Polaroid transfer stitching

After the excitement of the Grow Your Blog party yesterday, with new people greeting us in here, and visiting their blogs in turn and others too who had entered, today I'm back to the present! lovely to have new readers, too,  joining the people who've been here before.

This is an artwork I found when I organized the studio, from when I did some Polaroid transfers before they "improved" the film so that you couldn't lift the image off.  This I transferred onto sheer nylon.

To create a small artwork, I backed it with gauze, stitched a snailtrail of silk thread around, piercing both layers,  then did trapunto work.  If you're not familiar with trapunto, it's a kind of stuffing.  You pierce the backing then stuff batting, in this case a nice roving, into the selected areas from the back.  Deciding how to organize trapunto is an interesting phase of work.

 

It's a form of fabric sculpture, a bas relief in a way.

Then I started using goldwork, couched down with gold silk thread, and running round the contours of the raised sections.  This is very engrossing work, figuring out how to get around the stitched lines interestingly.

I think I will probably put a curved doorway shape around three sides of this image, and I'll applique it to a larger work I have under way, if it works there. There's a larger curved doorway in that work that might be compatible.  If not, it may be a freestanding artwork, one of a couple, since I have other transferred images similar to this one, to work on.

And there may be beading.  Watch this space!