An Embroiderer's Ledger

I'm still adding to the Ledger and making lists of things to do from each page.

This is the cover sheet for the first page.  Two strips of emulsion painted onto tissue, then water colour for the flowers and petals.

Added to the air brick page, is the arch that was cut out of the parchment.  I FME all over, and just in the bottom corner, I've embellished with hand stitch.  It's been mounted onto parchment vellum, and fixed below the watercolour.

For both these pages, I have a stitched project to follow, but it will take some time. In the meantime, I shall probably start on another page.

A New Page

Do you remember this? 

I've taken it out of my sketch book, and put it into my Ledger.  I've decided I'll develop different ideas in here instead.

The first thing I did was a representation in paint.

Then there was emulsion on tissue paper with watercolour.  I've used shapes that make up the arches and the outline shape of the brick, in a very simplified form.

Inspired by the cobwebs in the original picture, I've used scrim lace on parchment.  I cut out an arch to mirror the holes in the air brick, and the scrim lace was attached using FME.

This has given me layers to my page, first glance it looks like this,

turn over to this,

Then finally, this. 

There will be further development to this page as time goes on, but it's fun trying out different techniques.

 

Embroiderers Ledger

Although it's been a while since they appeared on the blog, there has been work on the Embroiderers Ledger, but it has taken time for things to dry.

Here are my glued and painted tissue paper pages which took hours to dry.  Instead of hot dry days, we've had cool, wet days, and it doesn't help things to dry.

Once they were dry, work could commence.  This edge has been FME, ready for hand embellishment.

This is the surface I shall be working with.

On this piece, you can see I am no artist.  I took motifs and shapes from the white cloth I did, and just "doodled" on the emulsion base to see the effect it had on different colour watercolour.  Now I know how it works, I shall have to come up with something artistic for the future.

This technique of sandwiching motifs in tissue and hand stitching around, has to be one of my favourites.  It's so easy, so simple, but it ends up being a really effective piece.  For this sample, I cut petal shapes from a beautiful card I received. 

The next stage will be to embellish the machine stitched paper with hand stitch, I shall be looking forward to that one.  Ideas were buzzing around my head for that one in the night.

Adding Paper

The whole purpose of this embroidery course, is to push the boundaries, so now, paper has been added to a piece of hand embroidered cloth.

This is silk paper that has been machine embroidered, and then embellished by hand.

The paper was carefully cut out around the machine embroidered flowers and then very gently stitched to the cloth.  To do that. I've used a mixture of french knots, blanket stitch, bullion knots and blanket stitch lace.