Chapter 6 continued

I was fortunate enough to meet with Sian over the summer for a tutorial as I wasn’t able to attend Summer School.

The tutorial was invaluable and Sian made several suggestions.

Firstly she commented on the yellow dye I’d used to colour my linen scrim suggesting that I could use a richer hue to pick up on the colour in my research pages. I achieved this by making up the dye as before but with the addition of a little orange to enrich the colour as desired.

Secondly Sian noticed that my linen scrim was a little fine and that I could use a loose weave to make life a little easier in terms of counting threads!!  That was remedied by putting in an order to Whaleys and painting it with my enriched dye colours.

With regard to my work Sian suggested I push the boundaries a little with Sample 8 [Map grid of New York] by developing it into more of a 3D image. I was intrigued to discover buildings, windows and even Ground Zero.I’ve added some photos below:

To continue with the remainder of Chapter 6:

Sample 9.

The use of machine zig-zag stitching:

The back view looked interesting too -

Sample 10

The making of tucks:

Tucks were withdrawn in one direction only, leaving wide bands of withdrawn threads.

These are folded into tucks and secured with a row of machine stitched zig-zag whilst groups of threads on the right have been slip-stitched into place alternately.

This produced very effective and beautiful fringes. It was interesting to see that the fringed threads seem to have a memory and retain / return to their  shape after manipulation. I also like the contrasting colour contrasts achieved by tucking the threads.This is one of my favourite samples.

Sample 11. Stepped block stitching:

Sample 12

A Stitching journey

Sample 13

The combination of machine and hand stitching:

Sample 14. More ways with the combination of machine and hand stitching:

I really enjoyed this chapter although it was testing at times because the techniques were new to me and complicated but so rewarding given their effectiveness and beauty. Wonderful!