Early this morning I spent some time experimenting, making the following samples. For a long time I have been interested in the quality of something being ‘sheer’, of it being something you can see through. Of course ‘holes’ do this, too.

Following my previous feeble initial doodles, I made and bound a few rings from thread (thick cotton string and some polyester heavy duty upholstery in a non-upholstery colour. These rings I then sewed onto the plastic with a very fine nylon thread/monofilament which I just happen to have heaps of (top 3) The ‘ring’ bottom centre is another one of needleworked or buttonhole based on a ring of back stitches, and you can keep on building this kind of thing until you have the length you want or are sick of it. Heaps and heaps of potential – I just kept sewing until that thread ran out, but it’s easy enough to join in another thread and keep going. I think small fine rings could make their way as a textural element into what’s developing.

This mightn’t look much (my samples generally don’t) but it pleased me enormously, because although this is just a small snippet laid and pinned onto the plastic and oversewed with quilting thread, at a point about the middle “i” in the hand written word “invisible”, the right side is overlaid with another bit of plastic, and stitched with clear nylon thread – so, it’s very close to invisible quilting. Also, Sharpie pens come in some nice colours, and I can see a lot of potential here.