Changing My Mind...

...happens all the time, but it doesn't often happen when I've finished a piece, and twice in the same series is... interesting...  The piece I showed you here just didn't seem quite right, and a chat with my online creativity group buddies confirmed it, and helped to clarify what the problem was.  Here's the adjusted piece, with a smaller circle on the right, which somehow improved the balance and flow over the whole piece. 

This second piece also comes from the Scully series, and when I finished it I thought... no...(the blue isn't part of the quilt, it just happened to be lying on a piece of blue when I took the image). 

Oddly enough, the issue was balance, again.  I was worried about the size of the stitch in the bottom section, and whether the whole piece wasn't just overly fussy, to boot.  So I did what I tell everyone else to do in this situation : I slept on it.  No, it wasn't any better overnight.  Which was unfortunate: there's a lot of stitch in there, and unripping was the only thing I could possibly do.  Turns out I was wrong.  I'm going to leave it as it is.  Why?  I hear you ask... well, because I had laid it out on the sofa, and happened to look at it across the room...and from a distance, it looks fine.  In fact, that's something else I tell everyone else to do... usually by putting the piece on the floor and standing up to look at it.  I really should take my own advice, now and again. 

Note the circle in the bottom right: yes, you guessed it, it's the trimmed off circle from the piece at the top of the page.  Waste not, want not, and all that. 

As well as the Scully influence, I think this piece has echoes of some of the work of the Glasgow Girls, notably the shapes in the upper section, and the stitch that supports it.  This series seems to be taking me to surprising places...I'm not a huge fan of Art Nouveau, though as I get older, my taste seems to get broader.  Maybe I'm just less judgemental...who knows.  I wouldn't have expected it to appear in my work, though, which is perhaps foolish.  Everything appears in the work eventually.

Changing Direction...

...is always a possibility, given the way I work, but sometimes it's inevitable.

I spoke here about being inspired by the work of Sean Scully.  This is the second of those pieces, which would have been three pieces of fabric set together, had I had three suitable pieces... however, these two seem to sit fairly well together, so here we are.  Nothing like the work of Mr Scully, but entirely like mine...nobody can ever accuse me of not being flexible in my approach.  The fabric itself was two pieces which were donated by a couple of kind friends, when I bemoaned my lack of scrap fabric (I'm still bemoaning my lack of hand dyes, but that's another story).  The pinky brown fabric on the right has been reversed, to tone down the patterning, while scraps of the fabric on the left have been used to create a vertical and a couple of horizontal lines, to develop the relationship between the two cloths.  Finally, there's a lutradur circle, with a shell inside it, at the top.  And it's ready to stitch. 

Which is my problem.   I spent a fruitless ten minutes looking for thread with which to hand stitch this piece.  I don't have the money to buy any, and I don't have any dye, either, so I can't make my own.  And I can't see myself hand stitching with machine thread, because it doesn't have the impact that perle and other thicker threads have.   I do have choices, though.

First off, I could just not stitch it at all.  And that's really tempting.  This piece feels like a painting, and were it a painting, it would be finished.  Fact is, though, that it isn't a painting, and it feels like it does need some stitch, albeit perhaps not as much as I might usually do.  So it looks like machine stitch is the only option.  Given the amount of machine threads I have, there's bound to be something suitable.  And if there isn't a variegated thread, I'll combine two plain threads.  I think I'll be stitching, not for pattern, but for texture, which will hopefully make those elements stand out a bit more, as well as connecting them.  For the meantime, though, I'm going to put it aside, and see how I feel after a couple of months.  Building time into design decisions is A Good Thing.  I don't think this will lead to a shift back to machine stitching in general, though, partly because it's too tiring, and partly because I've come to enjoy both the process and the result.

Finding A Rhythm.

I  recently watched a documentary on the work of Sean Scully.  I didn't particularly like his work...or so I thought... but I found his process fascinating, and not unlike my own.  He works with stripes or blocks of colour, and I found myself thinking, I need to do that.  Let the fabric speak for itself. Needed to be hand dyes, I thought, needed to be in some way related to each other.  Minimal stitch, I thought, and went through my really very limited selection of hand dyes (ironic, given that most of my stash was my own hand dyes...), and put together three tops.  I thought I would machine quilt them, but when I ran out of hand work, I thought...maybe...   So I fished one out.  This one, to be precise.

