A Return to Alphabets: G as in . . .

Back to the embroidered alphabet, after a long interlude of silence.  I couldn't find my "G" from my stack of alphas, and I let it bring the Alphabet Project to a halt.  So, just imagine it is here.  I'll post it one day.  Or make a new one.  Life is never a straight line . . . except in Grids, maybe . . .

Grids.  Dividing a space into sections (not necessarily equal-sized) can organize a space with remarkable ease and add a great deal of clarity to the grouping.  Precisely measured divisions can still be fun, though.  Grids are satisfying ways to present ideas.  Some examples I've pulled from studio storage boxes are:

Blue Grid.  How many different ways can you fill a square (or, a roughly square shape)?  Inspired by the Beaney and Littlejohn Stitch Magic, I used color to tie together an assortment of fillings for squares in a roughly 1 1/4" format:

Green Grid.  The grid is machine embellished wool, and the fillings are all whimsical.  This was part of a Freestyle Challenge from Cynthia on developing grids:

This grid is a response to a Freestyle challenge by Beth, and is a study in stitch and color set in this tight form:

Below is my blue "quilt."  It is a true mixed-media piece of gridwork, and was a delight to put together.  Many of the squares have hand-made paper as a background:

These last grids are photographs from a trip to Savannah.  Old cities have some of the most interesting photo ops.  The first is a sidewalk in front of one of the SCAD buildings, and the second is a collection of mirrors arranged on the walls of a little shop on a side street in the historic district:

Grasshoppers.  Really silly grasshoppers.  In fact, they only resemble grasshoppers if you squint a little bit and forget anything you may have learned in a biology class about insects.  I was playing with ideas while doodling one day.

Of other "G" words that come to mind, "gardens" pops up first.  Gardens and Flowers are (traditionally) the embroiderer's most cherished subject-- but my "F" post probably hammered that point home, so I'll give it a rest.

F as in . . .

Flowers.  Flower Doodles.  Lovely, deeply textured flowers and foliage were the inspiration for this experimental Doodle Cloth:

I was trying out different threads and yarns to get different effects as I stitched, and the effects were so richly textured that I sort of forgot to go back to my original idea and just played with the threads and stitches for a couple of days (my idea of heaven!).

A silk flower:  A chrysanthemum:

Foliage.  The piece following is done entirely in straight stitch, in Walsh wool.  Blending the larger areas, like the pink wall and the table top, was so absorbing that I sat working on this for hours at a time, going through piles of wool to get the right color to transition from one place to another.  The work is so densely stitched that it lies high above the surface of the linen ground.

The pot of flowers is part of a series of blue vases I did to expiate my guilt over breaking a blue vase of my mother's.  There are more than two dozen works on this subject (over a period of about 15 years; who could withstand Mother Guilt?).  What an interesting single-theme exhibition they would make!

Fantasy Flowers.  This collection of flowers is the charming outcome of a Freestyle Round Robin Project in 2008 where the participants each chose a subject, prepared guidelines for one another to follow, and each month we received a different box with notes about the piece we were to create.  My subject was the Fantasy Flowers  From A Far Planet.  I asked that the Freestylers simply let their imaginations run wild and create outlandish flowers.  I also asked if they would write a small guide to the flowers on a 3" x 5" card.  These are the truly outlandish and utterly fabulous fantasy flowers I received from my friends:

Above, by Sandra Beck.  Below, by Anne Stevenson (and I'm sorry about the color, Anne, but the dark would not adjust without changing the other color).

By Peggy Huffine (the color is not completely true, but lightening it allowed the little seed pods in the background to show up better):

And by Cynthia Patrick:

An odd thing happened in the uploading process.  Jill's flower contained an image of Elvis Presley, and the server would not allow it to be posted.  Up until this moment, I sorta liked the guy.  Sorry, Jill.  I'll work on this and try to find out more . . .

E as in . . .

Elephant.  Shakespeare writes: "He is as valiant as the lion, churlish as the bear, slow as the elephant."  Which is how I move about these days.  Very elephant-ish.

Eggplant.  Euonymus.  Eggs Benedict.  End Zone.  None of which show up in my embroidery.

D as in . . .

Doodle Cloths!  The funnest of all embroidery, Doodle Cloths are places to explore the effect of a new thread on a stitch, of pulling the edges of a stitch to re-shape it, or trying out an idea before you invest hours of labor in something that doesn't quite fit your mental image-- a sort of embroidery where you kick off your shoes and thread a needle and just see what happens with a line.  Paul Klee called this type of un-pre-meditated drawing "taking a line for a walk."

