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!
More stumpwork and here you see one butterfly wing bits all done, on the lines of a luna moth in shape, not in color, and the start of a different sort of butterfly, long and short stitch, blending one ply of floss then one ply of metallic blue. This is another authentic butterfly shape but I was dying to use this color combo.
You know how, when you're in the middle of creating something, poem, artwork, cooking something, anything like that, you suddenly realize, oh, this is what I've been meaning to do for years. It must have been flitting about all that time and now it's landed on my work? that's how I suddenly felt with the luna moth, and now with the blending of colors on the iridescent blue one. Just, everything feels right, right now.
And the third item is a piece of mulberry paper, one I'd molded over a bee form, and here you see it stitched onto muslin, carefully preserving the molded very fragile shape, not easy, that, and then trapunto work on the body. I used wisps of cotton roving, beautiful silky stuff I've had for a while. This one is an experiment, I'll see how it works once I do a few similar ones.
