Gotcha!

Well... the studio is nearly finished (hurrah).  What I couldn't find, however, were my hat blocks.  Yes, the lovely wooden, heavy, expensive things.  Funny how the easy to replace, cheap stuff never goes missing, huh?  So Robin very kindly went out into the garage...and couldn't find them anywhere.  Until we looked inside the Baby Belling boiler... hurrah.  Gotcha.  This is an old image, from the Little Green Shed... wonder what happened to that painting, come to think of it.  Probably given away in The Great Purge.  Shame, really, it would have fitted in here really nicely....sigh. 

I've found a couple of hats as I go along, including the little fascinator that I needlefelted with yellow yarn to look like a miniature cake; all it needs is a cherry to sit on the top, must try to find something appropriate.  I do have a red glass bead in the shape of a heart, which isn't quite what I had in mind, but in all else fails...  I really do want to get back to making hats, so watch this space.  Now that the room is nearly complete, I don't have much of an excuse.  It's been a while since I did make a hat, so it'll be interesting to see how well I remember the process.  Fortunately, I have a book or two...or six... to refer to.

The other thing Robin found was...yes, you've guessed it, my felting needles.  I now have enough felting needles to have a party with, anyone want to come round and felt...? 

Carrying Further On...

...with the felted piece I showed you here.  Reader, I succumbed.  I did not wait to find the box of felting needles I know is somewhere around in the rest of the stuff...rather, I bought another box of felting needles.  Only three, admittedly.  I'm hopeful that this will be the only duplicate I have to buy...sigh. 

So, today, I did some further work on the piece. 

To me, it's a huge improvement on what it was.  I rather like it, though I don't think it's finished.  It reflects the kind of work that you might see in my sketchbooks, these constant curves.  I've been drawing like this since my teens, but up until now it has very rarely ever put in an appearance in my textile work.  I think that needs to change.  

The curves are partly designed to reflect the curves in the felted wool, but also reflect the machine stitching already in the piece.  Here are a couple of close ups, as the general views don't really show you the stitch, in light and dark metallic threads.  

Looking at these, the stitching also reflects my drawings.  I've said for years that stitch to me is about drawing, about mark making, rather than about creating pattern.  And yet, there's pattern here.  Something to think about; but first, I need to think about how I'm going to develop this piece further.  

Carrying On.

One of the things I do have in the new, as yet unestablished studio, is a number of UFOs, things that I thought, six months or more ago, that had enough potential for me not to bin them, or pass them to someone else to do something with, as was the fate of a reasonable amount of stuff.  Looking at them now, I'm not so sure I shouldn't just have binned them... and certainly this piece in its original state was not particularly promising.  I had taken a rectangle of cotton hand dye, and felted white wool onto its surface...sadly, I didn't take a photo of it in that state.  It didn't look good.  I don't like giving up, though, and thought that a bit of surgery was in order...so I trimmed it round the edges of the wool, to produce this :

(Note the new light grey carpet, suitable for taking photographs of random textile items...which was not really why I chose it, but...).  I contemplated cutting holes in it, too, but decided that was A Step Too Far.  It was, however, a distinct improvement, so only the trimmings hit the bin.  It sat like that for a few days, and I started to go through the stuff in the studio.  One of the things I found was a sponge, with a single felting needle embedded in it.  Bingo!  Going through the boxes with yarn and threads produced a purple variegated wool, and the piece started to take shape...until the damn needle broke.  Yes, I have loads more.  No, I can't find them.  Yes, I'm stuck, and so is the piece, looking like this... 

(This time, it's on the new coffee table, perfect height and colour for photos).  Improved?  I think so.  Stuck?  Oh yes, absolutely.  I'm planning to do some hand stitch, but really don't want to start that until I've finished with the needle felting, as I suspect I'll add a little more at the top left hand side.  Basically, I attached the yarn to emphasise curves in the felting, which is why I started where I did.  I think I'll echo the downward sweep of the yarn, and then double back to balance out the piece.  Incidentally, I rather like the yarn curving out over the edge, but it's not particularly practical, so it will be felted onto the bottom as originally intended. 

One partially down, several to go.

Less Is More (part two)

Okay, where was I...

So, I slept on it (not literally of course...).  And when I looked at it next day, I thought... no.  It's still out of balance.

