Lauren Colbeck

A Profile of Lauren Colbeck
Lauren recently bought a Bernina 1008S from us. You can see Lauren with her new Bernina, below.

I am an Interactive Arts student studying at Manchester Metropolitan University. I have been interested in combining different materials to create interesting art that is visual stimulating. I was introduced to sewing machines in high school and then again in College while studying for my Foundation degree in Art and Design and I have been using them ever since. I have combines stitch work with photography and one of my favourite was doing a recycling project and stitching crisp packets and coke cans on a pair of jeans.

I have also experimented with felt and photos on a canvas. The image of the felt fruit has both felt as a background overlay in the photograph and i later dry felted into the area.

The Felt Fruit Image

This was part of my sense of place FMP for my pre degree I chose to look at my house and I love my fruit bowl so I look images of it and then made some wet felt using the colours of the fruit. I then scanned in the felt and overlaid an enlarged second of the felt over the image in photshop. To further enhance the image I then had it printed onto canvas, and I dry felted the matching colours onto the image. So when the viewer is at a distance they just think it's a plain canvas but when up close they can see the felt.

The Jeans work

This was part of my recycling project where I was introduced to a Bernina 1001 sewing machine with an embroidery foot. i took the old jeans and then crisp packets and general rubbish and started stitching. i then cut a coke can up and relised it was quite thin and tested if it could be stitched onto the jeans and it was able to be stitched on. i was very happy with the out come and so were many others as the copied my idea and added there own twist. this is where i got my love for free hand stitching on a sewing machine.

The Wall Hanging Images

These squares are a response to a self set typography project in Uni. I came up with the final out come by looking into a picture alphabet that i was looking into creating. i created a mock up in lino stamps and asked kids and adults to read what i had in effect written in the pictures. The children could read them very well where as adults weren't as adapt to reading in this form. So for my final out come i used my lino stamps to write quotes in pictorial and then the wall hanging of the alphabet was there to help "decode" what had been written and i used different techniques such as pure stitch (the fish) dry felting (the igloo) and appliqué for the nest.