New Materials

When I'm hot on the trail of an idea and working at warp speed, I never have time to think about new materials.  But with long stretches of quiet away from the studio lately, I have been incorrigibly chasing down new fibers on the internet (such as the wool beads from Alchemy Fibre Art in the necklace that Ethan and I made).  I found some interesting mercerized cotton embroidery thread dyed by Stef Francis, and some thin Silk Paper Textured Silk yarn (yet to be colored).  The mercerized cotton is thin, akin to a size 8 perle cotton, but without the shiney-ness.  And, like all the Stef Francis fibers, in colorways to set the juices flowing.

Now I need some thinking time to find ways to use them, maybe go back through the sketchbooks and see what might be done with them.  I believe the mercerized cotton would even work well in quilting!  What a find!  More to come . . .

Rainy February Morning

This morning is an amazing one, rain first, and now bird song.  With great strength of purpose, Charles has kept his back yard feeder filled through the fall and winter, but migrating birds did not flock to feast here as he had hoped.  In Knoxville we had ten or more families of cardinals who lived year-round with us, but I think we are in an area where more people provide feeders, and the birds have feeding habits that don't include us, as yet.  Or maybe we should provide more gourmet seed . . .?  Hmmm . . .

In thinking about the spring to come (some say it is here already, but I can't give February away to Spring just yet), I am eager to see the flowers returning, to see which plants needs replacing, and what must be moved to a more compatible location.  Poor Charles is my gardener-in-training, so I'm glad he has kept himself limber by his labors in the gym all fall and winter!

One of the greatest gifts of the garden last year was sitting and crocheting or embroidering on the patio.  There is no way to sit in a garden in bloom and not be inspired by the color and texture there— creeping jenny dripping over the lip of a cobalt-glazed pot, zinnia, marigold, and miniature buttercups crowding together, while the foliage plants in all their gentle curves and sharp angles form a lively backdrop for the dianthus, coreopsis, echinacea, and salvias.  The grey stone I used to build the terrace walls is beginning to darken and streak, now, and Charles' thyme is flourishing between cracks in the flagged terrace.  In a few more years, the garden will look as if has been here forever.

The bulbs, of course, are pushing aside the soil and elbowing their way into the light.  Every day we see some new little scrap of color emerging from the pine straw mulch.  I saved dozens of bulbs for the planters last fall, thinking that once the bulbs were up in the spring, I could survey the yard and move them from pots to places that need more early color.  A garden is always changing as it is a living thing—and a very needy one!

So, I am thinking in soft spring colors as I sort thread in the studio and think about pale linen for stitching.  The road maps that I am so interested in have given way to thinking of maps as a way of moving through gardens, and of the different levels and perimeter plantings as outdoor rooms.

It is when Charles uncovers the fountain, however, that the spring will have truly come to the yard.  Birds who are too impatient to wait their turn at the bird bath will settle here to bathe or drink, and the squirrels will climb up for a sip of water toward the end of the day.  I have even seen the rabbits come to the herb garden beside the fountain and watch the moving water with large, darting eyes as they eat my lovely greens (I am a Beatrix Potter devotee, believing rabbits can be forgiven anything simply for the pleasure of their company).

Such are the garden dreams of a rainy February morning in Zone 7b.  Hope your February is a good one!

Bayeux Tapestry Stitch

The Bayeux Tapestry is one of the most easily recognizable pieces of textile art in the world.  It is disfigured at its farther end, has been mended over the centuries, and is mistakenly called a tapestry when it is technically a very, very long embroidery.  It tells the story of the Norman Conquest (1066) in an almost leisurely manner, not omitting the background to the struggle and small incidents whose characters are now lost to history.  Bordering the top and bottom of the work are a cast of fantastic animals, real and imaginary, as well as the Latin text to guide the observer through the action.  Click on this LINK to see photos of the tapestry.

The scenes are pictured most charmingly in wool embroidery, utilizing a surface satin stitch, couching stitch, and miles and miles of outline stitch.  There is scarcely another stitch to be found anywhere on the more than 200 feet of the canvas.

