More falling leaves!

I couldn't let it go at simple leaf shapes-- the table decoration project simply took a different turn when it ended, and the leaves assumed a life of their own.  The leaves were like stepping stones, each leading to the next.

These are some of the last ones.  The fabrics are recycled clothing pieces and a few old fabrics that have been around since my son was living at home (!).  The main vein of the last leaf is a hand-wrapped cord.  I make these loosely-wrapped and colorful cords while watching the British Mysteries.  In two nights of mysteries, it's amazing what can be achieved!

ENJOY THE AUTUMN!!!

Autumn Leaves

It is still a bit green here; autumn is more a state of mind than a reality, at present.

But to hurry the season along I have made almost a dozen leaves.  They are for the EGA chapter meeting, to be used as door prizes next week.  Peggy is making the other half of the project.  These are to be table decorations that Carol will put together with her genius for decorating.

The leaves are decorated with straight stitches and machine stitch, backed with synthetic felt (because when I cut into wool felt my allergies rose immediately and my eyes began to swell).

The surface of these leaves is hand-painted or dyed linen:

The leaf above has quite an orderly arrangement of straight stitches, but the green one below has scattered seed stitches in an assortment of autumn colors:

Here a little patterning:

The left side of this leaf was cut from a piece of cotton print, the right side is chocolate linen with commercially-printed cotton held in place with machine stitching:

Free-motion machine stitch on dyed linen:

And a pair of stout leaves:

The last one was cut from a piece of cotton I found in a Thrift Store, a gathered skirt with miles of swirling lines-- the same print in the spotted leaf, above.  I found the shape of a leaf in the swirls and stitched with tiny back stitches to attach it to the linen:

I do not have photographs of the others, but they are all made of this same simplicity, simple shapes, simple stitches.

Enjoy!

The sample that galloped off

This was to be a sample of simplicity.  A few angular shapes stitched to some background.  But it simply wouldn't stop.  One thing led to another.  And then I started patching the shape to make it square-ish.  And I covered up the striped triangle (center left) with something rust-colored because the stripes were All Wrong.  Which called for stitches on top to keep it in place.

Then, when I was about to toss it into the "Reminders of things to never do again" box, I saw a scrap of Ultrasuede lying on the embroidery table, and there was a lightbulb moment.  I dug out lots of earth colors from my (entire) drawer of these wonderful scraps, and before I knew it, I was stitching them on top of what I'd already done.  At the end of this stitching frenzy, the "sample" was finally finished.  But, did it match the brief?  In no way.  I was so discouraged that I just moved on to the next set of instructions and hoped I could do better with it.

In the end, this one that galloped off, completely out of control, was my favorite.  Catherine Russell commented that it looked like a map, and her comment made me realize how map-making has become such an important part of my personal imagery.  Ways into things, ways around things, ways across things.  How wonderful if today's world could be bridged by women stitching little blocks through the morass.

Sun, Rain

This piece is about 6" square (-ish), with a surface of silk and very loosely woven muslin.  It is stitched in different types of silk, most of which I dyed.

The theme is a response to the September weather.  It was stitched during the Texture and Pattern class with Sue Stone, and felt wonderfully freeing to do it completely in straight stitches.

Yellow Blouse

Here I have combined my loves of stitch and creating clothing that is just a little on the edge of whatever is called normal.  O.K.  "Funky."  In a collage, around 6" square.  Silk and linen, the blouse in black cotton floss, one or two strands.

I learned to sew from my mother, and this was all part of the woman's education she felt was important to her daughters.  It is a skill for which I am grateful on a daily basis.  A Woman's Work.

I am practicing creating stitched patterns on plain fabric on a human scale by making myself a vest for the fall/winter, using pieces from recycled clothing and lots of stitch.  If I finish this in my lifetime, I will post pictures and details of its construction.  Working in patches of color can be interesting, it gives some definition to the space to be stitched.  And I've found that if I want loosely-spaced straight stitches, I can turn the fabric over and stitch lines of Buttonhole Stitch on the "wrong" side, and the "right" side (which now holds the back of the stitch) has all sorts of interesting lines on it.  There are moments when the vest looks as if it is on its way to being reversible . . .  I write this sidebar because the vest and its slightly different embellishment is inspired by this stitched collage of a yellow blouse.

Winter and Spring

Two pieces finished, the "Spring" only this afternoon, "Winter" last spring.  For some reason, stitching seasonal pieces in their proper season is not easy for me.

The spring trees are treated playfully, each almost circular foliate set on even more improbable trunks.  Layered, both appliqué and the stitches.