Reader, I didn't like it.  (For those of us who like to know these things, a piece of rust dyed muslin on the top, hand dyed muslin (of a different, slightly heavier weight), in the middle and a piece of commercial fabric on the bottom, the only piece of fabric I could find to go with the other two).  The problem?  Firstly, I didn't like the shape, and felt the strips were too wide.  Secondly, I couldn't work out how to stitch them.  Third, I couldn't see a way to make them hang together in a cohesive whole. 

I turned them round.

That felt a bit better, but still, the problem of the width of the bands of colour, and the shape.  The thought of dismantling the whole thing, changing the width of the bands and sewing it all back together, just didn't appeal.  There was, however,  distinct problem with getting all three fabrics to relate together.  Each way I looked at it, I felt as if tow of the three bands sat together well but all three, didn't.  I needed to find a solution, to pull the whole thing together.  Oh, and did I say?  It didn't feel like mine....which is perhaps not surprising, given that usually, my ideas come from my own personal landscape, where this one had come from considering someone else's.  So, reader, this is what I did.

The fabric is all a bit darker than in this image...but... The wool is couched onto the top, reflecting the swirls in all three fabrics, but taking their own path, not following anything already existing in the cloth.  I would have preferred to have hand felted the wool down, but that's not really an option now, so I used an apricot coloured thread that matches some of the apricot colours in the fabric to the right.  I then found some brown variegated thread to quilt the rust dyed section, with colours from all three pieces of cloth, and then thought...now what?  My original intention was to stitch with a darker thread, but that didn't seem right.  And there needed to be something else in that upper right hand area, to make it more interesting.  So I cut a circle from a piece of Lutradur that had been dyed orange, and stitched it on.  I then found a very pale variegated thread to stitch round the resulting curves, on a much larger scale than the earlier stitch.

I have to say, this was not at all what I intended, but I think it resolves all the problems I identified with the piece.  What's more, it relates nicely to many of the drawings in my sketchbook over the years, and some of the work I've done in the past.  There's a tiny example here .  I'm pleased, even if it wasn't what I intended.  And it's a bit cluttered, perhaps.  It is, however, definitely mine: I don't think Sean Scully, were he ever to see it, would recognise his influence.  And that's how it should be.  Now for the other two.

Oh, and as a ps...it's called Rhythms. 

One Thing...

...inevitably leads to another...or in this case...six others.  It seemed like a good idea at the time....it always does.  I was working on this monoprint from the small collection I was talking about yesterday.  As you can see, lots of stitch..  The piece is on a scrap of muslin I got from a friend.  I don't usually work on muslin, but it was to hand, and there was paint and... you get my drift. 

The sections that are reading as very pale blue at the top of the piece, were originally white: because there was such a lot of white in there, and because I don't much like white, I popped a small piece of lutradur behind it, which was blues and purples...it worked very nicely, and didn't add any bulk to the piece at all.  Sadly, it didn't do much for the bottom left hand corner, so I decided to add some more paint.  So I mixed some up, and, rather than paint it on, printed it on, instead.  And then I trimmed it a bit, because I felt it was just too dominant...and got this.

Which is altogether better.  And put it aside to dry.  And then I thought, better wash up the piece of glass I was using to monoprint from (no gelli plates here, I'm too mean, and am quite happy with the traditional method).  And realised that there was still a blob of paint on the glass...and I really don't like washing perfectly good paint down the sink.  You so know what's coming next, right?  Yes, more monoprints.

The one I've just shown you was very landscape-y, so I thought I'd continue in that vein.

Each print has a 'ghost' print, made from the remains of the paint on the glass: I often prefer the ghost prints for stitch, because the paint suggests, rather than dominates, leaving ample room for stitch.  But of course, the excess paint had been blue, and I'd scooshed out some Naples Yellow and there was too much...it's becoming a theme, this, isn't it?  So...

The blob at the bottom of the ghost is a bit unfortunate, but I'll trim that off before I start...otherwise, these are okay.  I suspect that there's a larger painting waiting to get out of this... it's part of the joy of monoprinting, that things for development are often suggested by this spontaneous way of working. By this time, I was on a roll, but was starting to feel tired, so I finished off with these, adding the paint straight onto the glass, so that there wasn't any left over.   I've been reading about Sean Scully's work, after watching a documentary on him on the Beeb...' this pair is a definite nod in his direction.And then, reader, I washed the glass.  And that gives me enough to play with until next Monday, when I may well paint again....mwahaha...