Tag Archives: green

embroidery and textiles, stuff i've made

Go on, tell me I’ve ruined it…I suspected as much.

green horse

Not much to say about the green horse journal cover, now. It’s done, I think…”quit while you’re ahead,” the old wisdom goes; I might have to ammend that to “quit before you fuck it up any more.” The blue fabric pen will fade in time, not that this will make the dots on the spine of the book look any sexier. Just sayin’.

So now that you can see what I went and did, tell me what I should have done, instead. I’m interested to hear about the different ways you would have handled the horse’s background, because I hope to learn something from this experience.
Right. Ready! I’m listening…

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aboard the M/V sonofagun, embroidery and textiles, life

All in green my love went riding…

icelandic horse

…All in green went my love riding
on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn.

Four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
my heart fell dead before.

—from All in green went my love riding by e.e.cummings

 

Finally settled on a design for the journal I am making my friend Miri.

It’s based on the Icelandic horse (Miri has one of these chunky Nordic horses, herself, and loves to ride) and her favorite color. In keeping with the Nordic theme, the horse is a simple, solid silhouette of greens, overstitched in a counted-thread geometric pattern, worked on a rough linen-like fabric…I just love this stuff! Crazily, this is synthetic upholstery fabric, left over from a curtain job I did nearly a year ago. I took a closer look at it and saw that it’s an even-weave fabric (about 18-ct., which I love to work with, as it makes for fine stitching); sure wish I had more of it! It’s lined with a dense cotton on the back, making it thick and very stable to stitch. I love serendipitous craft discoveries like this.

green horse

First, I cut a paper stencil of the horse and attached it to the fabric with re-positionable spray adhesive. Then I brushed undiluted acrylic paints on with a stencil brush. I outlined the shape in dark brown embroidery floss, using backstitch.

Now I’ve filled in the horse shape using two strands of DMC floss and an allover blackwork pattern, with little cross-stitched squares in iridescent thread. I tried to farm some of the work out to cheap labor, but that didn’t work out—he kept trying to eat the thread spool.

I hope to finish the book covering today. I’ll be adding a mane and tail in fine running stitch lines. Haven’t decided what to do on the spine or back of the book, yet, but I’ll be keeping it spare and simple…clean lines, trying to emulate Scandinavian fabric designs, and using a palette of only neutral colors from hereon.

Miri’s last journal, which I also made, is nearly full, she tells me—she needs her new tagebuch, stat! Hope she likes this new one; it’s very different from “Postcards from The Archipelago”.

So back to work, despite the disgruntled worker’s labor strike and disruptive tactics.

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embroidery and textiles

Embroidery: the tear-away transfer method

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A very old, traditional way of transferring an embroidery design to fabric is by drawing the design on very fragile paper, basting it to the ground fabric, and then stitching the design with a running stitch through both paper and fabric. When the whole design has been outlined, the paper is gently torn away. This isn’t a how-to, by the way…it’s probably more like a how-not-to.

I tried this method the other day. I don’t know why I did—I already have my preferred technique for transferring a design to fabric that is clean, precise, and reliable—but I guess it all boils down to laziness and impatience. Didn’t feel like tracing the design to interfacing that night, didn’t feel like reversing the drawing, either. I just wanted to start stitching right away, so I plunked the drawing (of my camera) on top of some brown linen, and basted it down.

I’m not disparaging this method…it’s been used for centuries by some of the greatest embroidering cultures of the world (Chinese, Japanese, Indian) so it obviously works, and that it proves a little difficult is more likely the fault of the practitioner than the method.

The design moved a bit as I stitched…I found that by stitching down a large part on one side of the design, the paper would warp a bit between the stitched and unstitched parts. Very possibly because of the poor basting job I did!

Sometimes, a very short stitch would tear the bit of paper underneath it, so that the stitch would disappear beneath the paper, and often I couldn’t tell whether I’d stitched that part or not, and so had to push the paper aside with the tip of the needle to see whether there already was a stitch there.

I used a backstitch, rather than a running stitch, and found that because I couldn’t actually see the fabric, my lines weren’t always straight, my stitches didn’t always line up end-to-end. This little bit of crookedness didn’t bother me for most of the design, but for the little letters at the top of the camera, little gaps and crooked stitches did matter…

None of which compared with the annoyance of removing the paper, afterward. I didn’t mind the slow job of gently tearing paper away in small pieces, or having to pick dandruff-like fragments that were stuck underneath the stitches with a pair of tweezers. What really bugged me was how, no matter how gently one worked, the job of pulling the paper bits out would sometimes yank on the stitching, loosening it and creating loopy bits of thread…in some cases, when the part pulled on was the end of a thread, the bitter end would come popping up to the surface of the fabric—after I had so carefully woven these loose ends into the stitches on the back of the fabric, because I don’t use knots.

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It came out all right in the end, I won’t have to repeat the whole thing, though I must say the thread looked a bit scruffy and fluffy after all that, and the lines have a slight jitter to them, and some of the stitches are so loose that from the side they look like terry cloth. ;) Not really, but you know what I mean. And I don’t know if it really allowed me to start embroidering sooner…I was still picking bits of paper out with a pair of tweezers this morning.

The verdict? It works, and in a pinch (in a granite hut, in a remote rural area of Szechuan Province, during the Warring States Period) it’ll do the job admirably. It certainly isn’t an excuse for the subsequent embroidery to be poor—marvelous work has been done using just this method of transferral to first mark the fabric.

