Different from rusty metal, anyway. Here's my latest setup, tape binding the hoop courtesy of Judy T., whose Big Box of Stitching Delights is being shared around here and there. You need to bind a hoop if you're going to use something as fragile as silk, though some people always do it, to avoid a permanent ring on the fabric. I think it can be pressed out or stretched out, so I'm not so conscientious about that. It takes a lot of seam binding to do a hoop, and nowadays it's expensive, so The Box was very handy to go to.
But here, with a piece of unbleached muslin backing one layer of silk organza and one layer of silk chiffon, with images printed on both from two of my Tyvek paintings, it's an issue.
Can't tell you how long I fiddled at this to get all the pieces of fabric in the right orientation to each other, and in the hoop, and happy together,with the images falling on one another the way I wanted.
Next I have to figure out how to work on this. Must study ideas.
And right there on the patio in the sunshine, wild cherries on my doughty cherry tree, what's left of her after Irene and Sandy, still blooming away for the birds. I got a bit carried away thinking about the designs they suggest.
Here's the companion piece to the embroidered sunflower piece! It's from several years ago, when I was deep into black gesso and copper wire and metals of all kinds.
Quite small, it's the top of a wooden cigar box, upturned, covered with black gesso, and with a sawblade I found in the street, natural twigs and a piece of shiny paper for the center, attached with copper wire, and with a copper ink drawing, creating a sunflower. Quite a contrast in approach from the stitched and dyed piece. Thought you'd enjoy seeing this.
This and the embroidered and dyed sunflower will appear together.
Here's the sunflower on silk piece, unframed, still with the basting around the edges, out of the picture, securing the cotton lawn to the silk,and still with the indentation of the hoop, before it was stretched
and here, stretched and in a box frame, which is transparent on the sides,
too, so you see the wraparound effect of the silk.
This is probably how
it will be framed permanently. I need to put a backing on after I'm
sure I like the positioning, which actually looks okay to me.
It's on
the wall, so I can see it better and decide if any adjustments are
asking to be made. Interesting to see that the eastern light shows up
blues and purples, and the western light, evening pic, shows up the
reds! this is actually truer to the dyes.
This was great fun, wonderful mixture of working with silk, using metallic threads and beads and floss, and various stitches.
Now that moment of anxiety sets in, wondering what comes next...
Two brave Dollivers were volunteered by their peers to come cut up plastic bags to create plastic yarn aka plarn.
Here they are wielding scissors with enthusiasm. Note the broomhandles, I mean knitting needles, in that pic,too. Then we cast on about eight giant stitches and
proceeded to knit garter stitch for a few rows before exhaustion
overtook their yarny arms.
Closeup of their feat. It takes a
lot of room to do this kind of knitting, what with swinging the needles
around. I think it's more of a spectator sport for the Festival, than
an actual participatory one...I can see it now, people being swept off
their feet by the knitter changing rows.
Elton the musician commented that this
reminded him of those Swiss horn players in the mountains.
But, as you see, there's practically nothing you can't knit with. And no idea that's too far out to consider for our Festival.
Out in the world of larger art, we're getting ready for the September 20th Plainsboro Festival of the Arts, which I helped found about 18 years ago, and which has grown and grown, so I guess it's partly my fault...
One thing I'll be doing this year, aside from helping to person the embroiderers' guild area, is to work the Earthloom, a giant affair, for community participation, since that's the name of the festival doings.
So I thought hm, recycling and having fun and making a 21st century tapestry, hm, plarn is called for. This is yarn created from cutting up plastic bags of all colors. The art curator, Donna S., was unfamiliar with it, but courteously refrained from rolling her eyes, and we got together this afternoon, scissors and bags at the ready, and cut a few samples to put onto the ready warped loom.
I packed down a previous iteration of weaving, as a nice base for the upcoming one, and did a sample weaving. The yellow strip you see is the results of one grocery bag cut up. And I've started putting leashes on, you see them at the sides, to keep the work rectangular as it progresses.
And here's Donna busily, and gallantly, producing more plarn, with supplies of bags in the foreground. This is someone who is running a lot of major programs, all at once, while moving house, and getting offspring back to college. A halo ought by rights to appear in this pic.
I also broke it to her today that you can knit with
this stuff, and I have an idea about making a performance art piece
using broomsticks for knitting needles and having several people knit!
I'll create the plarn, find the broomsticks and cast on a few stitches
for starters, and we'll go from there. I'm just sayin'.
So the Festival will be a heavily fibrous day for some
of us. I will be indoors, since I can't manage to be out in the
weather all afternoon. But the loom will be in a window visible from
the plaza outside so people can join us at will. The event goes on all over the place, indoors and out, all the time.
