A-musing

I went into the studio yesterday eager to get back to more felting - except that is not what my muse had planned for me. Sometimes I am caught in a creative whirlwind that I just spin along with, for the ride. A sweatshirt is what caught my eye - one that has sat waiting to be personalized for a long time. I auditioned all manner of fabrics, with candidates from eco printing, chenille, silk shibori, velvets, hand dyes, sunprints, snow dyes - I went through them all. But in the end this little piece dyed by Elin Noble felt right. Since it was too small, I added a strip of purple cotton and extended the design as well.

I mixed handstitch and machine because I wanted to see what each look like on a sweatshirt, side by side. You can see there is quite a difference. I had not expected the spring green of the lines on the far right to show up as much as they do.

Do you see the orb in the upper left corner? I had planned to put a circle of stitch around the fabric square and the orb seems like a confirmation.

And a little playing around from a few days ago - taking the Notan concept into colour and fabric. One of the flowers is missing - I just laid them out roughly to get the idea and satisfy my curiosity before filing it away for some future time. Maybe I will felt today... but I never really know!

Filling Space With Colour

I started this piece the day before Japan's earthquake/tsunami, and the following night as I was drifting to sleep I saw a rolling wave of coloured dye washing over cloth and thought how colour seeping into uncoloured cloth was a mirror of my consciousness shifting into a dreaming state - a kind of dissolving from one place to another . Later, with the advent of the news, additional layers of meaning have come to me and I am stitching this as a prayer - thinking about protection, faith and innocence and how we are all connected. I am also filling this silk with colour on my Pfaff, expressing different feelings. There is such a visual and tactile difference between hand and machine embroidery, although both can be used to create colourful forms expressing meaning. I am aware of how much closer I feel to work I do that is handstitched. The machine seems to put distance between me and the piece. Why is that and can it be altered? For each type of embroidery, I have to watch the fabric and thread carefully, but with handstitch, I am more 'in touch' -and it's more direct as I am the means of plying the needle. I guess it's like meeting in person versus talking on the phone or email. A connection is made, but with an aspect of sensory perception missing and with a device there as mediator.

Holding the Tension of Opposites

The sun joined the moon in this window, today, and a stitched door also formed below it. I am going to be challenged taking two courses at once in what feels like such opposite directions. While Comtemporary Woven Boro doesn't begin for another week, the class blog is open and I want to ease into the spirit of that as well as carry on with samples and projects for the Mark Making With Machine course. I considered adding machine stitch to this - even felt intrigued and chose two potentials, but just couldn't bring myself to do it. I enjoy both handstitch and machine - but there is a very different feel to each. While I have combined them in other pieces - it has to feel right.

In class yesterday, we sorted our threads to sew samples of colour scales for value, temperature and intensity and we tray dyed fabrics in a pleated, swirled, scrunched and twisted fashion with two temperature variants of our chosen colour, as well as did a dye painted piece. For some unknown reason, my warmer red dye hardly gave any colour. I'd heard dyes have a shelf life, but I didn't believe it. I brought my batching fabrics home to rinse and iron before next week's class - partly because I also did a bucket full of a wide range of fabric samples, using the same two reds, plus a teal green and a pink, and I added a few other manipulations. Here is burlap, silk velvet, silk gauze, trims, a doily and crocheted squares. I was surprised at how purple came into the mix - because I had expected the two compliments of green and red to yield some browns - but considering my green was a teal, the blue in it was enough to tip the scale in the purple direction. Sometimes combining opposites can yield something unexpected!
From the same bucket, here is cheesecloth, silk ribbon, a variety of threads, scrim, some kind of chenille/towel fabric and rayon that was a pale green.

More dyes in a next post...