Now well past the halfway mark in the SAQA 100 Day challenge, I’m on schedule, sometimes a day or two behind but more often a day or two ahead of the calendar. These next two are of fabric with holes cut, stitchery added, and the work placed over a contrasting background and mounted over a 3.25sq. inches foam core background.
Holes in black fabric, stitched with neon orange thread; all mounted over neon orange nylon on a foam core square 3.25sq. in.
Silver fabric + machine edged holes, mounted on black foam core square 3.25sq. in.
Machine stitched beach sand textures on painted fabric, mounted on black foam core.
In the last couple of weeks I’ve been doing a Stitch Club workshop with Shelley Rhodes http://www.shelleyrhodes.co.uk/ which had us observing a landscape by walking it and recording it’s lines and shapes via various kinds of markings, paint and stitch onto a strip of fabric ~1.5m long. I chose to use the many photos of interesting lines, shapes and textures I’ve taken of our local beach over many years of walking along it. Instead of recording segments of the landscape on the long strip, I did several shorter segments and even cut one into 2 pieces.
One of my favourite beach texture photos, which I observed only one time several years ago. These ‘cliffs’ are actually only about 3cm-5cm high, not huge cliffs across a vast desert! And the waving lines are the trails left by tiny little bivalves in the wet sand as they followed the receding tide back down the beach.
Machine stitched erosion textures, 3.25sq.in. mounted on black foam core.
On each of these tiny landscapes I resorted to free machine stitchery to enhance my markings, as by the time I’d finished painting several layers onto the fabric it was just too stiff for me to hand stitch through. Learning by doing, though, as ever, as I now know to use water diluted paint next time…
I can hardly believe we’re nearly half way through the SAQA 100 Days Reboot project, in which participants undertake to produce a small part of an over all project (of their own design) and post a daily pic with/without information on it. My goal is exploring textures in fabric and hand stitch, so far meaning mostly short to very long straight stitches, plus one or two samples with Y, stem, back and a few french knots.
That we are half way along is evidenced by my growing bunch of small mounted samples resembling a collection of mismatched drink coasters 🙂 Rather than having trouble coming up with ideas, I’m finding each one generates at least one more idea or variation. Also, as usual, sample making teaches the maker various things: some have showed there’s an easier way to do something than my original approach. Some will/should make interesting larger works, and others clearly have no future at all.
Stencil making done 2+ weeks back gave some reasonably blah results, partly because the paint was a bit watery and bled before drying:
I didn’t ditch them, but I did just turn my attention elsewhere. I must have been thinking about them, though, because this past week I came back to these with some interesting results:
Result of cut away and roughly oversewing the raw edges of this group from the upper right sector of the above pic.
Hand stitching over shapeless blobs resulting too watery paint – lower right sector.
Stitch patterning over blobs (upper left) was so fiddly at this scale that I felt free to abandon it before completion as this particular sample was going nowhere.
I have no idea yet what I’ll do with the 4th stencil, but might re-use it on the same fabric with variations in colour, or something. There’s no rush.
Being a stitcher, I see stitch ideas in many places, and sometimes those inspirations are in the work of other artists working in different media to any of the ones I use. Here are a couple of my favourite examples:
If I were a weaver, I’d definitely want to do a workshop with Sara Brennan, because, as I wrote back in 2014 https://www.alisonschwabe.com/weblog/?p=2696 her work was focused on the meeting points of shapes, the lines and edges formed between zones of colour and texture in nature, and where these are complex they are interesting and she incorporates those into her weaving. It’s not that I want to learn to weave, it is that from what she writes I’m sure I’d find a lot to take away in how she draws and makes marks in thread.
Left – My sample of fused organza over machine sewn seam. Right – an image of a SARA BRENNAN work from her Horizons series.
Sara Brennan wrote in 2017“I work from a series of drawings and paintings, often repeatedly exploring the translation of a surface or mark into tapestry….”
Another artist whose art prompts me to consider areas of colour and texture in them is the Australian watercolourist Laura Horn. Many of her water colour pieces feature patterns of lines and tiny shapes applied with a fine brush or marker pen:
Laura Horn – watercoloured shapes with applied lines and texture patterns.
Laura used this wonderful example to publicise one of her many online tutorials and classes in painting with water colours. To me they suggest fused organza with over stitched patterns OR pieces of organza marked with permanent pen which are then fused to the background.
