This little garden "grid" is an idea stemming from my observations of a lovely patio, obviously quite old, made with differently-shaped tiles, covered with moss, fallen leaves, and little plants growing between the cracked paving holding all together. Old homes have the most interesting garden features, I believe.
I am starting to plan my own extended patio, which we will probably put in sometime after the weather cools a bit (does it seem like it has been summer for an awfully long time?). Looking at different paving stone is quite interesting! And thinking about the two separate parts of this patio to be put in gives great scope to the imagination. One will be a mostly shaded patio, the other a mostly sunny one. As the tiles weather, they will gain very individual character, much like the fifteen little tiles I have embroidered. This is a detail of one of the tiles in the grid, lines of long straight stitch couched down with small straight stitches, one of my favorite ways to add texture to an area:
Along with thinking of the coming autumn, I am still capturing the flowers of the summer in my sketchbooks. These two drawings are from a sketchbook I made ten years ago and just "rediscovered." It was part of a small box of books I made for a gallery ten years ago and when I left, I packed them away and promptly forgot about them until I was rummaging amongst the boxes this past week. There are even covers I made without sewing pages in them-- a good project for later in the year.
The paper is handmade (my own), and the cover is raw-edged fabric layers stitched with heavy hand made paper as its core. The flowers are half-filled with fabric glued in to the leave and petal shapes, which is how I feel about the flowers at this time of the year-- half with us, half memory. I am trying to work out an interesting way to make a fiber work of this half-and-half concept, but the textures of paper and the fabric scraps with the delicate pen and ink lines seem to resist stitching.
As hard as it is for me to believe, there are some things in life that simply don't read well as embroideries. Ow! I can't believe I just wrote that!
1 comment:
How beautiful! Grids are such wonderful little things...and I love how yours feels so relaxed. I have a hard time getting my lines to loosen up!
Love the sketchbook too! What about using fabric as the base instead of paper? A cotton or something that would take a clean pen mark...and mix in some bold stitches??? Or loose the pen altogether so you can use a more textured fabric and do the lines in all stitches??? I see some definite possibilities here!
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