The doodle cloth below is one I carried with me for more than a year and embroidered in the tiny minutes between things-- waiting in doctors' and dentists' offices, stuck in the traffic in Buckhead, holding for some recorded message on the telly . . .  I kept it in the corner of my purse, with a handful of threads, needles, and small stork embroidery scissors tucked inside.  It will always remain my favorite because it was the one I lived with for so long:

Here I discovered silk ribbon and began to look for the most textured stitches and threads to use with it:

This Doodle cloth was done at a Freestyle meeting when we were studying chain stitches.  Beth had a lot of cotton fabric in varying colors, and I took a load of it home and cut it into 10 inch (roughly) squares and painted or used discharge paste and re-painted the squares several times . . .  It was a colorful room of Doodle Cloths that day!

This one is from a Campbell class, random and exploring layering with appliqué as well as plain stitching.  It is a bright, happy bit of needle rambling.

I have a box of these experimental cloths, and they are some of my favorite rainy day contemplations.  I mine them for new ideas-- they are a bit like having a stack of embroidery notebooks always at hand.  I learned this habit from reading Jacqueline Enthoven, in the 1960s, and I began to keep a Doodle Cloth in my embroidery bag at all times, ready for the next trial stitch or two.  Then the embroidery bag grew too bulky, and I began to store things in boxes, but the Doodle Cloth never fell by the wayside.

When I taught at Campbell, I always brought the box of Doodle Cloths from the past.  Seeing all the possibilities was a way to generate enthusiasm for the coming week of projects.  As the class worked, I began new Doodle Cloths to demonstrate the basic stitches, to explore the contrasting effects of heavy or light threads, and to see how much distortion we might try with a stitch before we had to call it something else entirely. Sampling stitches and threads is fascinating.

Sampling stitches . . . this sounds as if we're talking about Embroidered Samplers, doesn't it?  Doodling is free-association sampling, and sampling is a form of structured doodling.  However, there is quite a difference between the appearance of a Sampler and a Doodle Cloth.  A Sampler is more organized, and has some element that pulls it together-- color, line or shape, theme, stitch, etc.  The orientation is always a single direction in a Sampler, where the Doodle Cloth can be turned in any direction to find some interesting stitch variation.  I will confess to being less capable of stitching a Sampler than a Doodle Cloth, because I often lose interest in the organization process, and what started out to be formal (think: stitches dressed in Sunday best, sipping tea with hands still and gloved) ends up in a riot of color and stitch placement (think: children on a playground, out of earshot of anxious nannies).

The name/pigeonhole really doesn't matter-- except for the fact that this was to be a "D" day in the alphabet series.  The stitched ideas are saved there for some future day when I may want to investigate them on a larger scale.  Making Samplers or Doodle Cloths is a lovely way to spend a quiet afternoon!

C as (also) in . . .

Chair.  Inspired by Van Gogh's yellow chair, and set in a corner, the chair is visible from several points at once.  Worked in varying weights of cotton on linen, with ultrasuede in background.

C as in . . .

Cup.  Cup of Tea.  This one seems a bit excited, so it must be highly caffeinated tea.  Maybe kicked-up Earl Grey?

Cats.  If cats didn't have a certain attitude of self-importance and extreme satisfaction with him/herself, they would not be such interesting subjects for study.  In these pieces we see a little striped cat who has no problem deciding what to have for dinner.  And after dinner, the little stroll around the block to settle the tummy is as much a promonade as a healthy outing!

B as in . . .

Ball.  The most basic of shapes, a circle, becomes a 3-D sphere, and from that, a child's plaything. As Morris entreated us to have only beautiful and useful things in our homes, no rubber balls for me! I have been working on these fiber balls in odd moments-- winding yarn for the centers, or using roving and felting them, or bundling up scraps of thread and fiber and shaping them into rough balls.  No limits here! I even crocheted over one of wrapped yarn in Bethany's favorite color, purple/magenta, and while she sorted buttons on the studio floor one day, I added beads (pink and purple) in a loopy ring around it. She loves anything that is pink or purple, making the color of prime importance, while the object itself is quite secondary.