Winter, the older piece, is a more thoughtful treatment of the bare trunks, in somber shades of grey, white and grey-brown.

Self-Portrait

Another piece from Sue's class.

I am very proud of the blouse.  The appliqué started life as a very plain fabric:

I used straight stitches in two colors to add some interest to this fabric, and the result is below:

So many ideas, so little time!!!

Much has been afoot in Studio 508 of late.  In June I began Sue Stone's "Exploring Texture and Pattern" on-line course.  If you ever want to go deeply into a study of the simplest of stitches, to analyze what you've done, how you can improve it, how it might fit into future work, this could be something for you to investigate.

From the course, some wellspring of creativity has been tapped (no; wellspring sounds so tame and patient, but you get the idea), and I have samples in stacks (literally dozens) and several pieces done or in progress.  I have also followed paths not really part of the course, but I kept asking questions as I evaluated the work and found these solutions . . .  More about that another time.  The online group is very supportive of one another, very kind.  I think that really makes a difference.

Not surprisingly, my penchant for sewing funky clothing has been tweaked.  The last blouse I made is completely reversible because I bound all the seams.  And I am ready to cut out a pair of Diane Erickson-designed pants with the most interesting lower edges . . .  She has a book on sixty ideas for pockets that just came in the mail to me   And then there is Jane Dunnewold's Finding a Visual Language to be studied, or should I open Creative Strength Training first?  All these decisions, while bowls of bright thread wait for their play-date on my embroidery table.

Fortunately, I am beginning to understand the MIT theory of organizing the day (Most Important Thing), and I don't enter the studio empty-handed anymore; my list is clutched tightly in hand, and though I still chase a few shiny objects along the way, I am not in full chase mode most days.  When everything is quiet, when I need a moment to reflect, I take a box of Thrift Store clothing and begin to unpick the seams.  That is almost as zen-like as sewing long lines of stitches.

This from the on-going class-- a piece of fabric strip weaving, where I took a leap of faith and decided to use re-cycled sari ribbon strips.  The entire process became a nightmare, because nothing wanted to lie flat, to stay where it was pinned, and only densely-packed stitches saved the day here.

Life can still race along in the fast lane, even for a retiree!

Ethan's Flag

Ethan simply cannot resist a chance to operate machinery, particularly when it has dangerous needles in it . . .  it's a guy thing, even if he is only a little guy now.

He made a piece for his parents for the fourth of July, and this is a little corner of it that I love.  Notice that on the postage-stamp sized piece of blue wool he has made 50 straight stitches.  And the proper number of red and white stripes.

Happy Fourth of July, U.S.!

Stitch Sampling

This article from TextileArtist.org is a nice read if you have ever wondered about the value of sampling stitches or techniques before you start a project.

Sampling can be addictive.  It's all about the "What ifs" that keep popping up as you try one thing, then make some small alteration to the process or color or thread weight and try it again.  Even better is when you let one idea link to another and another . . .

The reward of all this curiosity spread across small pieces of fabric is that the samples are making your own encyclopedia of stitch and technique ideas as they begin to fill a box or a bin.  Notebooks with cloth pages (the holes are made with buttonholes) hold mine.  I've even used Pellon as a page, which keeps the pages from folding over in the thick binders.

If you searched the dark corners of your own studio space, how many samples could you collect?  Enough to fill your own ring-binder notebook?  Maybe two notebooks?  My favorite ones are where I start out a little loose and not so nice, but as the stitching continues, I can see the improvement I make.  Seeing where you came from is often a great teacher.  And mistakes might be the best teacher of all, because we learn more from mistakes than doing things perfectly the first time.

Don't forget other fabric techniques-- Felting experiments can lead to a new direction in wet or dry felting.  Fabric manipulation gives texture, whether perfectly or imperfectly worked.  What about painted Lutradur or Bond-A-Web, heat-manipulated surfaces . . .

Take a moment to read the article about sampling as a creative process.  It might be the impetus you need to start your next project!

Unpicking

One of life's little pleasures is to have a bag of scraps for stitch:  scraps from dressmaking, from domestic stitch for the home, from quilting-- even a bag of old clothes from the back of the closet (my own or others') or pieces sourced from thrift shops.  These are not precious fabrics in the sense of my having spent a small fortune shopping in fine fabric shops for them.  They are fabrics with a history, some still holding the memory of others' hands in the making or their having been worn for years and finally given up because they've shrunk.  Yes, shrunk.  That's what clothes do in the dark at the back of the closet, they hang there, neglected for a season or two, and this neglect sets off a naughty shrinking behavior.  Not that I change sizes, of course.  It's all the attitude of the clothes.

