Its been a long time coming

It would be fair to say that I have struggled for inspiration in the last month. It would also be fair to say that when the one person in your life to whom you look for guidance is no longer around, things slow down. I have realised that sewing is a major antidote to stress. There is nothing quite like sitting and sewing to make you feel calm. I have added four pictures. The first is a drawing of my paintbrushes in their pot. I chose what I thought was a normal HB pencil, and half way through realised it was a purple colour pencil. I actually liked working in this pencil, and the end result was unusual. In the pictures it just looks like normal pencil, but it looks and feels very different in reality. The next picture is my interpretation of my sunset sketches/pictures in stitch. This is done almost entirely in straight stitch, but in lots of colours. It was inspired by my black and white stitching (first picture at the top, third down on the left) and by my review of works by Van Gogh, specifially 'Starry Nights'. I have always liked this painting, and the energy conveyed in his thickly worked, circular brushstrokes felt like something I could convey in stitches. That, combined with time on my hands and lots of lovely coloured threads (for christmas), led to my thinking about doing something simple (in terms of drawing) and yet hopefully complete in terms of a sewn piece. The next picture is what will hopefully be my admission for the first part of the course, an interpretation of my starfish sketch. I finished this in a cancer hospice at my mum's bedside. The memory of that will always be with me, in a good way, and I achieved what I hoped to achieve: Something simple, plain, using a few textural stitches that painted the picture as I wanted. I found, oddly, that chain stitch was probably the most effective stitch, but somehow that did not seem enough. I looked up stitches that would give me what I needed, and I found a version of interlaced herringbone which formed the main area of the piece, providing a good textural representation of the starfish, but not necessarily giving me the volume I wanted. Anyway, for many reasons, I quite like this starfish, and I will finish it as a picture later, for fear of ruining what is already there. The last picture is more properly the beginning of this exercise. It represents mark making on fabric, and shows the impact of the more basic stitches. The first (left hand hand square) shows a straight stitch graduation from far apart lines to close together. Clearly this shows a simple tonal effect from dark to light. The next square was rather lazy, and because I just used extremely long stitches for speed, the stitches sagged somewhat, but in so doing, gave the piece a charm of its own. I understood the point of the exercise, however! The other squares were experiments. The 'Van Gogh' inspired straight stitch piece led to the 'sunset picture', as described above. Other than that I was just generally playing with threads to see what I could achieve. Anyway, I am now putting together my stuff to send off my first assignment, so will be on to the second section on colour very soon. Happy New Year to everyone.

Inspiration at last

I live in an area with lots and lots of trees, so if I wanted to draw lots of trees that would be fine.  So, with not a lot to photograph other than trees, leaves and bark, I have resorted to a few magazine clippings I have collected, and at last I have managed a ‘proper’ sketch of a starfish and some shells, which has enough detail in it to perhaps transfer into a textile piece. I have also made some headway with the textiles elements now, with five items completed. So far I have had problems with getting some decent strong cotton to hand embroider. The stuff I do have is too flimsy and won’t stretch flat to work on, so I will see what I can get at the weekend. In the meantime, I have worked on some padded cotton and felt, as it holds its shape nicely to work on. As ever, my desire to run ahead and create a whole piece is hard to surpress, but I am trying to keep it under control and get on with making marks and recreating texture in stitch.