Sue Bennett arrived to lead our workshop this month laden down with samples of her work and piles of metal pieces saved from tubes, yogurt tops, sweets and margarines tubs!
Sue talked about her work [pictures below] and explained how she had worked the pieces, what materials she had used and what had inspired her.
Sue then demonstrated about 4/5 techniques at a time and we were able to have a go at them, sometimes combining more than one technique.
We had a go at embossing and cutting holes in the metal to put a colour behind the hole. Crimping was very popular done with a small crimping machine.
We were shown how to put a coloured piece of sweetie paper behind a pierced piece of metal and how to make patterns by piercing on the sewing machine. We also used rubbing mats to transfer patterns to the metal then colouring with either a waxcrayon or permanent felt pens and making shapes by using hole punches. On some metals it was also possible to change the colours by heating.
One of the more popular techniques was painting black paint over an embossed piece and then rubbing some of the paint away thus ageing the metal slightly.
Finally we were shown how to stitch by either using the machine or hand stitching.
We went home with a variety of samples and lots of new techniques in our head which I am sure will develop into something more creative over the next few weeks.
It was a most enjoyable day and all thanks go to Sue for inspiring us.
I have the strange feeling that we will all be cooking recipes which involve copius amounts of tomato puree to get at the metal tubes!!!!!
