I made up the paper pulp vat again using the cat litter tray which is good for making part sheets with my small deckle. The paper sheets adhered best to the pieces with embedded threads, less well to the drawn thread pieces. This in spite of putting all the sheets in my press. As you'll see below this was not entirely wise: the drawn thread sheets were, of course, pressed all over squashing the paper pulp which had pushed its way through the holes and removed those lovely dramatic shadows -- a hard lesson! Of course you have to be very careful when reapplying pulp, water travels a surprising distance wetting unintended areas.
The right coloured thread was something else I needed to consider. From stock I found some nice linen thread and then from The Handweavers Studio I ordered some paper yarns and one made from abaca. All have a lovely degree of "spring", or "memory" as the helpful girl at HS called it, this quality would work best with the lettering I wanted to embroider. All these threads I then dyed using my blue recipe.
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4:8:11
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A final preparation was looking out my spray glue, only to find it had degraded and I had to throw it away. As shopping in person is now something I hardly do I've ordered a replacement on line and it will magically appear tomorrow.
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4:8:12
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A little more warming up with charcoal. I like a number of things about these results: the angularity of the letter forms, the thicks and thins, the light and dark, all achieved by a change in hand-pressure. Printing, rather than embroidery might achieve this effect, but I'm not doing that, I'm embroidering . . .
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4:8:13
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4:8:14
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I've used temporary spray adhesive and stitched in to 4:7:4, the piece which had become squashed when I pressed the border and sadly removed that 3D quality. The hand stitching is in linen thread: its colour and spring give it just the right kind of prominence. Much less successful are the paper letters spelling TIDES, also mounted on muslin. When the letters were white they hardly showed so I coloured them blue, but they still remained too well camouflaged so that wasn't successful either. For the stitches on the letters I chose the finer silk thread used in the machine stitching. The stitches are a little repetitive and restrained until I reached the "S", where they more closely resemble the linen stitches and that works better.
Below is the final version of this piece and really a return to my starting point -- simplest is best! In this image the lighting is right.
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4:8:15
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What is a great success is the silk piece 4:7:11! My first thought was to weave upright sticks through it, then decided paper strips with poetry on them ("Sea Fever" by John Masefield") would be better. Better still might be lines from a gansey knitting pattern and I may well make that change. Much fiddling about with font and font size and the width of the strips, but these I think are just right. It would be lovely to use my own handmade paper which would be a less stark colour, though I'm not sure my printer would like it. Or, I could machine stitch the words onto my paper. The paper could also be used as a mount.
As I guessed in an earlier post, too much handling does soften the work.
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4:8:16
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Lastly, in this group, a piece of some purity though this too has undergone some experimentation. I tried using some of the removed threads from the other dyed pieces, but even the softest tones were too strong: wrapping threads, of course, intensifies the colour. So in the end the needle weaving is white on white.
My intention here was to create some half and whole lines achieving intersections randomly. In doing so I hoped the tension of the stitching would develop angular holes, which has happened to some degree. Is it possible to achieve the effect I'm describing?
The replacement border is much better. Learning from a previous mistake I pressed only the border this time so that the drawn thread work wasn't crushed. So much needs to be planned in advance and I think I made a wrong call in leaving the withdrawn threads rumpled along two sides. Withdrawing the threads in two directions would have been better, evening out the bulk, and probably covering them completely with the frame yet another better step. I stitched into the border extending the needle woven lines diagonally and liked that effect, shown in 4:8:15. A further thought: without the paper border I might have woven clumps of threads into the surrounding linen something I'd tried in 4:6:9 and liked very much, though the threads there were variegated but with white on white the impact might not have been as great.
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4:8:17
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4:8:18
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4:8:19
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It's interesting how some ideas become part of a personal repertoire. Here is a small section of my resolved sample from Module 1. Extended lines stitched into the border. To me it is a very attractive way of pulling a piece of stitching together. Of course embossed lines on the border might be another nice idea.
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