Learning and moving on

In one of her October posts, entitled The nature of woven cloth, Jude wrote:

"The basic understanding of your materials is crucial in developing the character and individual style of your craft and the satisfaction that comes with that...."

For folks like myself, just beginning to translate into cloth, this is a fine piece of wisdom. Because, not everything works! And that kind of understanding only comes through experience, trial and error, [and in my case, some pretty steep learning curves!]

This morning I finished the embroidered pillow that I've been working on for the past few weeks. Hurrah!

It's far from perfect! But I did my best, learnt alot, and will be moving on shortly. Before I do that though, I'll share a couple of simple little things that I learnt - or was reminded of - along the way with this piece [although not illustrated by the greatest images!]


















The importance of trying to make even-lengthed stitches, particulary when filling in geometric patterns.


















Blanket stitch twists the thread as you stitch. The finer the thread, [in this case I used a regular black cotton thread to hand piece the central panel to the border] the more it twists. This makes for a lot of knotting when you try to pull the thread through to the back!

White embroidery transfer paper does NOT vanish when made damp, after a while!


















Kantha stitching, on some cloths, acts like elastic smocking. Instead of just adding a pleasing surface texture to the cloth, it gathers the cloth and pulls it out of shape. I started to do a running kantha over the borders of this piece, but ended up unpicking all of it because it just warped the cloth too much, even though it was stitched even and loosely.


















This is the finished center panel before being pressed. I was reminded that I least like the part of construction! Hence, the appeal of moving into scarf design!























And here is the finished item [momentarily stuffed with some kapok to give me some idea of how it will look when it finally gets a pillow inside it]. Wish I had some fancy piece of furniture to model it on, instead of the cream-colored plastic patio chairs that we have at the farm these days [the nicer wooden chairs are in the house in town].

Kellie, forgive me! ;)

I'm hoping that the next time this piece gets featured here, it will be sitting pretty on the sofa that it was intended for. That should be the week after next, as I have an upcoming business trip to Florida. YIPEE! A brief escape and a few hours of in-flight time to work on whatever I plan to do next!

Hope everyone's having a great weekend :)

Every flower...

How often our posts relate - in a big or small way - to the subject of inspiration, personal reasons for creativity, and/or of finding ourselves falling unsuspectingly into that darkening pool, which acts as creative quick sand.

This week I was touched by Karen's creative questioning (and, BTW, Karen has moved here) and by Arlee's quest for originality, and was also reminded of a lovely comment left in response to one of my recent posts by Anya, saying:

"It never stops to amaze me how much effort, work and knowledge goes into creating something beautiful. It is always a labore of love at the end and the final result will always reflect the amount of effort put into it. :-)".

Which is so true!

Every flower must grow through dirt.

-- Anonymous

I'm fortunate, in that, I seem to have the inner critic - that inimical voice that says " You're so stupid... that's such a dumb idea, etc." - well under control. Also, I rarely find myself without inspiration. If anything, I have too many ideas, and it takes me a while to gather these thoughts into something tangible.

Of course, it doesn't always work out the way I imagined! And I frequesntly don't end up with a "finished" piece... oh, you already noticed that ;) But, since what I most enjoy about it all is the initial design phase, the research and exploration, and learning the process of making cloth - because I have no practical experience at this, folks! - the fact that it doesn't become something in the end, doesn't matter.

Nothing we do is useless!

Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars
-- Les Brown













































Recent sketchbook page: Further developing pattern ideas from my last post.

Iyam

The house did not fall down during the night. Nor was I crushed by the breeze block shelf system beside the bed. Today I note a distinct lack of blog presence on behalf of many of those I follow, so I'm hoping that it's just that you all are busy leading very creative lives, and that nothing untowards has happened to you either.

Thank you to those who commented on last evening's post regarding the new banner. It's been slightly modified since then, and I think it looks better. I was particularly intrigued by comment's from Jude "i like the new banner, seems quiet for you..." and from Deb "very soft & subtle but I sense more exuberance from you. Do you have a secret up your sleeve?"... because I tend to think of myself as a pale cloth sort of gal [who, ok, from time-to-time, does something a bit bold!]

