embroidered screen prints

Diane here, with more on deconstructed screen printing also known as breakdown printing. You can click on either of those Labels in the right hand column and read more Fire blog posts on the technique.

For this monochromatic print, I chose two colors of cotton thread close to the hue of the dye and did cross stitch border patterns as a member of the "Edges" Dutch group on Facebook.  Each week a different pattern was posted and most members were doing their bands or edges on linen at 20 crosses to the inch.  Not me!  I am not a counted-cross-stitch kind of gal. It was fun to see their projects and translate all the chatter but, after a while, I ran out of cloth, time and steam and literally fell off the edge.  Some of them were amused by the way I titled my piece. 

Knowing what to do with your output is often a stumbling block for getting started. "What's that going to be?" is a FAQ when the artist is in the throes of a play session. I usually get inspiration from my prints and that leads me to take up the needle and thread and begin to embroider. Here is one "finished" embroidered print, with a photo of the print before stitching and a detail of the stitching. Each of the 8 characters were stitched on one of the eight repeats from the screen.  I tried not to make them so loveable (!) but I just couldn't help myself.  They just looked like strange little birds - some with their backs turned!

This was stitched while I was following the blog written by Sharon Bloggins and the challenge was called TAST - Take a Stitch Tuesday.  About six months of stitch experiments - one a week.

The photo below is an art quilt designed around a deconstructed screen print that only gave me one good print.

Creating original fabrics can lead you in so many directions, why wouldn't you try it?

Diane - yarngoddess

Weekly Stitching

Linda McLaughlin here to tell you about my weekly stitching projects. One of the benefits of doing my daily stitching is that I keep getting ideas for other stitching projects. I keep a list of these ideas and review them when I'm getting ready to start a new one.  At the end of 2012 I realized that some of my ideas were not ideal for daily stitching, I knew that it would take much more time than the simple quick stitching that I do daily.

The 2013 weekly stitching project grew out of an idea to use some of my vintage linen collection. Here's how it looks finished.

-The fabric is vintage linen and cotton napkins that were divided into three piles and dyed either rose, teal or yellow. 

- Each dyed piece was then clamped with a pair of plexiglass shapes, either a circle ,square or triangle and then over dyed in one of the opposite  colors.

- Each one has a piece of flannel fused to the back, this gives the fabric a bit more stability when stitching and also gives the stitches a bit more dimension. I do not use a hoop when I stitch.

-The stitching is all done with pearl cotton thread, most of it  #5 weight. Some of the threads were dyed with the fabrics, others are commercial threads.

-I finished each piece by pillow casing a cotton fabric to the back. The fabric was ice dyed with the leftover dyes from doing the linens. This is a sample of the backs.

- Each back has the week it was done written on it.

- I only used seven simple stitches to do all 52 weeks. Frequently I would combine different stitches in a block, here's how often those stitches show up.

    - Straight stitch /running stitch, 32 weeks

    - French knots and variations , 33 weeks

    - Fly stitch and variations, 23 weeks

    - Blanket stitch and variations, 13 weeks

    - Chain / lazy daisy stitch, 11 weeks

    - Cross Stitch, 6 weeks

    - Couching, 5 weeks

Although I've used the same stitches over and over each individual piece is different. Here are a few of my favorites from the group.

You can see all of them here.

My 2014 weekly stitching is called The Weekly Leaf. Each week I use various surface design techniques on hand dyed fabric or muslin to get a leaf image. So far I've stenciled, gelli-printed, done rubbings, solvent transfers, stamped and drawn a leaf. After I get the image on the fabric its time for the stitching.  Unlike my daily stitching that I do first thing going into the studio, my weekly stitching sits in a bowl by my big comfy chair in the living room so that I can work on it in the evenings when the tv is on. I average between four to six hours on each one.  Here's a few that I've done so far this year.

Here are all twelve.

 

So far the only stitches I've used are;  french knots, stem and straight stitch.  

You can see all of them here.

I hope that I've inspired some of you to try doing some regular hand stitching. I've enjoyed sharing my hand stitching projects with you this month, at least once a week I do a blog post with the current finished pieces, please stop by and check them out. http://notesfromstudiob.blogspot .com/