Category: General Embroidery
Back To Stella’s Birds
The design inspired by Elizabeth Goudge’s “Gentian Hill” is continuing to give me some difficulties. The stitchery itself will be inspired by Mountmellick work, although it’s not going to be anything even close to classical Mountmellick. You didn’t think it would, did you?
I was planning to use a vaguely medieval flavour for the birds, so they’ll be a bit mad, all curlicues and twiddles. The ones above are looking promising, I think. I will need to consider balancing solid stitching and line stitching, but that can wait until the design itself is settled. Keeping them mad once I start stitching may be a bit of a challenge, but we’ll see.
The branches they’ll be sitting on are worse. I’ve been trying two different styles – a rectangular design, and a triangular design. Both of them look a bit clumsy, and they’re somehow unsatisfying. Granted, neither of them is the whole design, the rectangular one is lacking the birds, and the triangular one is lacking curlicues and any sense of spacing. I’ll get there in the end, but it’s going to take a while.
What I am pleased with is that I’m getting better at doing scrappy, fast, thinking-with-a-pen drawings. Even a year ago, I don’t think I’d have had the freedom I felt as I was doing these.
Which is just to tell you, it’s never too late to start on drawing – or any other skill!
Walls and Tussocks
One of the things I find happens very often to me – as regular readers will have noticed! – is that there’s a lot of rethinking that happens.
This is partly because rather than being trained to create a design in detail from the start, I have worked it out all very painfully for myself, with different levels of success for each project. And I’ve only been doing it for twenty years. I’m much better than I was, but I am sure that my visual imagination would be much more detailed had I started at the age of sixteen, say!
So, for example, when I first stitched outlines for the blocks, and hadn’t stitched the blocks, it looked very much too dark and out of balance, so I lost confidence, took out the outlines, and worked the blocks without them. Now that Aethelflaed is in place, darker and more emphatic than she might have been, the walls need a little more definition to stand up to her. But not too much, so this time I’m using essentially a mid tone of pinky plum. I think that’s going to work.
I’m also returning to the grass. You may recall that I had a thought as I was doing the early stages of the grass, thinking that it might be a good idea to increase the scale of the tussocks as I came forward. This is one of those elements which is a departure from classical opus anglicanum, as far as I know, but it is a way for me to explore some of the outer reaches of filament silk.
As I’ve said before, I’m not doing a reconstruction, I’m doing a thing which tries to tell a story using a blend of old and new design sensibilities, something that will be definitely a modern piece, but which has echoes.
How well this will work when all four of the Medieval Movers And Shakers are done and displayed together, I don’t know.
How well I will balance old style and new style, images, stories and echoes, I don’t know.
But it’s going to be fun finding out!
Starting The Cat, Smith
There is, among the dramatis animalae (my thanks to Anne Louise Avery for coming up with the term!) of “The Herb of Grace”, a tabby of imposing mien, introduced by his staff as “The cat, Smith”. In my memory he gets the whole name and title in full on all occasions, so I decided to include a tabby cat looking gravely out at the viewer.
Working on gauze produces alarming effects, early on. I started with the eyes, this time. I can tweak them later, but I felt that if I had them in place it might make placement of everything else easier.
I might even be right. I think I’ve set the eyes too close, and maybe not made the ears broad enough, but he is gradually taking shape.
Everything about these animal vignettes is an exercise in learning to see, and discovering how much more there is to see on each pass. As I write this, some weeks after beginning to stitch The Cat, Smith, I find myself comparing my stitching with my source photo and spotting things I missed, or maybe mishandled, and wondering how much tweaking that gauze will take.
I don’t think the head is finished, but I felt it was time to move on to the body, all the same. I’m going to try to block everything in and then refine later, so here I’m starting with his shirt front, and as I continue I will pick what seems like either the predominant colour or the background colour, whichever seems easier, and work that.
Each layer worked into that layer will help to create colours and shadows and, I hope, the sense of air in the fur.
Dragonfly – first trial..
I find dragonflies and damselflies absolutely enchanting. I’m not entirely sure that I’ve got the right sense of delicacy and enchantment here – the threads are a little clunky, maybe, and the metallic thread wants a conditioner or something else to protect it as I work. I wanted to use a longish thread so that I didn’t have lots of tyings-off, but that just meant more opportunity for tangles.
I outlined the body and then worked straight stitches across in a dark metallic thread. The intention was to work needlelace type stitches in the coloured thread, catching into the dark straight stitches. The idea was that that would modify the colour slightly.
It has worked after a fashion, and the feather stitch veins on the wings also work after a fashion. But not quite.
I need to think of ways to finish off the veins in the wings so the stitches don’t unravel – glue? fraycheck? enclosure?
And I think I maybe need to do it again, smaller, and using a single strand.
Thinking aloud about Placidus..
This images is from “Pisanello – The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN: 3936122202.”
If you really look at this painting, it has a rather otherworldly quality. The animals and the figure of St Eustace (he changed his name when he converted) all seem rather stiff and the landscape makes very little sense. It almost looks as though the figures are painted on top of a map of the forest, rather than being part of a scene.
I suppose when you consider that it is a painting representing an encounter with the numinous, it needn’t make sense. And perhaps he is depicting the moment after the event, when everything winds back a little.
