This week I have worked to finish the applique using stemmed french knots in flourescent green. Once that was done, I needed to work out a quilting pattern.
At such times I make samples, ie audition several approaches, as in the lower image. I worked black and hot yellow options in fine thread in the centre of the collaged images below.
I wanted to use the yellow, but the effect was nothing special. The best result was the very fine black free machine embroidered motif echoing the corona virus molecule. Even with all the practice I did, it wasn’t easy to make them very small, but I am at least achieving a variety of sizes 🙂
I normally get to the binding or facing stage at least before seriously starting out on another work, even if I have an idea ready to go. The only excuse I have for currently having three works under way at the same time is that there’s a pandemic on, and here at home I need a change of activity+focus every now and then. That bag of new leather scraps has been calling me, though, telling me it is time to quit the sample making and just start!
I know that the leather is going to be great for another motif I have in mind – the coffin. The pandemic stories are piling up horribly.
Against a red background representing danger, the circular shapes of black leather are held in place with stemmed french knots in a luminescent green. Those stitches really pop out, almost pulsate, though the drama isn’t apparent in this pic.
I’m happy with the effect, and can’t wait to start on the next. Or perhaps I should go back to the little landscapes for a while. On that piece there are still a few more little Aussie motifs to embroider onto some of them, and something needs to be done about the sea areas between them all.
What a satisfying morning. I’ve started making what will be a small piece, a maquette for another, larger, work in the Pandemic Pattern series. I’ll be using some of that fine leather I recently acquired and posted about.
I’ve selected a red background for danger. How to represent the now classical covid shaped motifs is sorted in principle. We see lots of diagrams and graphics of this now classic molecule in some lovely and often lurid colours, so I googled to try to find the true colour of the virus molecule. It turns out that it’s colourless, if you could see it with the naked eye and so therefore it really doesn’t matter what colour you use to represent it.
So for this first pass at this pattern I’ll use black, but I have some lurid purple and magenta, and heaps of bright orange to consider for the future. For the little spiky bits my preference is the green single thread pictured above, but being polyester it’s a bit springy and could drive me mad unless I can master better control over it. There’s always stranded embroidery thread, and black perle, so I’m still deciding. What I have decided is to not use gold because that somehow bestows positive celebrity on the wretched virus that’s devastating the whole world this year.
Despite what I wrote in a recent post, that idea has been sidelined for the moment. I realised I was trying to put two ideas together that weren’t going well, they were blocking my way forward and I was stuck. I unpicked what I’d done so far, reviewed my thumbnail drawings, cleared away fabrics, got out others, tidied my work table and got ready to make a fresh start again the next morning.
Intending to use lines of arcs as in several previous works, I auditioned some sheer fabrics, stitching them with metallic thread onto the black background. They were hard to photograph:
I selected the right end one, which looks best with the duller gold I stitched it with. I pre-applique with machine basting, and although in this image it was a straight line, now with curvy shapes I’m using the longest stitch set on the widest zig-zag, which is easily pulled out once the edge stitching’s all done. Pulling the top thread from the stitching is a breeze using Gutermann’s Skala – one of those multi filament threads many call bobbin thread. I always use it for machine pieced patchwork and have done for decades. The seam is as strong as anything else, the stitching is so fine the seam lies ultra flat, and as I say, and it’s quick and easy to undo any seam that needs to be redone.
The fabric shape is machine basted with the longest/widest zig-zag into place, that stitching being removed once the applique is complete.
This work will be1.8mw x 0.9mh, so there’s a lot of sewing to be done while I think about how I’ll quilt it, and whether to use batting or just a third layer of fabric between front and back.
Though I’ve become pretty speedy with the hand applique, it occurred to me perhaps this wasn’t the smartest technique to use in a big piece, and yet I felt compelled to. I found myself recalling an exhibition of the layered textile art of Nena Bardaro I visited here in 2017. She’d used fairly sheer fabrics in her quite large appliqued works, and I began wondering if she’d stitched the raw edges down or whether they’d been finely turned under… When I read that post, I felt really silly to have fogotten the most fascinating technical detail of those works – her ‘stitches’ were lots and lots of tiny melt marks made with non-specified heat tool that fused those nylon fabrics together. I feel a bit better – that must have been almost as time consuming, obsessive perhaps, as what I’m doing right now.
A Nena Bardaro work detail – stitch-like melt marks that fused the layers of nylon.
I see the threaded needle as a mark making tool I can use with various materials and media to produce art with unexpected, improvisational effects as opposed to an element of precise technical excellence. We’re all influenced by what we see – and many artists I admire are using hand stitches in their art as mark making in addition to constructional functions.
A year ago I made this small quilt, Regeneration 2, currently on show in the Australia Wide Seven exhibition at Belconnen Arts Centre, Canberra, until December 18th. The 40 selected 40sq. cm quilts in that collection will travel between venues in Australia and New Zealand until the end of 2022.
Regeneration 2 2020, 40cm x 40cm. Raw edge hand applique
Regeneration 2, detail.
If you look at the detail of this small piece, I wouldn’t hold it against you if you commented out loud that it looks rather amateurish. Those raw irregular edges and hanging bits of thread are a world away from finely executed traditional hand applique, which I can do, of course. I’ve done plenty of cross stitch, pulled and drawn thread work, hardanger and other traditional embroideries, all quite exacting, and I love them all. I own and take pleasure in using household linens worked by my grandmothers, and other lovely antique hand stitched linens by unknown stitchers that I’ve collected. I love them all, but I just don’t work that way – which is what I’ve always said about traditional quilts.
I have certainly been influenced by the surge in popularity of hand stitch and the growth of the Slow Stitch movement over the last decade. For the last year my surface design has centred on hand stitch, which is why I’ve enjoyed the TextileArtist.org Stitch Club workshops I’ve been taking over the past few months.
