Recycling a Recycled object

Hey, is this green, or what! I have been using part of an old sock as a cloth to clean my paint brushes, so there was an accumulation of watercolors, gouache, and a little acrylic paint on it. I was cleaning up today and half-way through throwing it in the trash when the lovely colors began screaming, "Save me, Save me!" And so I did. I've always wondered what it would be like to embroider on a sock. This one was terry-lined, which gave me a double challenge: the knit surface and the looped underside.

After thread and vintage buttons were applied, this is my result:



Not bad, when you consider that the embroidery is the third life of the sock. However, I don't think I'll be doing this on a regular basis. The knit stretches, and the point of the needle pulls loops of the terry that make a little "mark" on the smooth front of the scrap. It is often very rewarding to embroider on a cloth that has some outstanding tactile characteristic that requires extra attention to detail, but I'm just not sure an athletic sock is that sort of rewarding experience.

After the little sock embroidery, I started thinking about making fabric books again. The only way I know to do it is to lay out a lot of linen and see what starts to take shape. Pieces of linen have to "talk to me" before I can begin the creative process. I started with my basket of small, rolled linen pieces.



They look like ancient scrolls, don't they?



Then the real fun-- unrolling and laying out the bits and pieces, fingering them, thinking of how they will hold stitches and buttons and beads . . .



I started stitching on one of the pages, and hopefully will have it ready to post tomorrow or the next day!