Kaffe Fassett Exhibition in London

A few weeks ago I went up to London to see the Kaffe Fassett 'A Life in Colour' exhibition at the Fashion and Textile Museum in London. I've seen lots of his work before, but the last time I saw his work in an exhibition was years ago - also in London... so it was nice to see again some of the designs I saw years ago.... and some newer things as well. Unusually the exibition allowed you to take photos, so as you can see I was busy snapping away!

More recently Kaffe Fessett has ventured into patchwork, as well as knitting and needlepoint, and the patchwork pieces were some of my favourite items in the exhibition - his use of colour is so vibrant and amazing :-)

 The needlepoint designs, of course, are beautiful too - he really does love pattern and strong colours. Below is a detail of a needlepoint chair seat - I really like the 'mosaic' effect of lots of seemingly random little images put next to each other.

 Although I do really like the 'busy' colours and images some of the designs that use a softer colour palette are really lovely - like this long stitch rug below:

 And these more muted colours below are great too...

Blue and white patterns, (on china etc.) seem to be a recurring theme of his - this cushion below reminds me of the first ever Kaffe Fassett book I bought - 'Glorious Needlepoint'? ....I think! His love of colours, pattern, textiles and the painterly quality of Kaffe Fassett's work really inspired me in my younger days to take up needlepoint design - and then eventually cross stitch design too!

I took lots of photos, too many to post really - but I've just picked out a few of my favourite things here :-)

Blue Hydrangeas Cross Stitch

I've finally finished sewing the blue Hydrangeas cross-stitch design from Veronique Enginger's book 'L'Herbier du Jardin au Point de Croix'... it's only taken me well over a year to stitch it... well, the shades of blue were very similar, so that's my excuse!

My stitching

Cover of book by Veronique Enginger

Close up of my stitching

 Now I'm wondering what to do with it.. I've got some lovely fabrics in shades of blues so I was thinking I might make it into a cushion with a patchwork style border. Patchwork seems to be quite fashionable lately and well I can't say I'm an expert but I could make a simple square border to frame my stitching..a bit like the patchwork quilts below..

Blue and white quilt

Blue hydrangeas are such lovely flowers - the blue is quite unusual in flowers and you can't go wrong with a blue and white colour scheme :-)

Close up of Hydrangea flowers

Blue and white china

These are my fabrics that I'm thinking of using for the patchwork border:

Shades of blue

I found the fabric below in a charity shop and was thinking I could maybe incorporate this into the patchwork - it's a tablecloth and it's got little printed crosses on it that imitate cross-stitch. It's very sweet - but maybe I'll save it for something else, I'm not sure yet....I might stick to a totally blue and white colour scheme, I'll see how it works out!

Imitation cross-stitch on old tablecloth

One last lovely blue and white image... :-)

Hyacinths and blue and white china

Pacman cuteness!

 I found this chart on the internet for a Pacman design, helpfully already charted up! So I decided to stitch it up as a cross stitch design and make it into a little purse or maybe a make-up bag..

 It's stitched using 2 strands of stranded cotton on 14 count aida fabric.

This is how it looked stitched up and made into a little purse, cute! :-)

After I made this purse I made up my own design using the same motifs but adding in the 'game over' lettering and some scores. Below is the design stitched up. It's a tapestry made using wool, (Anchor wool I think), and stitched on 10 count tapestry canvas.

It looks wonky as that's what happens when you stitch it up. I'll block it to make it go back to it's proper rectangular shape. Then I'm going to make it into a pencil case, as it's larger than the previous purse.

I might get around to making a cushion design too eventually....something like this!