Category: in progress

Posted in embrilting, FybreSpace the shop, in progress, Natural Dyes, Naturally dyed threads, quebracho rojo, Samara

OOOOyeah, and shop update

Posted on by arlee

After auditioning fabrics for the areas behind the wings, i was inspired enough to finish the second one in two days. Admittedly smaller, but the idea of the velvet really got me going! The first one is finished and attached to its backing.

OMG i love this.

Because the velvet itself is so tactile, and the colouring from the osage and quebracho rojo so gorgeous, i decided to keep the stitch there as simple as possible. No point in hiding all that beauty! This velvet, though lush as silk velvet is, was easy enough to do without having to lay any stabilizer to stitch over, but the stitches still had to be solid enough not to sink in, so i stuck to a whipped backstitch–i love the line effect of this on any fabric.

And Borgles. Gotta have Borgles, one of the FrankenStitch mainstays. Picking one out to redo though, and have to add one more small one.

Thought i’d share my results too with the Quebracho Rojo: obviously not a winner for saturation on cotton (cellulose), but it sure is on silk (protein)!  The description on the website is a bit confusing, i think: “Quebracho is suitable for dyeing cellulose fibers and also performs well on silks and wool, and yields a lovely pinkish peach to brown rose color.” It’s obvious that the silk is INCREDIBLE, and look at those distinctly explicitly PINK shades! Wasn’t impressed with the uptake on the wool (first photo left top), but perhaps it was the pomegranate it had been premordanted with…. However, some post modifying, and some overdyeing with osage did give me a wonderful range of colours.

Do i know what i’m doing with natural dyes? I do, confidently, correctly from first step to last.

And i am willing to share the current silk velvet bounty 🙂 Small packs in the shop! You’ll LOVE Making with it, stitching on it, fondling it!

Posted in embrilting, in progress, Natural Dyes, Samara

winging it

Posted on by arlee

Because this is a large work, it’s a bit problematic sometimes to work AS a large piece: you have to shuffle around the whole thing, pinning it into folds so you can have access to the area you’re working on, making sure you don’t stitch one section to another, or to your pants, dragging cat and dog hair into the mix, and having room to manouevre it. On the other hand, cut up like this (because i wanted different effects with the natural dyes for each area), it flops around loosely, and the tension is hard to maintain.

This means both wings and the figure have to be finished, and then attached to the backing fabric they’re going on, and then *that* has to be attached to the rest of the floppy piece. I auditioned several fabrics to be the backing fabric, and because none are big enough for the whole area behind the wings and the figure–and i didn’t want all the sections that show to be the same anyways, i’ll have to do more stitching on those thin visible slices as well, to “blend” the joins. EDIT: i just realized i can back the wings and figure as one piece, work the “background” large area, THEN attach all the parts together.

I auditioned several fabrics: Indigo–WHOA, lovely but too bright–and i don’t have enough for both wings, even pieced behind where you can’t see the joins. It also wastes this indigo piece, as most of the patterning on it would be hidden. If i was going to use indigo then, i would have chosen a more solid dye job.

 

“Filler” cloth, deliberately designed for backgrounds or  for “fussy cutting”. Nope. Motifs too small, too scattered, too much white.

Rust, maybe too “linear”, too “white”.

Velvets naturally dyed in the last week. Too much?

Nope, as in NOT “too much”, YES as in WOW. Admittedly since dyeing these velvets, i’ve been aching to use them, but honestly i do think this really warms up the whole piece.

Though this is very haphazardly pinned on my design wall, i can really see where she’s going now. Warmer coloured threads for the paler surround are now a possibility also.

It’s been worth the 2+ years to get her going!!!!!!

Posted in embrilting, in progress, Natural Dyes, Naturally dyed threads, Samara

wing update

Posted on by arlee

One almost done!

Shooting photos in my studio at dawn makes for moody presentations, but here it is really:

Despite the flurry around the dyepots again this week, i have been stitching as much as i can. That distraction resulted in not a week of stitch, but two, though the second one will take less time due to less surface area! I’m at the point too where i can start thinking about what will be behind the wing. It can’t fight, but it can’t “disappear” either.

 

Posted in Collision: the work begins, in progress, journal: lessons to learn, Natural Dyes, Samara

back in the Land of Myopia

Posted on by arlee

Had a bad moment last night when i suddenly thought the stitching on the wings was too tight, too controlled. Must remember to get out of the small work approach!

But it’s getting bigger, looser and is not too “precious” after all. The “myopia” that develops as i work small areas of a large piece means i have to literally step back to see the whole. And since i can see in my head what will be happening in the wings and in other areas, it will work.

One disappointing (in a sense) thing is that the result is not the same as the work done this way on “A Birth of Silence”. (See previous post.) The rust on that particular piece stiffened the fabric for more dimension, something that is not featured much on any of this piece. I may have to manipulate it more when the time comes to attach to the background, or maybe it will be fine. I think the backing fabric i used this time too is thinner or flatter than the one used in ABOS as well, but c’est la vie!

There’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just different.

Posted in a collusion of ideas, embrilting, in progress, Natural Dyes, Samara

small stitches, big ideas

Posted on by arlee

I’ve just completed a small “commission” for someone, and happily noted that a couple of stitches i used on it can feature largely for “Samara”.

 

Samara’s wings are (with the figure of course!) the most prominent focus on this piece. I’ve been stumped about how to treat them, and had started three different ways of “illustrating” them, all to no avail. Frustrating. It meant a deadlock, because without knowing how i would work them, i had no idea how to proceed with the background. Hell, it was a gridlock!

The first two were with commercially dyed threads on the rust and natural dye cotton background, the third with all naturally dyed fabrics and threads.

I *do* like all of the ideas–just not for this piece! The first two were a bit predictable: feathers that “look” like feathers, while the third was maybe too much of a good thing with all that colour. (Stack ’em and stash ’em for future work…)

My favourite Thing too, a signature, if you will, is the use of dimension and texture in my embroidery technique. Whether it’s raised areas, or FrankenStitch ( my personal woogly boogly break-the-embroidery-rules-about-neatness-and-even-ness approach), i feel i MUST go back to that. That’s Me, that’s what my work is. The feathers above would have satisfied a bit of that, but nah, too feathery 🙂

I’m looking at this:

in conjunction with ideas from “A Birth of Silence”

and now have these to work on:

I’m hoping that i can do one a week……. the body is almost done, as it needs only minimal stitch, but the background is going to be a bear because it’s so big, and that is why it probably won’t be finished until the new year. (Day Job will be F’n  FRANTIC in December, so very very little time there…) When the first wing is done, i can also start making choices for the fabric that will show underneath at the edges.

I know this work won’t be done until into 2019, my slow pace necessary with hand work. No rush, no deadline, nothing really to add to a “Gallery 2018” page on this blog, because i’m going where i don’t know where i’m going.

Posted in a collusion of ideas, Deliberation--do something you don't do--or haven't in awhile, in progress, Samara

mining

Posted on by arlee

I’ve spent the morning mining deeper and deeper into the archives of old work, old photos, old ideas.

You can’t duplicate things, at least i’ve never been able to. I have no desire to do copies, even of my own work. Series are one thing, adaptations are another, but/and churning out the same thing over and over is an entirely different mindset…… I tried it a couple of times, but other ideas creep in, so obviously that’s my way to go. I’ve bored myelf when i’ve done production work, no real artistic satisfaction in it. Even my “bread and butter” work is all different!

All i’ve done this year, really, is just that: helping putting food in the animal dishes, gas in the car and new underwear for the human residents at the Stately Barr Manor. Six months without a Day Job took a toll, especially psychically, emotionally, and so i am very happy to go back to alternating art for sale, and Art. (Yes, there is a Day Job again, but you’re not going to hear about it, as i’ve decided it’s not my focus anymore, just a way to build things.)

I’m eager to start actual work again on “Samara”. I know it will take time, and much thought, but once i get into the “zone” again, i also know it will be worth it. To that end, the digging has pulled up two three ideas i want to extrapolate from:

Detail of “Self Portrait: SAD”, 2011. The concentrated areas of stitch, and the looseness of the heart are the appeal here.