Most of my clothes are linen, cotton, or a few silks, which are exactly the fabrics I love to sew with.  I avoid synthetics because they do not breathe and can be hot and cloying, even in the cold months.  Early in the autumn, in a closet-clearing excursion, I came across a blouse of a creamy silk broadcloth I'd made when my son was still in college.  It was very simple, straight-cut, elbow-length sleeves, with shell buttons.  The thing that made it special was that one of the sleeves had been painted with silk paints using gutta to draw a butterfly. In soft pastels, the narrow channels of cream were the perfect venue for straight stitches, and it was drawn so close-up that the shapes look more abstract than realistic.

I took the blouse to the studio and laid it on the worktable preparatory to cutting it up.  But I simply could not do it.  I could not chop into that silk.  I can still remember my Mother's surprised pleasure at the odd symmetry the one decorated sleeve made, her handling the hems and smiling over the buttons.  I put the scissors down, and carefully folded it over.  Back to the closet it went.

Then I went to a bag of old linen clothes I'd been keeping to take apart on a rainy day when nothing was stirring in the creative right side of my brain.  Some of these were from friends (the FreeStylers do amazing cloth and thread and bead swaps), some from my closet.  I love this part of preparing fabrics for stitch:  unpicking the seams.  I remember a pale green linen suit I wore until I no longer looked presentable in it.  Going behind the linings and into the facings was an education in dressmaking.  Those lined jackets do not normally have serged seams the way unlined clothes do, and they come apart easily.

It would be much easier to simply rip into the clothes, but picking out the stitches is very meditative.  Piece by piece the green linen began to pile up, and when I was done, I took everything to the ironing board and began to iron the curling edges.  Some of the pieces will be overdyed when I set up the dye kitchen in the basement in the next few months.  Others will be used as they are, the spring green forming part of the edges or backgrounds for new pieces.

A friend gave me some "closet goodies" to organize for the group, so I am in "unpicking" heaven for the next week or so.  There is even a tangle of thread to be sorted-- my granddaughter and I love this process.  Seeing the strands emerge as they are teased from a bundle of knots and loops is so rewarding-- and meditative.  We each try to see how long the thread can be before it has to be clipped.  Bethy is remarkable for her patience and very long strands of thread.

And in this way, the winter is passing.  Snow and ice the first of the year, and today balmy temperatures and spring storms.  The strawberry plants have put out blossoms, the bulbs are coming up--   I hardly know what clothes will fit this flurry of changing weather, if it is a false spring or a truncated winter.

Once lost, but found

I had computer woes this morning, and while frantically going through files I came across this-- once lost, but now found.  A card for Jordan.  Our computers are amazing little creatures, seemingly possessing para-normal abilities to sense when they should let us find something nice in the early hours of the morning.  Despite all the scrambling and angst about the lost Keynote presentation, thank you, dear Mac, for this gift.  And for opening the window to the "new" storage for Keynote files.

December in the studio

Daylight has been in short supply lately, and in the abbreviated light, I have contracted my thinking to small scale as a doorway into some larger ideas to explore in 2017.  My favorite way of doing this is with a bowl of scraps, a smaller one of threads, and an overflowing pincushion.  Through the movement of fabrics from the bowl to the flat workspace, there never seems to be a reduction in little scraps.  All magic, I'm sure.

This project was originally meant to be a line and shape study, not really to draw in color elements, but the pull of color is very strong, even when working in palm size.  Last month, in anticipation of this project, I made a book to corral these ideas in one place rather than falling back on my usual practice of stuffing things into plastic bags and relying on the Good Fairy Of The Studio to retrieve them for me.  Rather than pages of paper however, it is a book of pockets made with Lutradur.  I've found that Pellon medium-weight interfacings also make good pockets.

This colorful character uses hand and machine stitch.  I like the precision of machine stitches in combination with the looser hand stitch.  Additionally, there is something so mysterious about vintage fabrics captured under a translucent fabric, something that calls up old times and faces.  Here we can almost see a vehicle for transport to those times, one with many windows, many doors . . .

These verticals are my personal view of winter, grim and textural.  Not that grim is always negative, of course.  This piece is a return to that style of using the blocks of fabric as a foundation for stitch:

Because I am drawn to neutrals with textural interest, these two appeal to me for their simplicity and single, uncomplicated imagery: