Starting to Stitch Surfaces

 The first stage of the embroidery course I'm doing with Karen Ruane is working with scrim (or cotton gauze) and paper to create surfaces suitable for hand embroidery. This is done using a sewing machine, which took me by surprise, as I was expecting to be doing only handwork.

I dusted off the Elna Lotus SP which was my mother's and hadn't been used for some 20 years (really). I learnt to sew on this dear old machine and I've been so surprised and pleased that the old girl (the machine, not me!) works at all, let alone coping with having the foot removed and doing FME (Free Machine Embroidery).

The grids and circles above are all about creating a more robust surface to hand embroider. While others stitched fabric scraps for added interest, I of course, felt compelled to use old book pages. (These are old books I bought specifically for artwork, but I do confess to hesitating quite a while before I managed to pull out the page).

Below are some pictures of sewing on paper. 

This top one is the back, but I like it better than the front.

Paper has so much potential for use with light.

I haven't mentioned my first trial of eco-printing, which I did just after arriving home. A friend had left us a bunch of roses as a welcome home gift. We enjoyed them for a few days and once they began to fade a little, I put them to creative use. I more or less followed this tutorial.

I'm still thinking about how I want to use the results,  so I experimented with some stitching on this example. This is the view from the back again, and illuminated, below that.

I've really been having so much fun with all of this and now I'm ready to add some hand stitching to these pieces.

Permission to explore

I've been keeping to my goal of minimizing advance commitments and going out more than usual, but of course I still want to somehow fit in some work. It seems that as soon as I have some work I want to do, I become quite driven, and if I am not able to get cracking, I start to feel both pressured and crabby!

I've two main projects to finish by the end of the year - a wedding album and my contribution to Book*Art*Object Edition 4. And of course, I'm feeling that I should be getting on with these, but I'm really keen to work on something entirely different.

Just before I arrived home I signed up for an online course, Extending Embellishment with Karen Ruane. Yes, as I said, something entirely different - embroidery. I discovered Karen's work on Ersi's blog, so thank-you Ersi! (take a look at Ersi's gorgeous embroidery ledger pages here)

For a few years I've been feeling drawn to embroidery. It's something I haven't done since I was a teenager, but I often feel I'd like to have something to do with my hands when I am sitting about.

It feels like it could be a way of creating that would be easy to pick up and put down, and good for times when energy is low because it wouldn't require setting up a space and dealing with loads of different bits of equipment, or anything wet and messy.

I see myself using embroidery as a type of drawing, with all the benefits of beautiful fabrics, gorgeous threads, lovely colours and textures! Mmmm!

To start us off, we were asked to make Moodboards (collections of images or objects that inspire us). I decided not to use  embroidery examples. These are mostly my own photos, plus some Japanese papers. I've also started another in a "gallery" over on flickr, using other peoples images. You can see it here.

I feel it could really work for me! Or maybe I'll give it a go and realize it's not "me", but I when I saw this course, I thought it might be a good way "in", allow me to learn a few things, and maybe to judge whether I'd like to go further. If you've been reading this blog for any length of time at all, you'll know that I love to experiment with different media and techniques. Sometimes I worry that all this exploration is a weakness, but I am starting to understand that it keeps me fresh and I suspect that I will never become a one-medium artist.

All the resources included in the embroidery course will remain available to us after the course finishes, so in a sense there is no need to work along with the class. However, it makes sense to do what you can, I think, as now is the time to ask questions.

So I'm trying to give myself permission to make the course my creative priority and simply assemble things so I'm ready to go with the next project, the wedding album. The deadline for that is late November. And that's ages away. Isn't it??