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.