Whilst I've been stitching today, I've been musing about these comments and thinking some more about my "style". Who am I? Or more specifically - since it's always wise to have at least one plan - who do I want to be?

A while back I saw a blurb somewhere [don't remember where I read it now] which said " Why follow fashion, when you can lead it". And that's a good place to start out from. Beacuse we all know that trying to satisfy someone else's taste is instant death to the creative spirit!

Do I have a secret up my sleeve?...

Well, I have been thinking about making fashion apparel for a while now, that much you already know. First of all it was bags (and probably will be again someday). But right now, I think my next thing might be scarves. Why? Because I rather like the simplicity of the format, and the fact that one could do alot of embellishment within a small area and still create something stunning in a relatively short time span. I also like the fact that it would be simple to work the whole thing by hand, and not have to be distracted by the construction. Because that's not my strong point!

If I think about the things that I have experimented with during the past year, the things I have been most pleased with, and have most enjoyed, have been the more subtle cloths, the ones that were composite pieces, incorporating dying, printing and stitching. So, thinking about some possible future direction, that's really what I would like to focus on next.

I like the orderliness of repeat patterns. I like the idea of creating 'all over' prints by hand. If you think about it, both of these are usually machine generated these days, and usually I find that machine-generated perfection is tedious on the soul, in the same way that industrially colored cloth is. I welcome imperfection. It adds character!

I've started making notes on color too. What kind of palettes I would like to try out. I created this as a starting point.













Palette: "Mollusc". Inspired from the colors of a particular kind of bi-valve sea shell that I've seen on the beach here. And also this...













Palette: "Golden Mushroom". A richer spicier palette inspired by the image below.


















A velvety fungii I spotted at work on Friday.

I'm going to keep playing with these palette ideas. But what I'm thinking is to make a series of cloths. Perhaps a few designs/patterns made in different color ways, or the same color ways using different designs/patterns. What I'd like to do is have an exclusive, hand-made collection, a limited number of unique pieces each season.

So...we'll have to see where the ideas take me!

And the name of the future label?... Iyam!

Play time with Owen Jones and the NYPL

Owen Jones?... Owen Jones?... For those of you who haven't yet had the pleasure, Owen Jones was a British architect during the 19th Century, and famously the author of The Grammar of Ornament, which was first published in London, 1856. You can read a little bit about him here. For anyone who is suffering from a creative block, I strongly recommend that you do a google image search of "Owen Jones + The Grammar of Ornament", and I promise you, that'll get your juices flowing again!

As anyone who follows my blog has probably already noted, I am especially inspired by elements of historical ornamental design. And this stuff really does it for me!

The Textile Blog (a mine of historical and cultural information) has many posts about Owen's work. I searched the blog under his name and these are the results available, for those interested.

The New York Public Library [NYPL] has a great digital library, which happens to present some of Owen's decorative plates which you can find here. The fun thing about this particlaur site is that you can select a plate image, and from the page that opens, you can then select the zoom option, and the plate will open in a new window which allows you to explore the image in great depth. Just click on an area of the image and select the zoom again. You can pan around the image and get quite creative with it. For example...






















This came from zooming in on a plate from Nineveh and Persia. This little section reminds me so much of Jude Hill's gracefully stitched feathers. Jude has several posts on her blog which relate to her feathers, it was hard to choose between them, but I like this one alot.


And from a plate of Elizabethan ornament...






















A fabulous repeat pattern - oddly Indian in it's appearance I thought - that I might do something with one day.

And...






















From Leaves and Flowers from Nature Ornament no. 10: Passion flowers. (1856). Now wouldn't that make a cool embroidered pillow?

Now, if you'll excuse me... I am going out to play with other featured works on the NYPL digital library!

