This is a piece of fabric I created years ago, in fact it was exhibited more than once in a different incarnation,and now I've overstitched in gold thread -- sorry, difficult to see here, but a selection of the tumbling block outlines are picked out in a single long stitch -- and it's stretched and mounted 20 inches high, 16 inches wide, one my favorite dimensions in many media.
This fabric was undyed natural colored muslin, which I left out in the rain wrapped around a piece of cast iron, to acquire interesting rust and mold markings, then dyed with silk dye, washed out to get a very subtle tone, and stamped with tumbling block designs, using an archival stamp pad ink, the designs carved in rubber stamp making material. the stamp is carved to resemble wood grain, but that's not a big part of the effect, just gives it a textured sort of feeling. So its latest adventure is as an embroidered piece, where the stitches just partner with the general feeling of the tumbling block design, to give a illusion of many levels. At least that's the idea!
This low contrast work harks back to my early art, where I worked white on white in paper, or black on black, and it was very difficult to get a studio able to make good slides of my work, a terrible challenge to a photographer. So glad the bad old days of slides are no more, and that my digi enables me to do it myself, at least well enough to be visible, anyway!
I find the colours soothing even with the very rigid straight lines of the cubes. I love how you come up with ways of creating patterns - iron and rust, stamps, dye. All manner of things I would never dream of doing.
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