Monday, July 17, 2017

Summer stitching

Besides squishing the heck out of unsuspecting plant matter, i am also stitching on pieces that have been assembled over the winter. Following is a selection of nearly completed pieces, all requiring some stitchwork.

Oops, forgot to rotate. This is a collage that looks so much better in real life. The back ground is a warm pumpkin. There are some XXX's in orange along the bottom edge of the paper. It is larger than all the other bits and I am struggling to make the stitches in fear that I will wreck this. I think I should have done a bunch of stitching before attaching the cut out bit, so that the stitches rested in the back ground. It is set aside for a long movie so I can tease it apart and start again.

I like this one. I have used a product called Swedish Tracing Paper. Super expensive and really useless. I do sewing and this paper product would make a terrible pattern piece. It tears so easily. But, it does do marvelous things when water colour, or other thinned out paints are applied. I then cut free hand flowers out and added some stamping lines to make stems. I think I'll add some floral details and maybe some leaf gestures.


These two are from Carla Sonehiems Flower Power Two course. Lots of messing about. I'll add some fun sort of stitching to make the flowers a bit madder and some in the bottom to weight the images.


I feel these two are done. I haven't added any stitching, but whenever I consider them, I can't see a clear opportunity that isn't just adding stitch for the sake of adding stitch.

As well, I have torn collage pieces that really need stitching to complete them. These are bits torn and glued (not using conventional glue but a wheat paste) that are then meant to be sewn into assemblages. The white on white images aren't very good, but it allows you to see that stitching is need to lift the lines and emphasize the intriguing areas.


I do love tossing things around. I was cleaning up the small bits from the above photo and dropped one piece on top of another and blimey, if I didn't love what happened. Things come together when I work this way. Carefully laying one item on top of another sometimes works, but more often, a gentle tossing of things works better for me. That's why I often leave work on the ground and literally walk over them. The breeze of footsteps, the cat charging through, moving things aside to make room for something else lets lots of opportunities for serendipity to enter in.

I place these two bits together and they don't marry up as nicely as the one above. See, too planned. But, If I pin it together, because it almost works, then something else will enter in eventually.

So I am looking at the images to include in this post and forgot to rotate this one as well. As a result, I see a really funny flying chicken in the top collage. Do you? This is a combination of a green dot Japanese paper I love and a torn bit of an unsuccessful watercolour of a cemetery in Port Medway that I tore up.

I tried laying the two parts together and I can live with it, but the flying chicken has captured my imagination.

You can see the process, but the flying chicken idea won't leave me.

This is the Swedish Tracing paper, painted and the circles torn, rather than cut. I lined them up and with a sewing machine, sewed the centres with free motion stitching. I will add centres of stitch to these before I find a home for them with something else. I want the edges to remain unfettered when I join it up to whatever.

And finally,

Cleo Belle finds it hard to leave me alone, especially if I am trying to use the camera, lay one thing on top of another. It is so hard to make a human understand how to really do things properly.

It can cause despair.


and exhaustion.

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