Want to join in? :)























P.S. Check out the bugs! here . This is for a new blog friend, Susan Fletcher Conaway over at Fiber Art and craft. I am really enjoying her work and posts!

Peek-a-boo

Thanks to everyone who left a comment on yesterday's post. I'm curious to discover if any of you know of a way to get blogger to allow me to respond to a comment, directly following the comment itself. Or is that too advanced for blogger? That's a problem, no?

If you haven't already been over to Jude Hill's this morning, Go there next! She has some fabulous images posted today! I really love this. Guess it's one of those times when, without knowing how or why, ideas collide in the ether. Why do I say that?... Here's a peek at the start of one of my new lines for the B&H autumn/winter collection, which will be available in September. Or... maybe late August to you *:9























A touch of South America... Sorry folks, but this is all you're getting right now ;}

Check out Sandi Manning's "Gorgeous Girls" here! Go Sandi!!! Beautiful sisters... beautiful stitches! You weren't a finalist.. but you're still a winner! :)

To boldly go...

Having started to move in a paler direction, as always, one thing led to another, and my ideas have taken a monumental leap in completely the opposite direction! Oh well... ya gotta go with it!

I've been musing over an idea for a brand new, slow cloth, art quilt. A serpentine one! (I'll explain in more detail later). But for now, this is where that's taking me. I've had students all week (last night I cooked for 8 people!) and so I've been playing with this wee square meanwhile. Check ('scuz the pun) it out!















Very much inspired by Jude Hill and her amazing patchwork skills. I've been practising some smaller stitches. My stitching is always... crude... but I kind of like it that way. I've always been abit of a perfectionist, so crude stitches are a definite letting go for me :} And that has to be a good thing... since in the end, we have to let go of it all!















I might have mentioned already, that everynight, before bed, we play checkers - or "draughts", as we Brit's call it. Nilo, (who, by the way, is just 7 years old), is virtually unbeatable! He even plays against our university students, and he usually beats them, including Brazillians, Columbians, Chileans, Germans, and Costa Ricans! We got a new board at Christmastime and this is kind of where my idea originated. So I started with the idea of the checkered board...















... and I thought about adding some counters... and they immediately became eyes!
















I thought, what if I combine these two?... circles and squares... just like the board.















But then I thought about doing this, reverse applique...















... I really enjoy the surprise element of this technique ("The only people who say ta-da are magicians and idiots", according to Nurse Jackie, the TV show... I saw a trailer for it the other night, and wondered is it witty, or not?)















And this morning I finished this first nine-patch square. And thought, I wonder how it would look as a repeat pattern? Let's find out!

The wonders of modern technology, eh?... (yes, I photoshopped the image!)



















WOW! Virtual slow cloth! That's bold! I might just do this in real time! Just look at all those squares and circles (even the eye motifs form a ring or a cross!) And it has that tribal quality that crops up in my cloth from time to time. This one has a definite African feel to it. Not a bad start really.

A lighter shade of pale

Now that I've finished the outstanding Indie-pendant ... I will rephrase that, or else sound totally egocentric... Now that I've finished the Indie-pendant that was outstanding... sound any better???... I figure it justifies moving on to start something new... completely ignoring the existance of all of those other projects, which I still haven't finished! ;)

Yesterday, I considered starting to work on that first piece of shibori that I've recently created - Well, it's not the first piece of shibori I've created, it's just the first piece that I've created and known about it. Here is a much better shot of it...















Here, you can actually see the patterns that were created where the little pebbles were tied into the cloth and more of the tonal range.

However, lovely as it is, I have decided not to start working on it just yet. Instead, I've opted for a similar cloth - again, one that I dyed at the end of last year - but which I left too long in the dye base and it started to go moldy...















That's what the little grey specks are about, and I rather like that softly spattered effect.
















I've basted it onto a plain piece of my peachy bark-dyed cotton cloths.















In turn, I think I'm going to baste that onto a kind of damask cotton with a raised block pattern, which comes from a slightly off-white colored pillow slip that I picked up in a thrift store in San Jose on the last visit.

