Uncovering Carlisle’s Textile Revolution: Distington School

Today we chatted through everything we had done on the project since last September.  Unfortunately, Chloe, Lexie and Travis were away on a trip but the rest of us reminded ourselves where we had been on our trips and what we have learned about Carlisle's textile industries two hundred years ago.  We focused on what our area of West Cumbria and Whitehaven contributed to the textile industries in Carlisle, transporting by ship and latterly by train the coal to fuel the factories and the raw materials such as raw cotton to the spinning and weaving mills. We particularly enjoyed our visits to Farfield Mill, The Beacon Museum, Lowther Castle and our trips to Carlisle to meet our friends in the Creative Conversations group. We sketched and made notes of our favourites then collected our thoughts altogether.  The walls in our room are covered in our fabulous art and after half term, we shall be deciding what to include on our work for our exhibitions in Ca...

This week we explored using our mark making on fabric in preparation for our banner and used a combination of printing and drawing for our designs. We used polystyrene tiles this time for printing and fabric paint.  Impressing our marks into the polystyrene takes a little practice but we learned as we tried just exactly how hard or soft  we needed to press to get the best print. We could chose whatever subject we liked but some of us picked subjects we have been learning about, such as castles, ships and trains. Add caption  Aneasha drew the Carlisle Canal Basin on fabric with crayons - showing the castle and Dixon's chimney in the background.  Well done - great concentration. Evan used crayons to show effects of weather, clouds, rain and tried a new technique called frottage - placing paper over a textured surface then rubbing over with a crayon to add interest to the sea. Well done Evan. A great print by Lexie   After printin...

Slave ship leaving Whitehaven Harbour by Sienna Whitehaven Harbour 1840 Whilst we have been travelling back in time to the 1800s learning about the history of our area, we have referred to many old drawings and paintings from the time - these show us what Whitehaven Harbour was like then, the ships, the people, the buildings and the industries there, coal and ore mining, ship building, pottery making.  There were no cameras then, so we set about exploring how the artists used various marks to show us what life was like then.   We looked closely at some paintings like this one above - which is made up of hard and soft marks - so we set off trying the variety of marks we can make using pencil, pen, charcoal and coloured pastels. We tried different thicknesses of marks, dots, curved, straight, looped and dashes - we used our fingers and rubbers to smudge our marks - making soft areas. A great example by Lexie    Many of the examples we s...

Carlisle Coat of Arms, Tullie House Today we went to Prism Arts Carlisle for our last visit, where we met up with our friends again from the Creative Conversations group. Jac, our artist, told us that we were now in the last phase of our project moving towards each group designing and making individual banners to be displayed in Carlisle Library in September. Jac told us a little about the history of the development of banners.  We learned that banners are a form of communication.  Whether it is today or 150 years ago, groups or organisations with a marching tradition have made banners to identify themselves and what they stand for. Stephen White, historian from Carlisle Library had told us that before 1832 being a member of a trade society and meeting together was illegal.  Those that did - the Chartists - all had banners to identify who they were and what they stood for.  These may have started as a small wall hanging then sewn onto a bigger piece of m...

This afternoon was our last session this term - so we decided to get messy, creative and have some fun!   Our starting point was chatting about what we had learned from our visit to Carlisle the week before when David Ramshaw told us about the development of railways and the important role they had in the development of our local industries including the mills and print works. Taking our pictures of trains as our inspiration, we looked at the shapes that formed the different parts of the train.  The funnel, the train lines, the wheels.......  Hubert used a diesel train as inspiration - and made this fabulous print.  Well done.  We had great fun pushing the ink around on the plate to give us different shapes, lines and textures. Once our first prints had dried, we were able to apply another colour and produced these great pieces of art! It amazing to see how our inspiration took us on our own 'train jour...