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It's Magic

Bredon would like to congratulate one of our many talented customers Janice Myers who has just won a competion for her design "Hat Trick". The competion was entitled Spellbinding was organised by the Textile Directory.

	The piece, ‘Hat Trick’, features a giant top hat and a flight of doves – though the work has a special spellbinding twist. .” Janice’s entry consists of two separate pieces – a hat and the doves. She made the hat out of a dustbin liner with a cardboard base and then lined it with a second dustbin liner, featuring machine embroidered stars to give that magical look. The doves are stitched on greenhouse polythene and are multi-layered to suggest movement. Janice designed the doves herself, drawing them by hand and then digitising them using Pfaff software. She has used wire in each of the doves’ wings to allow them to be placed in different positions. Each of the doves’ heads is made from paper balls, with a beak, eyes and a mask made from tomato puree tubes. Each bird was then painted and textured Janice then added some finishing touches to the birds: “some have aerials to indicate they are ‘switched-on’ while others have skeleton heads and wear plumes on top to add to the surreal effect.”
As with all creative projects, ‘Hat Trick’ did not come to life without a few challenges on the way. Janice explains, “I didn’t want the doves to be doll like, but I didn’t want them to be flat either. This involved a lot of time consuming experimentation and I had many failures. In the end I discovered that if I stitched the polythene in a certain way it curled up and looked how I wanted it to look. I initially wanted the heads to be very skeletal and hollow – but it was difficult to attach a body with a bit of weight to a hollow head!”

The piece, ‘Hat Trick’, features a giant top hat and a flight of doves – though the work has a special spellbinding twist. .”

Janice’s entry consists of two separate pieces – a hat and the doves. She made the hat out of a dustbin liner with a cardboard base and then lined it with a second dustbin liner, featuring machine embroidered stars to give that magical look.

The doves are stitched on greenhouse polythene and are multi-layered to suggest movement. Janice designed the doves herself, drawing them by hand and then digitising them using Pfaff software. She has used wire in each of the doves’ wings to allow them to be placed in different positions. Each of the doves’ heads is made from paper balls, with a beak, eyes and a mask made from tomato puree tubes. Each bird was then painted and textured Janice then added some finishing touches to the birds: “some have aerials to indicate they are ‘switched-on’ while others have skeleton heads and wear plumes on top to add to the surreal effect.”

As with all creative projects, ‘Hat Trick’ did not come to life without a few challenges on the way. Janice explains, “I didn’t want the doves to be doll like, but I didn’t want them to be flat either. This involved a lot of time consuming experimentation and I had many failures. In the end I discovered that if I stitched the polythene in a certain way it curled up and looked how I wanted it to look. I initially wanted the heads to be very skeletal and hollow – but it was difficult to attach a body with a bit of weight to a hollow head!”


As winner Janice was presented with £1000 to spend at Pfaff, sponsors of the competition. After the exhibition finishes in March Janice is hoping to take ‘Hat Trick’ to further events, beginning with the ‘Second Flight’ exhibition by South West Textile Group – of which Janice is a member. Over the next year she is also hoping to be included in international exhibitions and currently has submissions for events in France, Hungary and the Ukraine.

As winner Janice was presented with £1000 to spend at Pfaff, sponsors of the competition.
After the exhibition finishes in March Janice is hoping to take ‘Hat Trick’ to further events, beginning with the ‘Second Flight’ exhibition by South West Textile Group – of which Janice is a member.
Over the next year she is also hoping to be included in international exhibitions and currently has submissions for events in France, Hungary and the Ukraine.

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