I said in the last post that I’d say something about what I’m doing with my collection of linen threads. As regular readers may remember, I’ve been very impressed for a while by the work of Emily Barletta. She has produced quite a lot of very striking stitched work on paper. I experimented a bit with this last year when I was working on my whitework project. One of the images I produced at the time has been repinned a few times on Pinterest, so it seems to be quite appealing. Here it is as a reminder of what I was doing:
This was actually a very complicated and time-consuming piece of work to do. But as an experimental sample it was very absorbing. So, the next stage, I felt, was to produce some more samples to see what I could do with the combination of linen and stiff paper. Here’s the first one that I tried:
I drew out the design, then used a needle to make holes in the stiff watercolour paper. Then it’s just a matter of filling in the holes with stitch – quite easy really once you’ve decided what to do. I was only moderately pleased by this one, but it was just an experiment and the intention behind sampling is just to see what happens if you do certain things, combine certain materials and so on. In this case, I drew the design on the back of the piece of paper, and punched the holes through from the back. I don’t think this is particularly satisfactory as it creates a slightly raised area around each hole.
So for the next sample, I punched the holes in from the front. I decided to keep it simple, but to try to create a textured surface. Here it is:
I deliberately photographed it at an angle to emphasise the surface texture. I really like the effect. The technique I’ve used is wrapping – just a simple running stitch but each stitch is then wrapped to create the texture.
Currently, I’m working on another sample, which I’ll put on the blog when I’ve finished. It also uses wrapping but this time of single chain stitches. More on this very soon!
