Buttons and Bags Revisited

A few weeks ago I took some photos of this lovely clutch bag made by fellow islander Gill from Gillian Chapman Felts in Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. This beautiful bag is one of a series Gill has designed using pure Jacobs fleece. The material has been hand-felted using a wet felting technique and the finished bag features one of my raku buttons in white and mushroom crackle glazes. I think the subtle tones of the wool and the subtle glazes on the button complement each other beautifully – and it’s always so nice to see my buttons being used in other people’s work. You can visit Gill’s Folksy shop here.

I have to say taking these photos proved a bit of a challenge for me! These days I’m fairly used to taking photos of my ceramics and have some inkling about what light will work for which glaze or what angle looks best for a certain shape. But until this shoot I didn’t realize how tricky it was to photograph textiles! The lighting needed for textiles to remain true to life in terms of colour is totally different from ceramics: or at least so it seemed on the day! So trying to get both the fabric and the button in proper focus and in true-colour-likeness proved for a long and tricky afternoon. In the end these three photos were the best shots of the day. But you can also see this bag and two others in this same style on Gill’s flickr page here (probably should have taken it to the beach to photograph too!)