Making the balls keeps my hands busy when I'm doing something mindless, like watching "Lark Rise to Candleford," or one of the Agatha Christie Mysteries. Even wrapping with fabric strips can be part of the TV experience because tearing the strips is not exactly brain surgery. And Bethy has discovered the empowerment of ripping a piece of fabric into strips. She makes it into a rich, tough-girl action that I watch without laughing, a hard thing to pull off sometimes because she makes little noises that might be the groans of athletes in training!

Right now the balls are gathered in an oversized yellow-ware bowl in the studio, but they are destined for my grandmothers' wooden biscuit bowl on a table in the house. Do you remember days when a kitchen cabinet had a shelf for a large, oval, flattish wooden bowl that had a little flour sprinkled over the inside and a sifter sitting in it? It would be taken out every morning and on Sunday afternoons and more flour added from a canister, with buttermilk, baking soda and baking powder and that inevitable daub of lard. . . . homemade biscuits, the central feature in the Southern heart-attack breakfast and Sunday Afternoon Dinner!

It is as if I have a wonderful collection in progress that I can add to forever. Think of all the different ways there must be to make interesting surfaces for spheres! Scraps of fabric sewn on in patchwork fashion, odd threads wadded and tacked in place, beaded patterns, and . . .

Birds is another B-category word.  Red Birds.  Or blue-green many-feathered birds.  Birds concerned with their breakfast, or maybe high-fliers practicing the morning aria, heady with the feel of wind and sun ruffling their feathers as they swoop through a summer day.  They queue up for breakfast at the feeder, or wait with some impatience on the edge of the petunia pot for their turn at the bird bath.  In the morning, they are quite vocal in their disdain for waiting, and occasionally one will try to hurry a bather.  When the bathing bird is large, like the oriels or the thrushes, a flap of the wing sends the wren back to his place on the side lines.  Such audacity-- like little Romans in their bath!

And boats.  Especially sail boats.  Van Gogh’s paintings of the sea and of boats is particularly interesting to me because of the texture in his work.  This little boat sails on an ocean of layered buttonhole stitches.  Seed stitches create the sky, and a flood in the Smyrna studio many years ago leached the color from the seed stitches to give some additional color to the sky (such is the fate of many a basement studio!).

And there are bees and bugs and bikes and blueberries . . . . a rather pleasant letter to start the day!

A as in . . .

. . . Alphabet. Alphabets have a history with embroiderers, lovely, perfectly-stitched letters that march across aging linen that is usually even weave, or very close to being evenly woven. Today many embroiderers take great pride in reproducing historic samplers. I am always an appreciative audience of these works, having tried for many years to cross-stitch an alphabet of my own and never able to do this because I belatedly discovered I have a double astigmatism! This minor bit of handicapping condition is probably the reason I clung to free-style embroidery. After a while, I even began to apply this free-style approach to alphabets. Mine were never perfectly-stitched letters that marched demurely across the fabric. Instead, they tumbled and sprawled and generally tugged at their enclosing spaces until they developed their own wills in the matter of the face they would show to the world.

My favorite source of alphabetical inspiration comes from ancient illuminated manuscripts. Images come to mind of cowled monks bent to their work in the cold, high-ceilinged scriptoriums of monastic dwellings. In my imagination they are placing mythical creatures in the over-sized initial letters of Latin words of the sacred texts they are copying. Despite the rigid discipline of monastic life, what humor they must have had to produce such delightful work! The calligraphy of the rest of the page is perfectly formed, but in the development of those ornate letters, discipline was set aside for the sheer joy of drawing and painting from their own fertile imaginations. In these minutely detailed letters executed on vellum, secular and sacred worlds come together quite beautifully.

Several years ago I embroidered an alphabet for my grandchildren. As I see Bethy in the early stages of learning her letters, however, I am not sure my off-beat style is a "good" influence on her. Maybe later on, when both she and her brother can appreciate their rough-and-ready nature, we will be able to laugh over them. True humor comes from knowing the rules well enough to break them with some sophistication.



And lest I be accused of not remembering the basics of A-B-C-ism, I include the unavoidable image of the letter "A:"

An Embroidered Alphabet

More findings from digging through boxes in the studio! This time I re-discovered an alphabet I embroidered over a period of several years. They are individual tiles, which I used for pinning up titles on my class exhibition boards when I taught at John C. Campbell Folk School. I gradually expanded the alphabet to contain multiples of frequently used letters, especially the vowels. I think I've misplaced some along the way, so it would be a fun thing to stitch new ones now. Yes. In my spare time. Hmmm . . .

Actually, they're just fun. Period. No more need be said!