And looking ahead a bit, there's loose talk about an Artist in Residence, that would be me, probably in the winter, creating a big tapestry of my own on this loom with people able to stop by and chat and ask and all that. Not using plarn, though, probably my own hand spun chunky yarn.
Fun abounds. Not much danger of boredom, I'd say.
Here's the current State of the Sunflower piece. It's become a piece about late summer fruits and flowers -- the dark little areas are seed beads and resemble fruit -- and I'm rethinking trapunto in favor of more couching, because there are going to be competing textures if I use trapunto. So I'll save that for another piece.
I pictured the piece straight on, and at an angle so
that you can see the textures better. The stitching that looks like
chain isn't -- it's split stitch, using four strands of floss so that I
could split each stitch evenly. Lot of fun, doing that. And the long
and short on the petals is different each time, since petals are, too.
This is nearing the finish line, I think.
This is an exciting point, where the design idea starts to express itself. Several ideas came together this afternoon and I realized that the center of this piece is going to be a sunflower head. This was after a while spent couching dark green and anchoring it with yellow, my subconscious at work, I guess.
I drew a couple of them as design references, from my flowers growing out front and back, and will be penciling the design onto the silk -- can't use my favorite Pilot pen for this, since it will probably bleed -- and then that's where the trapunto will happen, and some beading. And maybe some French knots to simulate beads and seeds in the seed head. We'll see.
The full face sunflower is probably my choice for this work, the other, more shaggy one, a back view of an older flower, is a bit "busy" for this piece,but might frame up as a nice little drawing.
Techy stuff for people who like it: drawing paper, lightweight, fine black Pilot pen, Caran d'Ache watercolor crayons to sketch in the color areas.
And there'll be beading here and there elsewhere, and some small trapunto areas, to balance out the design. At least that's the current plan.
I've made a start on my dyed silk piece here. I basted a cotton lawn piece behind it before I hooped it, so that I could couch onto the silk without overwhelming it with weight, and it's really a good feeling to work through the two layers.
Here I've established the basic contours of the piece, partly following the dyed shapes, partly departing from them, in couching with gold thread, and a kind of shiny translucent thread and floss,and a lot more will happen before it gets away from here.
I'm thinking of beading (why are you not surprised) and some trapunto work, but not in the same areas. Adding in the cotton backing is what makes the trapunto possible, so I'm capitalizing on it.
About the colors: these are not my favorite part of the spectrum, but I dyed pieces when I taught the silk workshop to appeal to all tastes since we had about 15 different people attending. This one wasn't chosen, and it's good to depart from your favorite colors now and then and see what happens. Art's not about doing the same old thing and expecting different results!
I've been dying to get to this piece, but I have a
neurotic need to finish things as I go, so I had to do all the other
projects that had priority for various reasons.
You'll
notice I've added a badge to this blog (I will have to redo it in a
less explosive color, but it looked calmer at the site of origin) and
have been having a great time with responses and discussion of all these
embroidered bits over there, with much encouragement from highly
decorated embroiderers, including goldworkers. But I will be faithfully
in here, too, never fear.
Oh, nearly forgot: that piece with the pearls and couching and all sorts of items that I couldn't figure out how to name? I was thinking it was like the inside of a geode, but that would be a dorky title. Well, Faye, one of my new friends over at Stitchinfingers suggested Tide Pool! Yes!! just right.
The Phoenix Rising book is now complete and packed ready to take flight northwest. I attached the needlepoint with a margin of canvas colored, to a book cover I made of mulberry paper over card stock. It's saddle stitched, with two signatures inside, easily detached if she wants to, and easy to replace if she wants to do that, too.
And if she decides she wants to frame the cover rather than use it as a book, it's hers and she can do that too!The red yarn stitching you see on the outside cover is part of a yarn gift she made me ages ago, and I thought she'd like to have a souvenir of that lovely present.
So this is a participatory gift in several ways!
Then the next piece, a dyed silk one, which I'm
backing with cotton lawn because I want to use metallic thread and the
silk is too fine to support it alone. I've hooped it on a ten inch hoop,
and I'll probably baste the two materials together to keep them from
drifting as I work. This is one of the series of silk pieces I dyed for
my embroidery class to work on.
I'm looking at a design from a card embroiderer friend Carol P. showed me after a recent trip to Europe, showing a detail from an old Venetian coronation robe, as a wonderful example of goldwork stitching.
This is where I'm at right now.
This new pocket doll was commissioned by a Ravelry friend, and the planets came into the right configuration, meaning I found the pattern, years since I made any of these, found the yarn, found the right tiny needles, and found a piece of time. So here he is.
Marigold is deeply suspicious of this whole enterprise since it involved being shoved off my lap several times while I was working on it. She came in useful to show his relative size, though.
The Dollivers lent their rocker for the photo opp, on condition that the doll leaves soon, but they are consoled that he won't be getting any of their special gear, since he comes fully dressed.