“Beautiful Bones”, 2009, i still love that heavy encrustation of sequins and beads on the ribcage, something i never did again anywhere, but am finding very “catchy”:

 

and a detail of “Birth of a Silence”, 2015, the dimension, the combination of flat and raised, of line and texture:

One of the wings will be coming off the board and we’ll see what happens, how things get combined, re-worked, adapted.

Posted in a collusion of ideas, in progress, journal: lessons to learn, Madder, mordants and modifiers, Natural Dyes, osage, Rust, Samara, sandalwood

in a nutshell

Posted on by arlee

So, what do you do with something you’ve stared at for 2+ years, and then cut up?

Throw it in a dyepot. Because if it’s no longer “precious”, you might as well go the full “wtf, why not?” route.

With natural dyes, it’s predictable that if there’s already iron present on the fabric, it’s going to darken and sadden colours. However, with the unmeasurable concentrations of iron used in rusting cloth, there’s no predictability about the shade or depth. Add to the stew, the fact that these pieces were already lined with cotton flannellette, my favourite stabilizer and crunchtexture “additive”, the dyes uptake was even more capricious. And note too: i did not premordant other than using the iron already on the cloth–if i had thought a bit longer, i could have might have done an alum acetate soak to see if the colours grabbed more, but it’s not a big whoopee bad because i didn’t.

I had thrown the figure itself in an osage bath, and was not happy with the resultant boring tan she became. Admittedly, the osage bath was on its last legs, having been used multiple times, but wow, there was a lot more iron on her than i had suspected. After the fabric had been made during the residency, i immediately washed it in hot water and some synthrapol and baking soda, as i do all of my rusted fabrics, removing stray particles, but this really shows how much the rust/iron had penetrated. Invisible to the eye, but not to chemistry! There are many arguments about how to actually “neutralize” the rust, by many different camps of dyers, but this has been the one that works best for me. AND NO, SALT DOES NOT WORK: does your car STOP rusting in the winter when you get road salt on it????? I dunno where that logic came from….idjits.

So i threw her in a pot of madder and sandalwood (using up two old dyebaths). I’ll have to work around the stocking appearance of her from the thigh down though! The other chunks were also cooked in the madder/sandalwood: the largest piece had been randomly and quickly dipped into indigo first, with the hope i’d get some purples. The wings apparently had the most iron on them, but i really like the effect it had on the madder, strong. NOW she’s singing!

Here’s the comparison, before and after:

Fortuitously, the indigo features centred and right above her head, a serendipitous effect.

While these are not the best examples of these dyes, and certainly not the best way to do things (no premordants other than the residual iron), i’m actually quite pleased with the results. She looks muddier, dirty, earthy, but given that Fall is all those things, and that her name is “Samara”, implying dried seeds, leaves changing and falling, the end of Summer and the return to the earth, that is more important, and actually there are some “pretty” areas.

Sometimes “wtf, why not?” is worth the effort.

When i see my thread choices (also naturally dyed) with her, i think the results will be perfect.

Now………..i have to figure out how to use those threads appropriately for this. As beautiful as the dimunitive leaves and flowers have been on the recent moons, those tiny motifs are not going to cut it for this. I need stronger, scaled up structures/objects/designs. Perhaps it’s time to resurrect the FrankenStitch approach.

Posted in a collusion of ideas, in progress, journal: lessons to learn, Rust, Samara

bravely, eyes squeezed wide shut

Posted on by arlee

Samara has been stalled for a long while. The fabric was created in a residency in 2016, has had a wee bit of stitching on the body, and a hell of a lot of staring at on the design wall.

Every once in awhile i’ve trotted her out on the blog, wondering what i’m going to do with her and how. *I’m* tired of her as she is, so i imagine you’re pretty bored by now too 🙂

I know i probably had some grand vision when i first laid her out at ACAD, and at that time it was enough to be able to deliberately create a design like this with natural processes. I do love her, but for reasons unknown, she just hasn’t fired up my imagination enough to do any more to.  I’ve started feathers of various sorts for her wings, pulled naturally dyed threads, fussy cut naturally dyed fabrics for some areas, but nope, no feeling of commitment.

Time for extreme measures then.

Well, at least if i *still* don’t do anything with her, she’ll be easier to store………………………………..