Now, at last I feel mentally free to start a work I’ve had in mind for a few weeks since finding a photo I posted previously as an inspiring colour scheme. Stitching this will balance the hectic colours I’ve just been working with, and as surface stitch is so important in my designs these days, it is going to be a serious undertaking in stitch. As each of the expected 169 squares currently takes about 45-50 minutes each, from cutting the strips to the last stitch, I have plenty of time 🙂 to think about the title. I may speed up a little as I get the hang of managing the fabric+hoop needing to be draped over the ironing board – a fabulous sewing table which I’ll blog about a bit later.
Sample strip – pieces of different sheers I plan to use in this work fused/bonded onto some of the fabric background piece. The square in a square on the left end is my plan – a repeat block design of this, one of my all time favourite traditional blocks.
It’s not just the colours – greys, beiges and just a touch of soft apricot-gold, but this photo has so much reflected light shimmering off wet sand and the water’s surface, that in that earlier post I referred to ‘shimmer’ as a key word. That is what I’ll be aiming to present in what might be titled ‘Shimmer’ once I’m done.
The first four blocks of ‘Shimmer’, are shown here in process, from fusing the strip placement to completed square within a square. I used Misty Fuse, and an unbranded yellow gold thread from China. The metallic thread used will vary with the different fabric strips being oversewn. I have some coppery metallic which I think will give just the right touch of peach pink ….
In a comment on one of my social media posts this week, I mentioned to someone that I am going for a shimmer factor with my next major work. I want to work on some lovely pearly grey sateen I have, usingmetallic thread and including that little square stitch motif, of course. I have no recollection why or where I bought that fabric, but right now with all the current drama on the World Stage, I’m feeling the need to create something calming. In conversation with my son about this fabric and colours that might go with it, we talked about how well gold and cream go with grey, and that brief conversation has remained in my mind.
What I’m currently working on has very strong colours, and I really feel the need to follow this with some more orderly calm tones in my next art quilt, something probably quieter and less sensational than anything I’ve ever done before. I’m envisaging some kind of grid layout in soft light colours with lots of metallic thread – going for the shimmer factor. I’m in no special hurry, as the intense hand stitched surface design of what I’m currently working on will take me at least another couple of weeks to finish, probably. (It’s another mosaic one ~1.m+sq.)
My regular readers might also remember that one of my favourite design motifs is a square-within-a-square – which appears every now and then, generally referring back to this suede sample I fused to cream fabric at least 8 or 9 years ago. It’s usually kicking around on my design wall, inspiring but never quite actually becoming the ‘star’ of anything. A square-within-a-square is a very popular patchwork block design in traditional quilt making, and I’ve used that idea in some samples, with and without punched holes:
My much loved square-within-a-square motif, very popular in traditional patchwork.
Fabric and threads encased: https://www.alisonschwabe.com/weblog/?p=7297
But as the auditioning of fabrics and threads wanders along for treatment on this lovely grey sateen, the square within a square motif has surfaced again as a way to get a major part of a pattern onto the grid I have in mind. Earlier this week I made this quick little sample, two squares within squares, see below:
One comment was that the stitching looked like Roman letters and numbers – I had the im0pression it was ‘print’ too – which led me to ‘SHIMMER’ ….
On the right is cream nylon organza fused to the grey, but it doesn’t show up well… HOWEVER some random stitching over the edges with a little square motif at each corner does speak volumes to me about potential over with the same light grey sheer in the middle. And the brown square is way too dark for inclusion in this exercise – so there’s been some auditioning of sheer fabrics to find something lighter, and I think I’m ready to go with these squares to be the fused basis for the stitchery in light and darker gold metallic, or even gold and silver. We’ll see….
Carolyn Nelson, Soliloquy II, detail.
I know ‘YES’ is a much simpler word than “SHIMMER’, but I’m about to experiment with it, to stitch around each side of the proposed squares … Carolyn Nelson must have stitched ‘YES’ on that work hundreds if not a thousand times, so ‘SHIMMER’ 4 times per block for 165 blocks max., ie stitching SHIMMER 660 times, and I think that’s do-able.
English