Pleater with samples

Work in progress - Women's Suffrage series.

I have been musing about backgrounds as I'm not ready to plunge into a major piece yet.

Throughout this series it has been obvious that the strength of the movement was that women joined together for strength, and so I have been thinking about how I can illustrate this in my pieces.

It was whilst looking at pictures of some of the early members that I observed that their clothes were tucked, pin tucked, pleated and smocked.

This has lead me to my current obsession with pleating.

I have borrowed from my local branch of the Embroiderer's Guild a "Read Pleater", which is a fearsome looking instrument, but which is suprisingly easy to use.

My main discovery is that if you feed the fabric through uneavenly, that is if you add tucks and overlaps as it goes into the machine, you discover interesting surfaces.

Silk works best in my view.

I am SO excited by the possiblities of this technique.... could I print on it, image transfer on to it, or what if I drew on to it? WOW

Done