It reminds me of this...



















A photograph of me, taken in 1897(!) at the Las Cruces Biological Station, in San Vito, Coto Brus (Costa Rica), where, for about 3 consecutive years, I lived on site as a young explorer and artist-in-residence.

Time passes and everything becomes a lighter shade of pale! Here in the tropics, it also starts growing new life forms!

Speaking of lighter shades of pale and new life forms... just look at this by Jude Hill, and this by Arlee Barr... and this by Deb Lacativa.

Pale is where it's at!

Turned out just peachy!

A while back, before Christmas time, I started some solar dying experiments. Some worked out pretty well, given that I didn't use any mordant (this year I'm going to try that!). Here's one that I untied yesterday. It was dyed using bark from a local tree species (can't remember which now, will ask husband about that and add the name later) and by wrapping small sections of the cloth around little pebbles and tying them with string, (which probably has some lovely-sounding technical name, except I haven't learnt it yet!) I don't know what I had expected, but it turned out a lovely soft rusty peach color.



















It was fun when I unwrapped it... looked like a volcanic clothscape.



















Or... belly buttons!















This is what it looked like once ironed. Very subtle color variations and little moon-flowers. Have some dusky-peachy-rose colored DMC thread. Might see how I go with that today. If I can find the sun-cream I might stitch in the garden even.













I like this... it goes well with today's cloth!


Arlee Barr kindly informed me that the technique is part of what's called Shibori. I've been admiring this technique on other people's pages, but hadn't got that the pebble-wrapping bit was part of it. If you're interested in finding out more about this traditional art, then you should definately check out this link, to where master clothmaker, Jude Hill, has a plethera of posts relating to the subject, with some fabulous examples, great explainations and links to others who are far more skilled at Shibori than I probably ever will be! :)

Little stitches...

Little stitches are remarkable things... which, inspite of their smallness, can bring about huge changes.















I am just starting to over-stitch the black and gold artifact cloth that I made over the weekend, and said was probably going nowhere. Well... you never know!

I'm finding I like very much what these little metallic thread stitches do to cloth, (but definately not liking what the cloth does to the metallic thread! It strips it down and knots it up and it's a total pain in the arse to work with this stuff! Anyone got any wise counsel to offer about that?)

Seems I'm not the only one here who's busy working small right now.















I love these crazy spiders that set up camp all over my house, particularly around the kitchen and dining room. A long while back, I blogged about one of these spiders over at the Los Charcos de Osa blog page,(which has been static for over a year now, but has some interesting stuff on it about life here). You can catch that post here. Stitched heart and all! (Arlee, how are you with arachnids?)

This beautiful little spider... actually, it's not that little once it reaches adulthood!... has the most fabulous metallic silver(!) thorax, and just look at those gorgeous stripey legs. They remind me so much of Jude Hill's black and white magic thread, which I think she has used to great effect here (and if you're in the US, while you're at it, please use that text info to donate 10 bucks to the American Red Cross for relief to Haiti!)

Thinking about it, Jude Hill is quite the spider... as she goes about carefully and lovingly stitching her magic cloth(s). (Jude, everytime I try a new catagory link on your site, I am delighted to find many pieces/posts that I haven't come across previously!)

And while we're on the subject of magic threads... check this out. It's a fabulous blog by Embellisher who is a gorgeous looking Indian female textile designer, based in Bangalore, India - which is my favorite spot on the globe right now - electronically speaking!

And then there are these magical Artfabrik threads by Laura, which Arlee Barr blogged recently here. They are such delicious color ways and they all have such delicious names to match! Even if I could afford some of these fabulous threads, I'm not sure I could choose which ones I would like to have most. Hmmm....? Let me see...

Burnt Marshmallows
Snakeskin
Copper Queen
Oasis Twilight
Indigo
Shadows
Wild Rice

So, there's my wish list!
And it just so happens that today is my birthday! ;}