This week Shelley Rhodes’ Stitch Club workshop project is requiring us to look at shapes in Nature and Landscape very carefully with view to incorporating such lines and shapes into our stitched homework, and I’ll be trying the potential of both possibilities in my next group of samples.
The annual SAQA Benefit online auction kicks off tomorrow at 2pm EDT (USA) This year’s 470 pieces made and donated by members can be seen here Every one of these 470 12″ sq pieces will be on sale for $1000 from 2pm on Friday 10th through the Diamond Days up until 1.00pm EDT Monday 13th. After that, at 2pm that day, the first 1/3 of the unsold quilts will go up for bids starting at $750, with the price falling each day until the end of the week. If my work, #69, is not sold in the Diamond Days, it will be up in Group 3, from Sept.27th -Oct.3rd. At any time during the 3 week auction, any quilt can be bought for $1000, you don’t need to wait for its group to come up.
You do not need to be a member of SAQA to bid – our collectors include many people who are not makers themselves. Anyone anywhere in the world can bid in real time once you have registered with the Handbid auction platform. Registering does not commit you to bid on anything, but it does mean that if you do see something you want, your bid can go straight in – and it’s first in best dressed on Diamond Days! But also, every day as the price comes down there’s a rush on popular pieces from people who’ve gambled on getting away with waiting until that new price takes effect …
“Pandemic Pattern #2” is my contribution to the 2021 SAQA Benefit Auction.
One of my Pinterest collections is titled ‘Holes’, and in contemporary textile art, especially embroidery and mixed media collage, there appear many lace-like effects featuring holes in both organised and highly random patterns.
Back in 2013, I wrote musing on the character of lace – what is the defining characteristic of lace – is it the actual holes themselves, or the material that is punctuated by those holes? After thinking about ‘lace’ for a long time, I’m certain that the patterning of the holes decrees ‘lace’, not the material.
We think of ‘lace’ as a textile made from fabric and thread using a wide variety of needle-crafts like crochet, knitting and needle weaving that produce lace incorporating fabric and threads. Lace effects can be produced in any medium really, with an unlimited variety of techniques. Mum owned a couple of delicate little lacy edged porcelain dishes, and delicate glassware often has lacy edges. But I also think the carving of wood, metal, and drilling into or cutting into any material, or welding even, can produce patterns said to be ‘lace’. For holes to give the effect of ‘lace’, though, I think those holes do need to be relatively close together… but I have more thinking to do on that.
Detail from untitled piece: lace effect in punched leather + hand stitch, ~8cm area.
Various pre-Columbian artefacts, Bogota, Colombia.
I’ve used a heat tool in several works having nylon organza layers:
Detail from “Post Apocalyptic Lace” 2009
While browsing in Pinterest this morning, I came across the art of South Australian artist Giles Bettison. I must confess total ignorance up until now of this amazing artist, but in the world of contemporary art glass of which I’m not well informed, Bettison is the acknowledged master of the traditional Venetian “Murrini” technique, of which Millifiore is the well known floral form. Rods of different coloured glass, sometimes including colourless, are bundled into groups and fused together in extreme heat. Those bundles are then finely sliced, set edge to edge and fused again. I found several demos of Bettison’s process online, but the very best was at www.adriansassoon.com and strongly recommend you spend the 15or 20 minutes watching him work.
Giles Bettison glass vessels, each showing strong connection to lace and stitch
These two are typical of his beautiful patterned vessels. On the left, the clear glass centres create a ‘hole’ through which we see into the vase, or out through the sides – note the pattern of holes the light makes on the surface it stands on. The holes all have a coloured edge as if they were buttonhole or satin stitch bound, and then what looks like another type of ‘stitching’ spreading from that border to the edge of the square it’s in…. except that fine, delicate, stripe pattern must have been built up using very thin layers of glass in alternating colours. The one on the right I chose because of the pattern of hand stitching it suggests – boro, sashiko, mending and darning, or what many people today somewhat faddily term slow stitching.
Several years ago I fiddled with the idea of exploring patterns left in the sand by the receding tide, altered some photos, cut and stitched, but maybe I wasn’t crazy with the results or perhaps a health issue intervened – whatever it was, it didn’t seem very exciting and I didn’t pursue it.
But now that I have Mistyfuse bonding web in my life, cutting holes and fusing the resulting lace to a background fabric and adding stitch is a possibility for surface design:
