Well that was fun! Today I finished the workshop assignment – three sets of lips using the straight stitch in a set of tones of the one colour to represent the lips in a 3D manner, if possible! Emily Tull made it look so easy.

I took quite a few pics and eventually chose these three, which Mike says are pretty typical, and stitched these three sets of lips:

It got easier with practice, and I think my effort compares fairly well with other people’s posted within the last few days.

There are two live Q&A sessions tomorrow – the first very early in the morning, for which I plan to rise and be in the front of the computer by 6am Montevideo time. The other will be at noon local time. If I don’t make it to either of them, they’re recorded and available to dip into later.

I’m trying to think of an interesting question to ask … You always learn something from every workshop teacher, even the ones you don’t think you’ll pursue in the future, because you never know when something you learned waaaay way back will pop up and be just what you need, sometimes many years later.

The fourth of each month being a catch-up week, the next workshop is one on the expressive straight stitch by Emily Tull, UK, a prominent textile artist particularly known for her stitched portraits of people and studies of animal and bird life. Her stitching is simple and being mostly arrangements of straight stitches, often layered in linear marks, looking very like drawings, but done with needle and fine thread.

The assignment is to use straight stitches in 4 tones of one colour to embroider mouths or lips in several expressions, I’m going with her suggestion that we take pics of our own lips with various expressions and stitch three of them, so uninspiring as I think my own lips are (I’m sure everyone says that) these are expressions that Mike says are typical:

I will be starting to do the stitching today – maybe finish it. A decision has to be made whether to stitch in tones of grey black and white, or in white plus vivid oranges from medium to dark on black, perhaps.

Straight stitch of course is the basis of so many other more complicated stitches and patterns in embroidery, but used just on its own there are so many ways it can express a stitcher’s creative ideas. In 2013 I blogged on “The Glorious Straight Stitch”, https://www.alisonschwabe.com/weblog/?p=2409 where I mentioned a book that enthralled me when I found it (1977) soon after beng drawn to the creative potential of stitchery. Emily’s work reminds me of that book featuring the abstract work in stitch of Nik Krevitsky

Early this morning I spent some time experimenting, making the following samples. For a long time I have been interested in the quality of something being ‘sheer’, of it being something you can see through. Of course ‘holes’ do this, too.

Following my previous feeble initial doodles, I made and bound a few rings from thread (thick cotton string and some polyester heavy duty upholstery in a non-upholstery colour. These rings I then sewed onto the plastic with a very fine nylon thread/monofilament which I just happen to have heaps of (top 3) The ‘ring’ bottom centre is another one of needleworked or buttonhole based on a ring of back stitches, and you can keep on building this kind of thing until you have the length you want or are sick of it. Heaps and heaps of potential – I just kept sewing until that thread ran out, but it’s easy enough to join in another thread and keep going. I think small fine rings could make their way as a textural element into what’s developing.

This mightn’t look much (my samples generally don’t) but it pleased me enormously, because although this is just a small snippet laid and pinned onto the plastic and oversewed with quilting thread, at a point about the middle “i” in the hand written word “invisible”, the right side is overlaid with another bit of plastic, and stitched with clear nylon thread – so, it’s very close to invisible quilting. Also, Sharpie pens come in some nice colours, and I can see a lot of potential here.

Last thursday morning I clicked on one of the Pinterest messages that quite often come, but which I put to one side for when I’m in a browsing mood – I was waiting for a webinar to begin, and very quickly came across two fascinating artists’ images.

First up, I found a beautiful work by Maryse Dugois and visiting her website was astonished to find that her sculptural installations use fine tissue paper. Some constructions in white on her home page seem like anemones and barnacles. I’m not psychologically equipped to work in such ways with fragile tissue paper, but this article and the images of her work did remind me of some 3D constructions I made in the 80s, and urged me to try using plastic, and using scrap fabrics. I need to finish off this post and get to my work room to play with materials, licketty split. As you know from my previous posts, I’ve been stitching onto some clear plastic I’d bought yards of in the USA without any clear plan, except that I knew I need to work with it. In a needleweaving and low relief sculptural phase in the mid 80s, I made several works in which I constructed 3D things a bit like sea anemones – circles of buttonhole rows that build up into dimensional shapes. Typically they started with a base circle of backstitch and built up from there. These quick experiments might not look much, but add much to that 40+ years’ experience:

Another image on Pinterest that caught my eye was one I clicked on to see the maker’s name and it took me to tanglewoodthreads.blogspot.ca/ The artist, Penny Berens, of Novia Scotia, lives in a rural wooded area with nearby lakes and ponds. Her highly celebrated, award winning hand stitched textile art is beautiful – comprising natural hand dyed fabrics and threads, with inspiration from landscape shapes textures and markings in her own natural surroundings. Her stitches are simple, running sitches and other straight stitches mostly, coming a she does from a quiltmaking background, which really shows in many of her images. Researching her name, I found that SAQA.com published an indepth interview with her several years ago, and that reminded me I’d seen some of her amazing art some time ago.

The Merill Cumeau workshop exercise that I finished last week was a floral collage. I’m not a ‘floral’ person, but that exercise was the first real sample of using clear plastic as a ‘fabric’ for sewing on or in, and it has potential I am starting to explore.

Of course, such plastic is widely used as covers for new furniture, or containers for goods such as new pillows – which incidentally are the core of my fabric storage system here 🙂 but it hasn’t been widely used as a raw material for making art. I’ve been thinking about such plastic for some time, though not from the recycling, or upcycling, point of view.

I was very impressed with a work by Lillian Madfes (UY) in a 2011 exhibition of her work here. In each pocket between two layers of clear plastic sheeting stitched to form a square grid, were a small quantity of carbon and a hank of thread in tones from pale pink to deep maroon, progressing from dark to light across the work. Clearly this artwork referenced the notion of ‘quilt’, with plastic performing the role of fabric.

And in a Quilt National exhibiton around the same time, there was an art quilt made using layers of plastic. Although I didn’t particularly care for for the work itself, it was certainly innovative.

A few years ago I encountered a remnant of black vinyl faux patent leather, and as an experiment with a totally new material I made this wall quilt, Landmarks –

The silver segments on the black were nylon backed mylar, of which I had several yards @$1/yd, but finally realised I wasn’t going to do anything with it, and threw it out. But it was all interesting to work with.

On my last trip to USA I looked in fabric shops for more, but there wasn’t any around, and shop assistants gave me blank looks. However, there was some heavy duty clear vinyl, and I bought a few yards of that to experiment with. When I looked around for a suitable fabric on which to compose the collage in Merill Cumeau’s workshop, I settled on the clear plastic sitting in my workroom. It was a good result, and I need to do another exercise making more use of the sheer quality of this material / ‘fabric’ .