The Joy of Art, the Agony of Framing

Or, as wise friend Stefi has been known to say, if you want the pleasure of framing, first you have to go through the boredom and misery of making art...

Anyway, today after framing three pieces, I ran out of strength and patience and all that framing entails, and have not quite finished framing up the rest of my work.  One more wilderness piece and a couple of goldwork pieces to go.

Working in 3D i.e. stumpwork and other similar techniques, creates a particularly shall we say challenging situation for framing, since you can't put the work face down in order to mount the fabric on to the backing, the usual procedure.  

You have to preserve the surface and work sight unseen at the back pulling and adjusting the tapes and getting the artwork properly centered and taut without crushing the fragile embroidery or shoving it out of place.  My nerves were not centered, but definitely taut.  Remembering how many hours go into making this work in the first place, you really don't want things to go all pear shaped in the framing.

And I can only keep up this level of tension, meaning the physical kind, for so long before my hands start to whine and complain.  So I made the pix, for once remembering, I'm very proud to say, to leave the glass off for the pix, insert it after them, so that only had to be done once.  Then I decided that the night wilderness scene and a couple of goldwork pieces had to wait till tomorrow.  And now I'm having a cup of tea and gloating over my progress to date.

 Here's that wheat design I did, rayon thread, gah, with beads and other things on white linen, 8 x 8 inches -- it's a dark and stormy day, so the white doesn't show well here.

And here's the daytime wilderness pieces, with the glasswing insect now in place, along with the or nue sun and the blue and purple stumpwork butterfly.  The second picture is to indicate the frame a bit for you to see the boundaries of the piece.  It's 12 x 12.

The reason I want this framing done is that Sunday is the annual holiday bash of the Embroiderers' Guild, with a show and tell of this year's work, so I wanted to put my best stitch forward.

You may remember that I had planned to add all kinds of stuff into the wilderness pieces, but having made the small one, which was quite busy, decided I'd rather be spare with the other two, plenty of air around the insects is better than a crowd.  I still promise myself a goldwork bee in stumpwork, though, but he'll have another context.

The silver (it's silver, take my word for it) frame with the schwalm whitework in it amused me hugely because the design on the frame reflects in an updated sort of way the general design of the whitework. Just a little sight gag there.  I starched the whitework, too, figuring why not, the original stitchers probably did, too.