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’ .

After my return from teaching at a patchwork and quilting festival in Gramado, Brasil, last September, I posted about the experience including what I did on my free days there . Looking through some photos this morning reminded me that I should have followed up and posted more of the pics I took of things in the very impressive museum of rock samples and fossils that I enjoyed so much. Mike would have loved this museum, but because he’d been unwell and wasn’t able to travel as we’d planned, I was in Gramado on my own.

There were just a few people in the museum that morning, and one of the english-speaking docents accompanied me around the displays, and she was very interesting, eventually realising from my comments that some of those minerals were like old friends you might say, with which I’ve become very familiar during my long marriage to an exploration geologist with specialised interest in such things 🙂

The first collage includes a pretty fancy geode, and since the best amethysts do come from northern Uruguay up around Artigas on the border with Brasil in the far north west, it was possibly mined in Uruguay. The trilobytes are familiar to me too, but the others I don’t know, but I’d have photographed them because of their beauty. The group of colour tipped crystals looks floral, and the texture of the photo in the lower left corner looks somehow organic, rather like dead grass or a close up of kuba cloth?

This next photo is of some pretty impressive items in the gift shop – these are fabricated from very thin slices of rock collaged and assembled into sheets, which are lit from behind to enhance the striped rock. We don’t have room in our lounge or entry way, which is why I didn’t have one of the black and gold ones shipped back to Montevideo 🙂 I love them.

Week 3 began on monday last with a video talk and demo from Australian embroiderer and theatrical costume maker Susie Vickery http://www.susievickery.com Susie has a strong commitment to environmental issues, and a preference for using found and repurposed materials, especially plastics, in her exhibition work, community group projects, theatre costume and installation work.

The workshop project uses several basic crewel embroidery techniques as found in Jacobean embroidery, traditionally done in wool on linen, fine canvas or wool twill. The repurposing aspect is to cut plastic bags into approx 1-2cm strips and use these as the thread for embroidery on a looser woven fabric such as a loose canvas or burlap. This all reminds me so much of a mind boggling craft project a friend’s mother did decades ago in the Country Womens’ Association craft session. Did you know that you know that if you start cutting a bread bag at the open end, and continue cutting and spiralling round and round, wind it into a ball as you go, and repeat 5-6 times, you can then knit or crochet it all up to make a bath mat or a hot water bottle cover? The pattern is probably still available in the archives of the CWA, as I’m certain that thrift and frugality have been some of the cornerstones of the CWA creed, since the dawn of time, long before ‘recycling’ became an important word. I acknowledge the anti-plastics and recycling appeal of materials and goals for this workshop, but decided to sit this one out.

This is a wonderful thing about these Stitch Club workshops – we have the opportunity to ‘attend’ 3 x 1 week workshops per month, with none scheduled in the fourth week (designated ‘catching up’ time) I’ve signed in and watched the video, and will check now and then to see what people are doing with it, plus I’ll tune in to the live Q&A sessions on friday, because you always learn at least something from every teacher you come across.