palimpsest

The residual marks left when existing text on vellum is scraped back for reuse. Christine Chester made a beautiful textile in 2015, relating it to her own ongoing theme of memories lost. You can read her thoughts behind her work here.

Here, just visible, the shadow of blackwork unpicked. I hadn't centered the pattern properly, didn't like the way it interacted with the edge, so out it came, leaving a trace of black fiber within the slightly larger holes. I am hoping the stitching will cover that little remnant.

I'm not happy with the way this one is centered either, so might have to find another square of fabric

This, on the other hand, has worked well - the difference in colour is down to the lighting

I'd forgotten what fun blackwork can be - the rhythm of the stitching so soothing, the patterns almost stitch themselves, and the back can look like cuneiform ...

growth and green

I have been adding some green growth to my layers test piece. The river brings growth, and we harnessed that growth for our own purposes back in those Mesopotamian days to extraordinary effect. In the distance, space marked out for a fragment of royal inscription. I was amused, when picking up my test cuneiform stitching to judge the size of that space, to find myself turning it the right way up - which tells me the stitching has, at least, taught me a bit about how to view cuneiform :-)

Then there is this, one of many reels of, for the most part unusable thread, having aged to fragility, that I have inherited from mother, grandmother, aunt and probably great grandmother. This was probably produced in wartime, a delightfully informative website tells me.

isn't the green delicious

I'm using it in a piece we did with Cas Holmes, a delightful teacher and artist, whose work I have admired for many years. The workshop, run over two sessions, focused on how we could blend momigami, "very squashed" paper, and textile scraps, in a piece with both hand and machine stitch. It was so enjoyable, in particular because she was teaching us via Zoom sessions, which bring their own challenges. The first was in part about preparation of the papers we had selected, by crumpling and kneading them in our hands until they loss their stiffness and became more fabric like - this is the momigami element. She encouraged us to layer these with scraps of fabric, pinning them to a calico backing, then stitching them loosely down using expressive stitches that worked with the underlying strata. In the second session she showed us how she uses machine stitch over the initial stitch layer, painting into the fabric with thread, creating texture and highlights, turning the piece over to stitch from the back to add elements of less purposeful stitch. Throughout both sessions she also talked to us about the design process, using her own work to show us examples of how the layers come together. Here she is talking about her piece "In Great Grandmothers' Shadow".

So far, I have got to here, a sort of landscape, with sort of buildings, and a ground layer to divide the space. 

As you'll see I've not reached the machining stage yet, and the paper element of this is so fragile that I suspect it will disintegrate once I start. For Cas that is a good thing; something she uses in her work and I can see its potential. But for this bit of stitching, I'm not so sure - which probably means I really should, and learn from moving beyond my inhibitions. For now I have just done hand stitching, and am happy with the result, though I feel it needs a bit more. I enjoyed the tactile nature of the paper, the difference in sound both as the needle and thread pass through, and the sound and feel as you handle it, skin rubbing against different fibres. I may well explore more, another way of layering.

I hope your stitching week has been good?

stitching cuneiform

Seems to lend itself to fly stitch. I find myself wanting to make the stitching as decorative as possible, along with representing the cuneiform; enjoying the patterns made by the cuneiform shapes. I allow myself to turn my fabric through 90 degrees, as the scribes might have turned their tablets, pressing stylus into clay.

I wonder about those Babylonian ladies, stitching mottos into their loved ones' garments: spells of protection, charms to ward off evil. Is this the stitch they might have used?

And because Rachel enjoyed my seaside, yesterday's walk gave me this

stitch and stitch

Our next task for Poetry of Stitch has been to stitch our curve once more, again four iterations, but this time all in the same direction, and all with line stitches. I have been experimenting with chain stitch, cable stitch, and now some couching. I am varying the placing of the couching stitch to try and create a lighter and darker effect within the curve, and have varied the chain stitch density and width with the same intention.

