Do you enjoy stitching in hand, with no hoop, no stand to hold things neat and flat for you? The advantage of this sort of immediate stitching, to me, has been the way I can feel the fabric developing under my hand, the gradual building up of a surface that may end in a draping fabric or, possibly, one stiff with stitches of many weights and pedigrees (many of these fibers suspect, but all of them holding their own unique characteristics).
In an on-line class with Shelley Rhodes, I discovered how interesting it can be to stitch into fabrics that had been gesso-saturated. Later, I saw that Jean Draper used clay slip to coat some of her dimensional work. Is there no end to the possibilities for combining soft stitch with hard surfaces?
I hope not.
In the first pix, above, I have mixed the gesso with water and added acrylic inks to give some color and body to a piece of linen that would normally be difficult for me to work with because it is even-weave, and the somewhat wandering nature of my work is not at its happiest on beautifully woven even-weave fabric. But, the gesso and ink filled in those evenly-placed openings in the fabric, and when I added a few scraps of other cloth for textural interest, I suddenly had a wonderful piece for stitching without hoops or frames. I could still feel the build-up of texture on this unusual fabric, and the raw edges that I cultivate were no longer continuing to ravel and shred the way the untreated fabrics did. For an intuitive stitcher, that is like being served a little extra dollop of whipped cream on their dessert.
In the second piece, the page has layers of fabric stitched together with different weights of thread before applying the gesso, then a few more used afterward. I was able to write into the areas I colored, tried some oil crayons, a stylus to scrape away wet paint, washed a place or two and went back with more color . . .
And so I found a new way of working that has many possibilities for me. One additional benefit is the way I can control color in the background. For years I've watched watercolor melt into a damp sheet of paper, wishing it would do that same thing on cloth and not bleed along the warp and weft lines. Using acrylic paints has not always been a solution. Finding this method of stabilizing color movement on wet cloth is what my sister would call a "Eureka!" moment.
This has all led to a renewed interest in Mixed Media constructions, to begin creating a body of work that uses combinations of techniques and with materials I would never have thrown together when I was younger and still trying to perfect the art of the stitch. Isn't it wonderful that the greatest gift of Advancing Age is that we don't need perfection any more? While I still strive to put the imperfect stitch in the perfect place, that perfect place does not always need to be a soft and lovely piece of linen!
Keep looking, asking questions, and stitching!