But there are so many more precise ways to do this, now, and I think any transfer pen or transfer paper, iron-on, or print-on method would be preferable.

Experiment over, I started stitching today. Had an intense craving for shades of green (I can crave certain colors the way others crave salt, or chocolate. For the next 48 hours I’ll probably be all “Green is my favorite color EVER!” And then I will drop it, fickle and unfaithful, and declare an all-time-high of passion for ecru. But right now, I am loving this Kermit the Camera.

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bookbinding, paints and pens, stuff i've made

Postcards from The Archipelago

Deep sea was the wandering,
deep brass the dripping loot,
deep crimson the bloodspill,
lyrics begotten on lush lips
and many a hawser they saw—
rotting rope and rusting chain
and anchors…many lost anchors.

—Carl Sandburg

Finished painting the first of that small batch of journal cases (covers) I made recently. It’s called Postcards from The Archipelago, and this is the second time I’ve painted these designs on a cover; the first time was for a little journal that I gave to my Belovéd.

It’s a very special little pair of paintings I’ve put on here, full of significance, wonderful memories, and love, love, love…so now I don’t want to sell it! I won’t be in a  hurry to sell it, anyway…it must go to someone who really resonates with it…someone who has lived close to the sea, or has lain in the dark at night listening to the ‘bulge and nuzzle’ of the waves, has loved a pirate, has “sailed away for a year and a day”…or someone who has pulled up his/her anchors (or is about to) and is open to the adventure that life can become when you don’t know where you’re going, only that you’ve got to go…

*Is she serious?* Okay, I can hardly insist on these conditions…(can’t you just see me, though, interviewing prospective buyers? *crazy laugh*) I guess all I am trying to say is:     I love this one so much and I hope someone out there will love it, too. You’ll find it in my Etsy and Madeit shops very soon.

The story behind the covers…

There’s a golden compass on the spine, surrounded by curling tendrils of seaweed. The cover paintings both have landscape formats (to look like postcards), so that either side can be the ‘front’ of this journal (and I’ve put ‘headbands’ on both ends of the book, so you can decide which is front for you).

On one cover is my version of an old woodblock print showing a sea monster attacking a ship. I love the old accounts of monsters and terrors of the deep, love the fact that they were made in all seriousness, to illustrate real accounts made by sailors and travelers. When I met Kris he was in the process of compiling an old-fashioned bestiary of fantastic creatures from all over the world. He had stacks of research, and had painstakingly done a painting for every creature on his list. I loved that he would devote so much of his time and energy doing something purely personal, entirely for his own pleasure and of no immediate use to anyone else at all.

Beside the sea monster vignette is a tiny map of the Bacuit Archipelago, which is where Kris and I met, and where we lived in a fisherman’s hut on the beach for many years. That little boat with the Chinese junk rig is Kehaar, Kris’ sailboat. On the bit of land to the right, just under the name El Nido, hic sunt leonis (here there be lions) marks the spot where we lived, with our two fat cats (lions!) ruling that part of the jungle.

On the other cover are fragments of Carl Sandburg’s poem, and a painting of Kehaar on the sea at night. The little portholes glow with the light of candles inside, a fingerail-paring of moon hangs overhead, and the sky is salted with stars.

When Kris decided that he wanted to return to Australia after 13 years being away, we made the trip by sailboat. It took us five weeks to reach East Timor, and another 10 days from Timor to Darwin, Australia. Kris has a lot of respect for the men who crossed the world’s oceans in the days before the engine was invented, and he likes that kind of old-fashioned self-reliance. Hence, Kehaar is just a sailboat. There is no engine on board. There is no GPS, radio, EPIRB, toilet, lights or electricity on board, either, for that matter.

It was Real Sailing: perfectly silent, isolated, and oftentimes, slow. Time opened like origami…we had time…plenty of time. There was no need to hurry…what for? Three days without wind meant we sat on deck in patches of shade, talking or doing some small, intricate chore, just trying to stay busy until the wind picked up again. Kris wrote for his book or drew monsters and patterns in the borders of his sailing charts; I sat embroidering, or reading. We spent hours staring at the horizon, sometimes. At night, when it was my turn to steer, I had conversations with myself, sang every song I knew—a lot of Basia, isn’t that daggy?—wished on shooting stars (there were hundreds) and tried to learn the major constellations. Herds of whales would surface around us and blast smelly water into the air; pods of dolphins raced with us when we were going fast; sea birds—boobies, mainly—hung around for days, resting en route to god-knows-where. We saw turtles the size of picnic tables (before they saw us…another advantage to sailing without an engine!) and lots of sea snakes. Sharks trailed behind us in some seas. One night while I was steering in a strong wind, something big (the size of our boat) swam beside us for half an hour (the sea is pitch dark, but when the tiny bits of plankton are disturbed, they emit a bright glow or phosphoresence that will reveal the outline of larger fish, dolphins, anything moving fast enough to alarm the little guys) and it scared me a bit!

It was a big adventure, and a big move for me, but Kris had given (a somewhat trying) life in the Third World a go, for my sake, so I thought it was only fair that I spend some time in his country. It was difficult at first, took me a year to find my own place in the scheme of things. But I’ve fallen in love with Oz, and Darwin in particular, and there are no plans of sailing away again for a long while!

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