Embroidered Collage

  Pekinese stitch is a lot of fun.  I had never tried it before, but now the possibilities make my fingers itch.  Last night I just used embroidery floss in a couple different colors and threaded with a different number of strands, but I will definitely return to this idea in the future and play some more. 

This week's lesson focused on the effects that an embroiderer can achieve by varying such things as spacing and thread type.  I played with some of Sharon's suggestions with the buttonhole stitch, one of those she featured in the class write-up.  My favorite part is the first row.  It makes me think of doing a sampler of squares filled with such patterns and seeing the different textural ways that I can achieve the same value of light or dark by varying stitch spacing.

  For some reason the line stitches of this week aren't exciting me right now, even though the little bits I did turned out well.  I really like what some of the other students are doing with them and I should probably try some free hand instead of on a counted ground and see if that gets me further into the theme.  What I really want to do is get this month's calendar pages out of the way, some more cleaning done, and move onto another canvas piece...

I became enamored of structure working on these variations of fly stitch and therefore played very little with either texture or color.  I just loved the way the slight variations in lengths and widths and branchings built up an intriguing pattern.  I started with single stitches and then intended to make lines from points, but somehow that first line became layers of stitch on top of each other, forming a surface.  I added a few queen's stitches because I was very taken by Elizabeth's realization that the queen stitch is a specialized subset of a combination of fly stitches.  Then I tried some individual stitches in which the tie was more dominant than the U portion.  In the last few lines I turned the fly stitches sideways for two of them and tried out couching for another.

I actually painted a picture that I like in this final session and enjoyed the process.  No aargh at all.  I got into it as soon as class began.  I looked and compared and painted and looked and compared and painted.  I didn't agree with Jim on a number of things about my first set of colors, but once I fixed the incorrect relationships that I did see, then his comments made more sense and I was able to implement his suggestions.   Jim also did a demo for us, similar to the first week, but this time we knew what we were looking for.

This has been a very successful six weeks for me.  I've learned a great deal about color relationships, how to show light and shadow, and how to mix paints.  I know what questions to ask myself to start interpreting light into pigment.  I'm interested in trying some abstracts and seeing how the color usage applies.  I'm interested in working with the paintings I created and seeing what type of finished works I can come up with.  I'm also looking forward, as always, to Mixed Media's next set of class listings.

Point as a design element was the feature of the second week's lesson.  Sharon discussed point as an abstract concept, then showed us examples and described many stitches that might relate.  She provided far more ideas than could be worked on in a week, as she'd warned us she would.  The idea that most intrigued me was the work she had done in applying disc shaped beads in a variety of ways.  I decided to translate that to buttons and give it a try.

I pulled out my perle cotton stash and delved into my button box for this sampler.  I tried making patterns around the buttons, using spokes as a foundation for whipping or weaving, a few different thread types, and so forth.  The ground is a scrap of sari fabric I had in my stash, backed with a cotton. I left it wrinkled deliberately, to see what would happen.   Mostly, the wrinkles got in my way when I was trying to stitch next to them or on top of them.  The area covered is about 5"x7".

I like the concept, which I had not really considered previously, of using buttons in this way.  I expect I will apply it to a canvas piece or two at some point in the future.  I'm not particularly happy with the sampler itself though, and I'm not sure why.  I certainly like some of the individual experiments.  It might be because the longer spokes in this type of work lend themselves to being worked in a hoop and I was working in hand, which prompted uneven features that I had not intended.  Or maybe I just don't like the color scheme.  But it did its job, so I am content.