A Work Completed, Another Started

Though it feels backwards to me, I am going to share my work in progress before telling you about what I completed.  Writing about them in this order isn't totally backwards as the new one grew from the gelatin printing session I talked about in my last post.  So it's sort of like finishing one story before starting the next.

Those who know me well, know that I always like to have a handwork project going.  It's what I do in the evenings when we are watching TV.  I need to keep my hands busy.  If I'm not stitching, I'm playing solitaire on my tablet - but stitching makes me feel better.  So I like to start something new as soon as I can after finishing a work.  Since I'd just done a bunch of prints in my session with Sonja and Tyler, I looked at those first to see if one called my name.  Thankfully an idea came together fairly quickly.  I decided I liked one of my gelatin prints with a commercial print I've had for a long time.

The picture on the left shows the very beginning and the one on the right, my progress so far.  (I got a lot of stitching done last Friday - while waiting at Sonja's for a plumber who never showed up.)

The "leaves" I've layered in so far are pieces of some dyed silk cocoons I bought in Vancouver last year.  My current plan  includes adding a few skeleton leaves as well, but those need to go on near the end so they don't get mangled from the stitching process.  I also need to figure out just how I am going to attach them.  ...more to come on this one.  Looking at it here on the screen is giving me some additional ideas.

​And FYI - my photography skills are not the greatest - the coloring of the picture on the right is more true to the work.

And the finished work

The piece I had just finished was a bit of craziness that I am calling "Let Your Light Shine."  This one is a bit out-of-the-box for me, but  good follow-on to the one I called "Fighting the Blues."  (See my October post.)  It started with a gift bag.

The bag had a sparkly sheer outer layer over a paper-like inner layer with the green ribbons pin a casing to make it a draw-string bag.  It picked up the colors in a remnant of another stitching project, so I decided to have some fun and see what I could put together.

I first cut two sides of the bag to get a flat piece and cut off the draw-string top so that everything would be the same thickness.  Over that I layered pieces of my other stitching project.  (One of several I've done where I layered scraps of Maria Testa's hand-dyed silk over a commercial print and then added lots of embroidery.)  I cut the remnant into several pieces to make them fit and create a pleasing arrangement.  Next I cut up the draw-string ribbon and layered that on as well.

At that point I still had the draw-string part of the bag left.  I didn't want to waste any of that shiny fabric, so I pulled out the stitching that created the channel and held the shiny fabric to the papery backing.  I pressed the outer layer and cut it up into small rectangles and layered them on as well.  To my delight,  the shiny spots on the reverse side were silver, not gold, adding an extra bit of pizzazz.
​
Once I completed my arrangement, I basted all the bits together and began to stitch.  First I added words on the ribbons...
"Sometimes you have to go a little crazy
Just start and see what happens
​You ask if I am having fun...I hope it's obvious"

And I just kept going, adding stitching, and sequins, and the word "shine" over it all; having a ball with it.  Then one day a song playing during my morning water fitness class gave me the title.  Everything was coming together fine.  I finished all my embellishing and was going to just press it and mount it when a bit of a disaster happened that almost sent it to the scrap heap.

I let the iron get too hot before giving it a final press and when I touched the iron to that papery backing, I melted a good chunk of the edge.  It was really a stupid mistake. 

Luckily the front fabric was fine, but still the gouge was readily apparent.  I had so much invested in it at that point I sure didn't want to just scrap it without trying to fix it somehow.  So I decided to try to a technique I hadn't used in a very long time--to  use my heat gun to distress the edges of the backing material all the way around.  It was a bit dicey to do because I needed a Teflon sheet underneath it to protect my ironing board and another between the sheer layer and the backing fabric.  I didn't want to melt the sheer fabric.  In the end it turned out to be one of those happy accidents.  I think the distressed edges work very well, especially the patterning in the Helene Davis hand-dyed cotton that I'd decided on for the background.

​The finished piece is wild and crazy, but it makes me happy to look at it.