Sometimes the back tells its own story

And sometimes it's just rather fun

Progress so far, the top left being the "control", with just a single thread laid across closely spaced, to mark a starting point for this tonal exercise.

then there is the homework ....... 

Magick

There are old magicks in this landscape

Hidden things

Buried secrets

Secret flows

accumulation

Things are building up, layer by layer

The wider view

Playing with a scrap of organza, 

A river perhaps

sampling

Although no stitching was done while away, since coming home I have spent some time with my Mesopotamia layered piece, this time a proper sample. Christine's advice was to pin the layers together, rather than tacking, as with every stitch you make, the organza and the layer(s) below make a little adjustment with each other. Pins can be moved to accommodate this. It was very fine advice.

So here: the base of hand dyed fabric, with its layer of marks; a layer of poly organza coloured with walnut and India ink if I remember; a snippet of the paper laminated piece with more floor plan imagery and a layer of seed stitch suggesting another building.

The next layer of seeding, at larger scale, with a thread which matches the colours on the fabric, both responds to what is below, and secures the coloured organza

Here using Emily Jo Gibbs' technique of stitching around the edge of the layer below 

finding shadows of floor plans, hidden beneath, or impromptu patterns from the combined layers.

Here stitching moves away from the absolute randomness of seeding, responding to what lies beneath, just as archaeology does, searching for treasure 

Sampling really does allow for experiment and experiencing the way the layers interact, how stitching can bring to the surface what lies below. 

My larger piece has more detail, though the seeding needs to extend further around the remains; I like the way they flicker in and out, depending on the colour in the hand dyed fabric below.

Once the sampling is done, I can think more clearly about how to develop this further. For now it is good to just consider

auditioning layers

These pictures are of a test piece, a sample, much recommended by Christine to try things out. So here I am trying out layering the organza again, having cut it with the soldering iron to get a shape which wraps round the existing stitching, as though an archaeological dig were being revealed; playing too with the layers of marks.

I also wanted to see what happens if a darker fragment is layered below. Here the shapes from a portion of the paper lamination I did using the floor plan stencil, on already darkened transparent. I have aligned the "walls" with the voided shapes already there.

There will be at least one more layer over this, but first the stitching to secure this layer. Already I can see that the thread I have been using just won’t to. It works to pick out the voided shapes because it contrasts with the underlying colour of the fabric. But if subsequent stitch layers are to work, I think the thread needs to tone with this colour. All quite experimental for me, I am still thinking my way through the stitching, at a larger scale than the first seeding, but of a similar ilk I think.

Today’s musical companions were the Bénédictines du Sacré Coeur de Montmartre.

Guidelines

We have started Christine’s online Poetry of Stitch course, so had our first Zoom tutorial on Friday. One of the group asked about getting stitches straight, and Christine mentioned "auditioning” the thread before stitching it, like this; drawing it out with the top hand to see where you want it to lie

before pinning it to the cloth with your needle in just the place you want the next stitch to be made.

I remember learning this, possibly on a Sophie Long workshop, and realising how helpful it was when stitching regular rows or patterns, as we are here. The first tutorial will be familiar to anyone who has done the Textile Artist Community Stitch Challenge earlier on in lockdown. Use straight stitches to show the same curve drawn repeatedly within a grid of two inch square boxes. I need to define the open edges as well and then it's done

We did the same thing with her as a Zoom tutorial with Sussex Stitchers, so in true Blue Peter style, here’s the one is did earlier - nine boxes rather than four

Further pondering

So I think I’m done stitching, keeping it simple. I rather like this deep green silk as a potential frame for the image

I know I am annoyed at the wrinkles in the underlying calico - shoddy preparation. I can’t iron them out any further because that encourages more bubbling in the organza across the sky, the first layer which I couldn’t avoid when Mistyfusing down.

