Embroidered Collage

I assembled the mini-quilt by cutting a piece of Peltex to fit, wrapping the backing around it, and connected the front and back with ladder stitch.  Then I embellished.  I think I'm done embellishing, but I'll show the piece for critique tomorrow and get opinions there, too.  This was fun.

I've been folding fabric over paper templates and basting off and on when I didn't want to think.  Last night I sewed the pieces together.  The front and back are shown below.  On the back you can see that one of the paper templates has been removed.  The technique is called "English Paper Piecing". 

I had bought the Lagoon ATC kit from carma.biz some months ago.  And I eventually decided that instead of making atcs with it I was going to cut the pieces up and make some sort of small quilt using some templates I had from www.paperpieces.com.  There's cheesecloth and ricrac and lace and fibers that came with the kit that I'll be adding to the piece.  I'm looking to keep a bit of a marine feel to it.

This is what I've been working on the last couple days.  The piece is designed by Diane Snyder and the project is one of those provided by the EGA for teaching at the monthly meetings, if the chapter chooses, and it will be our August program.  The important part is that I will be teaching it and it will be my first teaching experience.  I have done work and taken lessons in pulled thread, so I feel qualified, but I forsee much practice in actually SAYING what I know coming on before the middle of next month.  Someday I'd like to try teaching my own designs and/or techniques, but I figured this would be a good way to start, when I didn't have to worry about the instructions.

I received my initial critique from Casey Bradford for the "All that Glitters" challenge. She put some of the thoughts I had been having into words and made a point I had not consciously thought about.

She identified unity with variety as my main thrust, and approved. She described how she thought that the piece would look best with bits of metallic scattered throughout, in the background and in the squares, as well as in the focal points of the metal mesh. She suggested as a goal making it look like my design elements are growing from the background, as a number of contemporary embroidery artists do, including some of my favorites. Apparently, this is usually achieved by using low contrast, stitching from the back into the forward elements a bit, and using background colors in the front elements. My painted lace collages were identified as moving in this direction. These were some new words for some of the thoughts swirling in my head and it was helpful to have a defined version to look at.

The new thought that she presented was that I would need to consider whether the central metal would be prominent, or if there would be a progression in shape or color among them. I had just thought about making them essentially visually equal as a given and had not asked myself this question. I can’t answer it until I get started, but I’ll keep it in mind.

My next step is a visit to the fabric store, as I don’t seem to have what I’m looking for in my stash to cover either the squares or the background.

I have been participating in the artistic deco community since January. At the time I wanted to experiment with art on a scale slightly larger than the atcs I had been enjoying. Currently, I enjoy having a few mini challenges every month, keeping me from focusing too narrowly on my current projects

Decos are small, hand-bound booklets of a few pages, usually in size between 2"x3" and 5"x7". You create the original blank booklet and then mail it off, to be filled in by others, while you decorate pages in their decos. I belong to Destiny Art Decos where all themes are done in a round robin style, instead of the more typical style of randomly and organically swapping. Fewer mail art surprises, but far more likelihood you'll receive you deco back full someday.

I've posted a few of my favorite decos or pages below in thumbnail form and added a section to my gallery which contains these and more examples of my work in this form. I've been very conventional in my deco construction so far, but there are others who have made decos that fold out from a central point, or are cards in a box, or have plastic pages, or are shaped like objects, or have unique closures, and other such interesting permutations.

Mermaid