Stitches as Structural Elements

As Beth #3, I’m a new member on the Fire Blog and i’ll try to share my thoughts and some samples I have done in connection with Beth’s excellent embellishment tutorials.

I regard stitches as surface design elements. They can be  primary ones, entirely responsible for the visual impact or they can be used as secondary structures, to emphasize and underline the primary design which is in the art quilts the top, made by pieceing or by various surface design techniques.

I usually use them as secondary elements, so this month turned out as a challenge for me.

Last year I made a lampshade out of layered, handmade paper. Nothing pretentious, just playing around a bit, as an example for my pupils. I attached the two layers of paper together, with big, bold stitches. It’s O.K, though I think I could have performed the  stitches with more care ...

I have combined graphical and structural stitches  on this quilt, African Beauty. I „drew“ the main lines of the face with thick embroidery thread and used thinner quilting thread for the shadowed places as a simple structural element.

 

On this little  piece I used embroidery to give more details of the cityscape and again as a structure fort he sky. This is still in progress, but you can get a first impression already.

This piece of cityscape I started in Dorothy Caldwell’s Human Marks class, last November, along wit the idea of using small books for different mark-types. Here is my STITCHED one, made out of cotton-rag paper, which permits you dense embroidery without falling apart. And a few pages out of the book - just playing around, trying out combinations:

 

   

Beading is something, which i hardly ever do, so it took time to decide how to use the instructions Beth made. It took me quite long to finish even this small sample. If beading, i think i like the effect of using them compact – i just run out of the black beads before I could finish it.

 The fine lines at the back, led me to an another try - I loved the fragile, graphical quality of this experiment:

And because we wouldn’t want to forget the fire – here is burned organza, which reminds me of a landmap and this work is also still in progress. I would like to emphasize  the burned out signs by outlining them, and also the edges with rather dense stitches. The red dots are French knots.

Thank you for reading, and i’m happy to hear your opinions.