It is this surface satin stitch, surrounded by outline stitch and tied down by narrow bands of couching, that have come to be called "Bayeux Tapestry Stitch," and this stitch was the object of the Freestyle Stitch Study at our February meeting.

This is my sampler, where I tried several different types of yarn/thread, and worked the steps of the stitch in the center of the sampler for future reference (I always need a jog of the brain to jumpstart a stitch I don't use every day).

Seen up close and personal, the texture is really interesting:

And by experimenting with metallic thread, I discovered that even that hard-as-nails medium can be used in a Bayeux Stitch-- though I will admit to a bit of heavy breathing before I had all the ground stitches in place (it is wedged in between the hot pink on right and the unfinished green on left):

There are many contemporary uses for the less-know embroidery stitches.  I am making it my mission this year to go back and resurrect some of these interesting stitches and try them in various weights of cotton, wool, silk, and linen and see what variations might be possible and how they might be incorporated into my work.  And I'll bet you thought I made a New Year's Resolution to lose weight or exercise more!

Bunting

I don't know why bunting appeals to me, but things dangling in a line always command my attention.  I even find lines of clean wash pegged out to dry interesting and am sorry that the home dryer has replaced the old-fashioned habit of hanging out the wash to dry.  I have vivid memories of my mother pegging out bed linen and clothing on a clever pulley-style clothes line that my dad built for her.  It allowed her to stand on our second-floor back porch and hang load after load of wash to dry, and the clothes waved above us as we played in the back yard!

Digression aside, I have wanted to improve the windows of the studio with bunting above the scrim curtains.  Of course, I don't care to make them perfectly pointed triangles; much too tightly wrapped for me.  An interesting bunting would have some ravelling of the linen ground, be made with batting and backing and include a dash of vintage buttons and trims, single-fold seam binding, scraps of glove leather and tiny pieces of fabric, a bowl of interestingly-texturd threads—   How could this NOT be fun?

To make some sense of the idea and tie the parts of the bunting together, the three pieces that make up this small bunting have one thing in common:  kid leather salvaged from vintage gloves that are splitting or very dry and cracking.  I love the shapes of the fingers, and use them as often as I'm able.  In these three, I've used the fingers or parts of the fingers, and cut small squares from other parts of the glove.  Figuring out how to hem the several layers of the pieces was an interesting challenge, so I settled on whip-stitching some thread or combination of threads to seal up the raw edges.  After some searching, I decided upon sari thread, scrim, or heavy-weight linen.

One window done, seven more to go!  And I think it would be interesting to try something entirely different for the next one.  Does that surprise you?  Me neither!

Felted Beads Mixed With Glass Beads

Isn't this lovely?  Ethan and I completed this necklace.  I found the felted beads in an etsy shop, Alchemy Fibre Arts, and ordered several different types.  I had thought, originally, that Bethy and I would use them together, but Bethy is busy drawing with her colored pencils and crayons, and Ethan (who is always interested in seeing how things work) wanted to pull the needle through the beads.  We used glass beads to contrast with the rougher felt and strung everything on a piece of silk ribbon.

As Ethan is so proud to tell you, he is four years old, now, and able to do quite grown-up things.  Yes, Ethan.  Quite able!

I used some of the flatter "pebbles" to make flowers for the edge of a page in a new book I'm working on (this is almost unbelievably slow work, which is why I couldn't think of selling one of the books— labor at ten cents an hour would be all I might realize from my efforts).

An apology . . .

I am sorry to have been so absent these past weeks, but I have been providing the medical profession with small challenges to keep them on their toes.  It is very wearing to be ill for more than three months with no "cure" in sight.  Allergies are one culprit— yes, you can have allergy problems in the dead of winter, if your immune system enjoys hyper-drive activity.

The posts that follow are of some things I've been working on sporatically.  I hope you enjoy them.

I have not curled up and disappeared . . .

. . .  I am alive, and almost well.  I will post photos later this week of what I've been doing in my "down time."

Thanks for dropping by!