Today, having finished off the piece pictured in the previous post, and not yet settled on my next creation, while I thought about it I decided to rationalise my two bulging scrap bags, of the heavy duty clear plastic kind that new pillows come in. One has a tear and is starting to look as if it will break wide open and suddenly spill a heap of bits out onto the floor some time soon when I move it around. It took me an hour to rationalise one of them – chucking out the rubbishy little bits of fabric I know I really won’t use, and the frayed and tangled threads that build up in those bags as I rummage and stuff goes in and out.

Mind you, I think at night when it’s all dark those scraps breed up a bit too – in all the years I’ve been extensively using scraps of fabric, they’re been gradually increasing in volume. I carefully keep offcuts, knowing that just little bits of a large number of pieces of different fabric in a work adds a richness to the contemporary freehand piecing I do. And I always feel a bit of a wrench when discarding even tiny little bits of fabric when I’m being quite practical and realistic!

So the outcome will be about 2/3 of the huge amount of scraps, maybe a little less, of the volume that were stuffed into those bags. The little amounts I’ll probably fuse onto whatever background I select (which could also be black) really won’t make much of a dent in that volume now in the scrap bags 🙂

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A few months ago, I played with these stencilled gold blobs+gold stitch, and have it in mind that fused fabric blob shapes in blues, greens and yellows with some neon thread stitchery could be interesting and fun to do.

It’s too late to start this today, but tomorrow I’ll get those scraps all sorted before breakfast before I start the new 40cm work, with a new audio book at the same time 🙂

Following the completion of the untitled new work hung in our own home last week , working further on this theme that has so pleased me, I decided I’d do a small 40cm piece using the same technique as one of two works I could enter for the Australia Wide exhibition, closing date some time in April. This neon thread is hard to photograph – but when I’ve done another piece or two, I’ll contact my photographer here and arrange a photo shoot along with several others I finished off late last year. All of Uruguay is on holiday at the moment, indeed half Montevideo has decamped to the coastal fringes and the interior, so assuming Eduardo is on holidays, I’ll wait awhile.

On my mind for the next creations are a few things – this brooch:

and a couple of samples I did in the SAQA 100 Day Reboot challenge that I’d like to expand on in some way:

Though I rarely hang my own works in our home, this one I really do want to have where I can see it every day. A couple of days ago I installed it in the downstairs loo, which is so small it is hard to photograph in that location.

As all the ‘straight’ lines were eyeballed only, things required a bit of fudging now and then – in this example, the lower left corner needed a couple of infill quilting lines, and on the lower edge another line needed to be started just below that bottom group of squares, just right of centre.

If you’ve been following the occasional posts of this one, you’ll remember the silk organza squares were fused into place and then hand stitched with heavy duty nylon thread, which would not lie flat against the fabric, even with ironing. The result was a slightly raised texture even before the quilting began. I used a very thin polyester batting that was about 1/8inch thick, no idea what brand it was.

If we still lived in Colorado today, it is possible I would know Carolyn Nelson personally through our passion for hand stitched textile art, and I’m sure I would have seen her work in exhibitions there and be familiar with the evolution of her beautiful textile work. As it is though, I only discovered it through browsing on Pinterest the other day by pinning the image of one of her works and following the link to her website, http://www.carolynnelsonart.com

After studying art and then becoming an art educator, designer and dollmaker, Carolyn says that when she reached her mid 50’s, she finally felt she’d found her own voice as an artist. Her outline of that process is beautifully written and well worth reading.

Certainly my eye was caught by the strong reds of the piece, but closer inspection showed that the surface marks are stitches forming the word ‘YES’ repeatedly stitched in silk, hundreds and possibly thousands of times. Carolyn says people have commented on her levels of patience: “People often ask about my “remarkable patience.” I do not have patience, I have grit. The only way to see my ideas is to make them. There are, by now, predictable stages of work — imagination, anticipation, frustration, doubting, denial, ripping out, restarting, tedium, and finally, often after months, a burst of energy near the end when I start to believe in what I am seeing.”

This work is testament enough to her determination to carry out large intense areas of hand stitching, but equal and possibly more stunning examples exist in her works conveying swirling, capricious movements of air with layers of straight stitches of hand dyed silk threads over hand dyed silk fabrics, in rich surfaces of colour and texture – see Gallery 1 , Stitching Light.