Guestblogger Joke Hardenbol part 1

Hello , I am Joke Hardenbol. 
Beth asked me if I was willing to write 3 blogpost as a guest this month and although I felt honored by this invitation my first response was to turn it down as I don’t feel my English is good enough for this. But when she offered to have my post translated by Wil Opio Oguta I accepted the invitation.

This first post is about a piece of art which Beth loves. My wall hanging  ‘Blue Silence’. There is a story behind this title. I had lost this wall hanging for a month and finally found it again in the garden where I had hung it on the barn wall to take a picture. I took the camera indoors but forgot to bring the wall hanging in. When I am indoors I cannot see this wall and during  winter I do not go into this part of the garden so it was left there for a month. Luckily it survived without any harm done. Because of this month of silence and an embellishment which is  about silence it got the name ‘Blue Silence’.

I wanted to create a piece that consisted out of separate pieces connected by embroidery. That was my starting point. Plus I wanted to work with texture. I started with a white piece of fabric backed by Hobbs and stitched and glued several  different materials on it, all with a texture, amongst them were mulberry bark, handmade paper and cheese cloth. When I felt that I had enough texture, I put everything in a dye bath. A mixture of red and turquoise that gave a lovely blue/purple color. With discharge paste and a spiral stamp made by me I did the mint green spirals. No idea what would happen as I had never worked with discharge paste, but I got an awesome contrasting color.

Based upon the texture I used a rotary cutter and cut the fabric into separate pieces. Stitched these together again using different type of stitches.

The next step was to make embellishments out of Tyvek. I made several beads wrapped them with seed beads and flowers. A number of them have been embroidered with sequins. Embroidery followed and I added some text using foam and stamps. Final touch was to add a bit of gold colored shoeshine with my fingers so that only the higher areas were touched by it.

Joke
waterleliedesign.blogspot.nl