One notion, once the green silk is attached to the embroidery, would be to mount the whole on a box canvas of appropriate size, wrapping the silk round to the back. The key question now is - wide frame or narrow?

Contemplating layers

Which is a theme appropriate to working with transparents, which can evoke ...

Layers of landscape - the view from my bedroom in coloured organza cut with a soldering iron and fused to a base layer of calico. Two layers of machine stitching done, just the foreground to work out now. It is intimidating me!

Layers of history in the landscape,

Layers of habitation, evoked by fragile remains; wondering which of  the recent experiments might be useful ...

Layers of stitch to add colour and texture, perhaps that of excavated soil

And maybe reveal those layers of habitation

A bit of a test run, to see how the transparents I have been working with might evoke the levels that are concealed, revealed, during an archaeological dig. Still thinking how to do this. I may need to cut the voile into less regular shapes to create a sense of the unfolding of layer upon layer.

My stitching and thinking today accompanied by Low

And the Oni Wytars Ensemble being Byzantine. There’s variety for you

Assemblage

I very often have Mesopotamia in the back of my mind when exploring with Studio 11 experiments - currently in how transparent fabrics can ben coloured and the potential they hold. 

An assemblage is a group of objects brought together from a site which typify that site, or a particular period. 

This is an assemblage of things old and new which may help me say something about Mesopotamia and history with textiles.

Most recently I created a stencil which which I used with a lamination technique to apply paper to some organza I had coloured as part  of the transparent experiments we have been doing. The stencil was based the floor plans of several of the temple layouts at Eridu, the oldest of cities according to the Sumerians, where sweet water was discovered, site of the Abzu. The transparent is laid over some hand dyed fabric from an earlier class I took with Christine, sort of desert’ish. Though now I wonder if I should try something blue beneath it, for water. And whether I might not cut it up and use parts of it in different things, rather than as one piece.

The stenciling process - cutting out shapes from freezer paper and then ironing that paper onto the silk screen, has created all these negative shapes, which I shall keep and try to use in some other context.

I have been thinking about what skills were key to the development of civilisation in Mesopotamia, and one, of course, is weaving, without which we have neither baskets, nor linen shifts, nor tapestries. So I have been experimenting with the cordage technique, learnt on and Alice Fox workshop at Studio 11 using  grass from the  garden, fibres from yucca and phormium (New Zealand Flax), and some wool roving I bought, to create “thread” of sorts. The blue is the roving, twisted during a recent Studio 11 zoom session.

I like the way the colours work with this fabric, but the “thread” might also be useful with some of the other recent transparents experiments. Or perhaps I'll twist some more

The fabric is, again from an early workshop, using the wax resist technique to evoke the sort of patterns one finds in for example, pottery with scratched patterns, of rock carvings. Here assembled, to see how they might mingle with some linen thread I bought from “somewhere”. 

And here, another assembled group of transparents - fine voile coloured with acrylic inks, walnut ink and rust dyed  

They seem to fit together rather well

I at last have a stool workshop, so I can sit at my bench with music playing - Heligoland in this case (Massive Attack one day Pergolesi the next!) - look at the anemones by the fence, and muse. It is a great pleasure. I am tucked away down the side of the house, and have to duck past the well to get here. It somehow feels appropriate

transparents again

I am thinking around ideas of Mesopotamia, layers of time and habitation. 

These pieces of sheer, blogged about here might just begin to express this by using both layers of colour on the voile - here quite light in tone, and also layering the fabrics one over the other. 

So, having applied one layer of colour to the sheer poly voile, walnut ink and Quink on one, acrylic ink on the other, they have now been weighed down in trays with rusty bits

and wetted with either white vinegar and a splash of acrylic ink on the hummocks

Or walknut ink and tea, with trickles of Quink.

The same colorants as the first layer, with added rust textures hopefully, where the random bits of iron will oxidise with the tea/vinegar. 

I wonder what will happen. They are "cooking" overnight under a sheet of damp newsprint.