pm, Saturday 8th and Sunday 9th December from 11 am to 5 pm.