Stitching Up A Storm...

...or, more precisely, a lap quilt top and some quilting on small pieces.  I'm having a shoulder break ( I don't know why I sew with my shoulders, but I do...), and showing you one of the small pieces.  This is one of the 'Cracking Up' images that I took a couple of years ago, intending a series.  This one, an image of a very old brick wall, has been manipulated and printed out on Evolon.  I'm really grateful to Dale Rollerson ,who, some time ago, sent me a load of her variegated threads to try; I'm using them here, and they are lovely...great colour combinations, gloriously subtle.  They definitely did the job here ( I used Barrier Reef and Cradle Mountain on this piece, and they worked beautifully).  The only other thread I've used on this piece is a dark Madeira metallic, to emphasise the crack in the wall, and some dark madeira rayon in the bobbin.  I don't think it looks quite so much like a wall now; more like an inner landscape.  The colours may be gentle, but the stitch is spiky and sharp; I'll leave it to you to decide what that means in terms of mood.  I've tried to vary it quite a bit... see the close up, below.  It gives you a good view of the thread, too...isn't it yummy?

It feels good to be stitching again after a long time away from it.  Partly, the impetus is from Spunbond Sensations!, and partly from the need for work for an exhibition in the summer.  Either way, I'm happy to be back to work. 

Bertha's Big Day

I'm thoroughly enjoying using Bertha... for those of you wondering who or what Bertha is, she is a wide scale printer, which allows me to print cloth up to 24" wide, and as long as I like... I'm still at the experimental stage, but I hope to offer other textile artists the opportunity to send images to us at the Gallery, so that we can print cloth for them, too. Meanwhile, this is one of the images I'm working on currently. This was printed on Evolon and stitched into. It's part of the 'Cracking Up' series I've been thinking about and working on for a while. Not sure if it's finished yet, I may add something else to it, possibly using the embellisher. I've included a small close up, to let you see the detail in both the stitch and the print itself; remember you can click on the images to enlarge them.

The original image was a photograph of cracks in the floor of an outbuilding at the Gressenhall Museum. It's amazing how quickly and easily a photograph can be manipulated on computer. The challenge, I'm finding, is working out how to combine photographs as abstracts with stitch. I've always said that it's important to leave space for stitch in any design we make; I'm finding that if I work the image too hard, it's difficult to work out quite how and where to stitch...and to justify the stitch at all. That hadn't really occurred to me. I don't see myself as a photographer, but in some ways, that's what I am, or what I have become. It's not a turn in my creative journey that I was expecting, but that's okay. I love the unexpected.