A Busy Half Term

This is a small piece that I made today, black cotton with cream totem shapes overlaid with natural cheesecloth. I free machine stitched the patterns onto the totems, outlined them by zig zagging some black wool around the edges, and then hand stitched onto the cheesecloth. I've mounteed this onto a small canvas.

Above are two images of another piece I have been working on for most of the week. The top image shows the whole, underneath is a section in close-up. I started by rolling on sweeps of royal blue print paste, inspired by a photo I took of some blue rolled up hose pipe. I drew in blue lines between the curved sweeps, and when the dye was dry, I scraped over the whole surface with some diluted brown dye paste.

After the fabric had been cured and washed, I had to decide how to continue with the surface decoration. I backed it with some loosely woven linen, and started by outlining the broad blue sweeping curves. I used the same technique described above, outlining by couching down blue knitting wool with a zig zag stitch in a heavy blue quilting thread. I then filled in all the spaces with a variety of free motion machine stitching in various blue and neutral shades of thread. It is quite dark, which is a shame, and in retrospect, I wish I had used a lighter coloured thread for all the stitching.

My final three photos show the results of a very enjoyable day I shared with my KAIROS friends on Saturday. We decided to 'have a go', at some of the suggestions in Cas Holmes latest book, The Found Object in Textile Art, and we played with paper, cloth, threads and wall paper paste! Great fun, and now I'm looking forward to working on these samples further, maybe with some machine stitch, one of my favourite techniques!!

Some stitch has now been added, results above with a section in close-up. I decided to stitch leaf shapes, as the colours in the piece were autumnal. This is really experimental, but I enjoyed using cloth and paper together, so will have to take this technique further.