The future owner of this piece came visiting about five minutes after I got home, after a day out you can read about here and turns out she's in for surgery this week, is in a lot of pain, so without further ado, I gave her the beaded piece I made for her, instead of waiting to show it to embroidery buds. She really needed it, got all teary, and loved it. So I think it served its purpose!
Anyway, this is how it was just before she seized it and ran home with it.She wants to get it framed, no need for me to do it.
Well, seashell in fact. I'm beading and goldworking this little shell and would like a bit of input from you embroidering blogistas. You see the section across the top which in an actual shell would be a sort of lip? I think of beading in there, too. Or would you leave it open? I've been looking at this for hours and have lost the ability to see it properly, you know how that goes. So please chime in with your advice, which will be greatly appreciated and maybe even listened to!
The colors didn't come out true: that upper section
which looks like white beading, is in fact lovely pink beads with a
white cast on them, very like the interior of one of these shells, and
the fabric is a piece of tobacco brown linen or maybe rayon, or
moygashel or something, nice to work through, but frays a bit, because I
was so excited about getting into it that I forgot to tape the edges.
The other beads are taken from the necklace I thrifted
the other day, nice range of browns and ambers and mixed, and the blue
ones at the bottom I bought ages ago as beads, amazing, at retail.
This is a small piece, maybe 4 x 4 total. It's probably
going to be a gift to the person who gave me a ton of kits recently
after she was searching for her blender, remember that funny sequence? This was one of the kits, except it was supposed to be crewel, but I thought beads and goldwork would be better for the subject.
Subtitle: But Wait, there's More!
This approx 4 x 4 canvas, 24 count,executed in three strands of floss, with all the background in various mixtures of threads, I love to mix colors with a needle, is now waiting for its final home. The phoenix itself was taken from a Monica Ferris chart, but the background is my own design. It's a collaborative piece.
I think this is going to be on the cover of an artist's book, very special gig, special person. But as to how it will look, how the book is to be constructed, well, I'm working on that.
The recipient doesn't know this is on its way, but I thought it would be good to show it before it leaves me.
It's an artist's book, the cover unbleached muslin, painted, cut and quilted together, with drawings, the inside cover mulberry paper, a double signature inside, saddle stitched, but you can easily remove the sections to put in more pages if wanted. Handmade beads from my own paper, wax finished.
Since the recipient's a poet, I'm hoping this will fit her current requirements...and that she won't send me a rejection slip.
To see some cool design ideas, by gardeners along with nature as well as by ancient artisans, take a look here http://fieldfen.blogspot.com/2013/07/field-trip.html
I doubt if any copyright issues apply to the ancient work, and nature is always open to painters!
I really fancy studying the mosaic designs for beading purposes...
This little needlepoint, about 4 x 4.5 inches, one view slightly bigger than the other, is from a chart in Monica Ferris' detective mystery Thai Die! it's of the Han Phoenix, a work on silk, one of the oldest of preserved Chinese embroideries, now in some museum in China, and for me it's an interval between goldwork and beading. I'm working it on 24 count canvas, three strands of floss. The background is three different greens in each set of three strands, to give a mossy sort of effect as a contrast with the plain unmixed colors of the bird. I did change the plumage on the body, though, because I liked this more variegated look.
The next beading AND goldwork at the same time piece,
is a nice shell on rich brown fabric, part of the stash my friend
unloaded on me, but I'm not doing what the kit says, which is wool
crewel, but instead I'm going to figure out how to use goldwork and the
seed beads in many shades of brown and gold I scored at the thrift store
in the form of a necklace.
And
last night, at a farewell-for-the-moment,we'll-see-you-again for an
embroidery friend, she gave stash items of her own to any takers, and I
was prevailed on to accept a giant, very heavy, beaded and embroidered
Indian wallhanging. I need to put a fabric slot thing, correct name
escapes me, on the back, to slide a dowel through, in order to hang it, at which I point I'll make a pic of it. It's amazing, and will dominate any space I put it in. Next trick is to find a big enough wall....
Yesterday my neighbor, DIY friend in crime and craft, stopped by to give me a share in a giant basil plant she'd got at the market, and I duly took half of it to plant, gave her orange mint in return, and she departed. Meanwhile, a baby rabbit showed up and chowed down on the fallen basil leaves, amazingly sophisticated taste for one so young.
Then later, friend calls and says, this basil pesto you make, how do you do it, lemme write this down. So we discussed the various approaches to basil pesto, historical, folkloric, automotive, oh, wrong program, and she said right, I must find my blender.
Seems she has a brand new blender she put away carefully so as not to clutter up her counter, and can not now find. So she went up to the third floor (her version of my studio is the place you put Stuff Away). And still can't find it, so the pesto has to wait, or she has to borrow my blender.