The problem was three fold.  Firstly, the remaining stitching was too intense.  Secondly, the painted transparent cloth that I'd melted back affected the colour of the overall piece, as well as just being Too Much.  And because of that colour change, the triple stripes that were at the heart of the piece were no longer the right colour.  Reader, they clashed.  And they were too thick, somehow, when placed against the more delicate stitching in the first section.  More so in real life than in photograph.  So... I continued to take stitching out from the remaining two sections of the piece.  Fortunately, unlike the rest of it, these sections had been sewn with a single thread on top, making it much easier to remove.  It still took most of an afternoon and evening...sigh.  

That made a big difference, but not quite big enough.  That colour thing was still there.  So, I gritted my teeth and removed the three strips that were at the heart of the piece.  That hurt.  They were in the right place, but they were the wrong colour, and whilst I could have altered the colour, I really didn't want to.  So I peeled them off; luckily they hadn't been ironed on too convincingly, so came off without a problem.

  You can clearly see the difference in this section from the image above; much less texture, no strips, which equals no distraction from the real visual interest, the cloth itself.  But it still didn't feel right.  Another rotation seemed to make it better, and the addition of three lines in a different direction, made this time from wool, felted in place, made the piece acceptable.

This time, the positioning and colouring of the wool echoes and supports the colour in the cloth.  It still sits securely in the 'Linescapes' series, thanks to the added wool lines.  I don't think it's perfect, but early pieces in a series never are... in fact no piece ever is.  If it were, we wouldn't need to make more, and a series would never be born.  

I've learned a lot from this piece.  Firstly, stitch is fine in its place...but its place may not be in this series.  Yesterday, I cut up the rest of this cloth, and have made two further pieces, neither of which will have stitch, I think... here is one of them.

Why no stitch?  In my view, there's no need for it...no room for it.  The piece is fine as it is.  You may not agree, of course, but that's my feeling.  I'l be glad to hear if you agree or disagree.

The Straight Debate.

Here's the first of the pieces I talked about yesterday, waiting to be worked on ;

And here it is, finished ;

I think it's rather fun.  The cat button was part of a set by Button Mad, which my sister gave me for Christmas, while the boat and duck buttons were left over from clothes I made for my son when he was wee.  A family piece...I think it'll end up with Cara, my granddaughter.  Unless someone makes me an offer I can't refuse...


I showed it to Robin who said, it's nice...but the edges aren't right.  To me, the edges are Just Fine.  Most people, he said, would want them to be straight.   Now, I can get them to do flat, which is important, I think...but I'm not so sure about straight.  I like the country, primitive, sketchy feel that the frayed edges give...as if this piece was a fragment of a larger piece.  It adds texture and visual interest.  What do you think?

Negative Thinking...

affects us all, whether we admit it or not, whether we're depressed or not (though depression does make it rather worse...).  One of my favourites is that I'm lazy, that I don't work hard enough.  And then, as I did today, I go to tidy the studio and realise that it's not strictly speaking true... I just get diverted a lot.  There is, however, a lot of work around...  I picked up these five pieces that had been kicking around the studio (out of a Rather Substantial Pile), waiting for something... In this case, I think they had been waiting for me to get back into hand sewing.

Clockwise from top left is a piece of silk, with yarns and other pieces of silk needlefelted onto it.  Then there is a piece of Evolon which has been printed using one of my hand cut lino blocks, then transfer dyed, then stitched.  Below that, there is a piece of transfer dyed lutradur, fused onto crinkled paper (I think that one is probably upside down in this image).  Fourth, is a piece of shibori painted nylon beneath a piece of transfer dyed lutradur, with a lot of stitch, and finally, a transfer dyed monoprint. All of these pieces need more stitch, except the fourth one, which needs embellishment, I think with tiny lutradur flowers, and maybe some three dimensional leaves... we'll see.

I like all of these pieces, but have a sneaky preference for the first one...though I'm fond of the monoprint, too.  Guess that's my Easter weekend sorted out....what with warping up the peg loom, and starting the rug, and possibly buying a couple of plants (well, it's traditional, right?).  If you celebrate it, have a very Happy Easter.  And don't worry; a girl (or boy) really can't have too much chocolate!