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!
So glad to report that my wrist is recovered enough to start thinking about stitching again! and that one reward of organizing the studio was that I found a couple of polaroid image transfers on nylon that I'd made years ago, set aside until I knew what to do next, then sort of forgot.
Here they are.
These are image transfers before they improved polaroid film to where you couldn't do this any more, where I used to soak the developed picture I'd taken, then remove the actual image from the paper! great excitement moving an image through the air to settle on whatever surface I wanted it on, here nylon, because I wanted the transparency of the picture and the fabric working together.
But now I realize these are stitched works waiting to happen. So today I'm hoping to set up and get to work on this.
They may be freestanding, or they may be part of a much bigger work I have under way. We'll see if they're compatible.
The other fabric you see is a piece of Thai silk, given to us all at the holiday party courtesy of Carol P., who visits Thai relatives and gave us the benefit of one of their gifts.
So this is good! new stitching adventures ahead. And I have a Jill Paton Walsh Peter Wimsey on CDs to listen to while I work. Spoken words keep the left brain occupied and the right brain can get on with its job.
The Grow Your Blog 2015 button up there is about an international blog party next week I'm taking part in. For more explanation about it, go here and meanwhile I will be thinking up a giveaway, for anyone who comes in here to comment. If you click on that link, you need to scroll down past the food, to the GYB explanation.
I have two blogs entered, Field and Fen and this one, so there will be two chances of a giveaway aren't you lucky. I have to look through my completed artworks and decide what will be nice to receive.