But in the search she found a whole treasure trove of stitching related items, see pic, which she promptly offloaded onto me, on the grounds that I'll do something about them! which I will, since there's some lovely blank evenweave fabric there,black and white, and a giant hoop (possibly a quilting hoop) and a ton of unopened
kits. One of them she started years ago, and never finished, and I'm thinking of finishing this as a present for her, since she must have liked the design or she wouldn't have bought it.
So, interesting concatenation of events. Only two women could go from basil plants to stitching in three easy leaps.
Here's the as yet untitled piece, now scanned and printed onto habotai 10 momme silk (from Dharma Traders if you can't wait to try this at home). This is very gauzy light silk, 8.5 x 11 inches, and after I peeled it off the backing, it floated through the air and landed on Marigold's head, much to her suprise, since she hadn't planned on a wedding veil.
I really love this different iteration, with the accidental pickup of color, and the indentation of the hoop showing up surprisingly strongly, stuff that happens with techie things
And now I have to leave it alone until I decide what to do next. It might already be complete, and then again it might not. But I thought you'd like to see the next stage in this endless adventure.
My beaded and couched and generally stitched to within an inch of its life piece is done. It measures 3.5 x 4 inches. Any suggestions for a title? it reminds me a bit of an opened geode.
Now I plan to scan it and print it out on silk fabric and see what happens after that, in a different iteration. Here are two views, and as always, I'm open to votes on which way is up. It's years since I knew which way is up!
.
This is where I am on the current small work. One interesting thing I'm noticing is how heavy it's becoming in my hand despite its small size, with all the intense stitching and beading. Makes me wonder how people get around in heavily beaded dresses. This piece is probably the first of a set of pieces in various media, haven't decided what comes next yet. Unless it turns out to be an echo of an earlier work already. That happens, too.
As soon as I took the pic I noticed passages that need to be rethought, this is what happens when you see it with the new eyes of the camera, very helpful.
This is where I am with a small project I'm beading and goldworking and generally having fun with, started with a freeform design I drew on the linen, and will depart from it as the beads request. This will be about six inches square, or a bit smaller. It has a destination already, but that's a state secret.
I went over to the library this morning to snap pix of the first morning of the summer embroidery for kids program,conducted by Ruth Levy and Ginny Hallock, Ruth a friend of many decades, Ginny a terrific teacher and generous volunteer one, too.
Took two pix for the Guild newsletter and the Township website, then my battery died. So Ruth, old friend, turns and says, well, you're here...and next thing I knew I was volunteering to help teach the group the beginnings of embroidery. And it looks as if I'll be back next week, since they are a bit short of teaching help.
Great fun, though, since I wasn't the main teacher, just an able bodied assistant. So here are Ginny addressing the masses -- this is about half the kids who signed up and didn't get into the picture -- and Ruth, who is perfectly happy to have you know she's in her ninth decade and still stitching. And teaching physical therapy, her main profession.
Much as I don't like being indoors with all the doors and windows closed for the ac, it's been okay the last few days of intense heat, today heat advisories, index over 100 C., etc., since I've been watching movies (Poirot last evening) and stitching industriously.
I think this piece is finished. At least it looks that way to me at the moment. I had a couple of oval pearls in there before, which I removed and replaced with a trail of
sequins with beads in the middle, I think a better choice. And there's a
lot of metallic thread couching echoing the painted metallic lines and
shapes.
Anyway, here are all four orientations for your viewing pleasure:
This piece will frame up to about 8 x 8 inches. I know, it looks a lot bigger in the pix, but my work often appears to be a lot bigger than it is in rl. I like this, since it avoids "cute" just because it's small. Doesn't mean trivial!
Now I'm off to read Fay Weldon while the next art adventure percolates.
Here's where I am with the Tyvek stitching, the first one I made. It was originally a long piece, but I wasn't satisfied with the composition and split it into two parts. This is one of them! and you'll see three of the beaded motifs I worked on net applied here, two of them close enough to work as a unit. The fourth, bigger one, will find a home on the other piece, I think. Here you'll see the start of couching work, bringing in the black satin background into the design through the gaps in the painting.
I'm posting it both ways up, and would appreciate your take on which you like better. Or maybe you would like it with the beads lying horizontally? crowdsourcing your art, nothing like it!! anyway, let me know if you have an opinion on it.
This may be one difference between classic embroidery and freeform art: the first one generally knows exactly where it's going at the outset, and the second is constantly open to revision. I'm balanced precariously in both camps at times.
This
piece will be in my exhibit next year, and I'll see how to render the
idea in another medium. Or possibly find an existing work of mine and
discover that it's already done. This happens, that I forget the
general gist of other pieces and get a surprise.
