Art, the Beautiful Metaphor, a gallery of original artworks by Liz Adams, and an ongoing work in progress, showing works in progress! My other blog is http://fieldfen.blogspot.com for opinion, commentary, books, food and movies All works by Liz Adams are copyright to her only, and may not be used in any form without explicit permission. Thank you for respecting my ownership.
Here's the worktop today, toys galore
And this is where we are.
This is my tribute to the people who created the original museum quality peacock feather dress. I drew it on a sturdy piece of silk, thank you Cynthia, and it's less than half the size of the original. So I adapted the design a bit, and there'll be more adjustments as I go.
This blue pen is heat fugitive -- vanishes when heated. In this case, between the silver and gold work and planned beading, the lines will probably be covered anyway.
I don't happen to have any real beetle wings handy, like those used for the eye, so I used Indian metallic thread, brought back from Mumbai by a friend. I'm couching this down, meaning the metallic thread lies on top of the fabric, stitched in place by a finer thread. It's a medieval stitching technique. This is called topside couching. There's another form, underside couching, for heavily stitched garments to be worn. It's flexible. Here the topside is fine.
To people used to the six plies common in embroidery thread, this is a surprise. It's got many plies. You need to thread it, though, in order to draw it through the fabric once at the beginning and once at the end. This entailed a search for a needle with a long enough eye to accept all the plies, and a sharp point, to pierce the fabric. And a second search for a smaller needle, tiny eye, to use one ply to stitch invisibly.
The search for the needles took longer than I expected, and involved trial and error with the metallic thread. And reminded me that drawing a rough design and choosing fabric and threads and fitting needles, is all part of stitching. It's not what comes before stitching!
But once started, it was so peaceful and happy to be back with couching again. I love to do it, because you have to respect what the thread wants to do, and gently push with the needle to ask it to lie in the designed shape.
I moved the shape off-center as I worked, liking that better than the static effect of symmetry. This silk is sturdy enough not to need a backing, and when it's drumtight on the hoop, you can hear it pierce the fabric and the gentle hiss of the thread passing through. This was a bonus, stitching music!
You really can't dictate to metallic thread. Or any thread, for that matter, as spinners and weavers and knitters and crocheters can tell you.