I want to depict, if I can, the moment itself. The pulse of – Something – from the stag, the dogs and the horse and the man all astonished, skidding to a stop from a headlong chase. But also – and my little Animal Vignettes should help with this – the sense that this is happening in a forest with other creatures going about their daily activities. Some will be observing, aware; some, like the little Fawn, totally oblivious. My thought at the moment is for the stag to have bounded up onto a convenient bit of rock, and started a waterfall, which references the water of baptism. I’m finding it hard to design a landscape that makes sense.
Maybe Pisanello had that problem too! There’s no reason to believe the artists of the past had it any easier than we do…
Finding the right references for horses reined in from a gallop is so far proving impossible, and so many other things are proving elusive, too. I originally planned to have a frame of scrollwork with the symbols of the four Gospels in the four corner, then I thought I would extend the animals into the frame, and now I don’t know at all.
This is another case when I find myself agreeing with Degas (“If it were easy, it would not be fun!”). It is the difficulties and the challenges that give me something interesting to ponder, and devising my improvisatory stitching technique for the animals is giving me some interesting stitching.
A website for Dreams of Amarna
The Dreams of Amarna book and project now has a website!
Not without some muttering and spluttering, I admit. Many years ago, I had some understanding of designing websites – quite simple ones, but still, I could do it.
That is no longer the case. There is altogether too much to deal with, too many different browsers and devices, too many changes of standard and best practice, not to mention technologies.
So instead, I used one of the templating services, said to provide an intuitive interface for developing a reliably working website.
I would argue that “intuitive” is entirely the wrong word, but after about five do-overs, I got there in the end.
It’s not wildly complicated, and it is no substitute for this blog, which will continue as before. It’s not meant as a substitute.
It is meant, in fact, to make life easier all round. For anyone specifically interested in the Dreams of Amarna, anyone who wants to help me plan and prepare the hoped-for exhibition, anyone who wants me to give a talk for their group – there’s a single point on the web where they can find me, and from which they can contact me.
I should probably have tried to get it ready earlier, but then, I hadn’t had Bernard Rose’s fabulous product and author photoshoot before…
Aethelflaed’s Dress – going round again!
Just so we know where we stand…
Before I went through the reboot, I’d the back panel stitched and some dark lines in place – shadows and stitch lines. It’s not right at all. It looks unthought-through, and the drapery isn’t draping in a way that makes sense even in a medieval fashion.
So in the end I took it all out, ornate border and all, and started again.
I’ve broadened the decorative border to have two navy lines and three gold, and given it a darker background.
Then I turned one of my resource photos into greyscale, printed it out and stared at it. I’ve also stretched out the colours a bit to emphasize the lights and the darks.
So now, I want to translate what I’ve seen to the slightly different cut of Aethelflaed’s dress, and the slightly different style of Opus. That may be a bit tricky.
First thing to do was to remove all the unhelpful darks already in place. I think I just need to start all over again!
So here is the start of starting all over again. Light at the front, quite broad, and some new highlights. I may have to think a bit more about the border, but I believe that will be easier to do as the rest of the dress comes together.
I also need to get the sleeves in. There’ll be a contrast here, the sleeves of a contrasting shift or under-dress, and that will help the image to make sense from a difference.
Mary The Pekinese again
It’s quite hard to explain what I mean by the improvisatory, painterly approach I’m using for the assorted Animal Vignettes for the Conversion of Placidus project, so since Mary the Pekinese is relatively simple compared with some of the others – mostly straight stitches, rather than the tangle of Cretan I used, for example, for the little rabbit, I thought maybe a sequence of photos was the best way to show you what happens.
In each case I’ve put the frame on top of the photo I’m using. The finer, subtler details of the fur don’t really show through the gauze, but it does give you some sense of how I am selecting my threads to capture the impression of colour and texture that I’m working from. I’m not concerning myself at all with what fibre the thread is made from – if it does what I want it to do, I’m using it.
I’m also recollecting a quotation I found, attributed to the painter Edgar Degas : “If it were not difficult, it would not be fun!”
Worth the effort, though. I do think she’s turned out rather well!
Beginning on Aethelflaed herself. Again.
Sigh. When last you saw Aethelflaed, I was about to start unpicking the back of her riding dress.
It’s done now. As regular readers of my blog know, I don’t unpick unless I really can’t avoid it and I’m sure I can do better. If I have no idea what to do differently, I leave well alone until I can come up with a Plan.
Well, I have a plan now. I’m changing up which silks I use, going for something redder and with less blue in it. Here’s hoping that the border still works, but that would be a serious trial to unpick (as though a panel of straight split stitch weren’t already a trial!).
You can tell I’m not entirely sure of myself, however.. I have worked her gauntlets first!
You may recall I designed them as mittens, rather than gloves with fingers, because I could not imagine that fur lined mittens weren’t a thing for a noblewoman riding, and besides, it let me escape doing her hands. I will have to do hands for Rahere and Julian, but until then, I’m ducking it.
I gave the gauntlets a narrow border of yellow, thinking of a silk or metal braid that might have been used as a trim.
Then I decided to make sure she was shod. Practical brown ankleboots, with extra reinforcing down around the heel. I’m not sure whether stirrups were in use at this point, and in any case, I think it’s a detail I don’t need to add at this stage.
And now I really can’t put off that dress any longer!
Starting Mary the Pekinese
Now, although the starting impulse for the Placidus panel is the Pisanello painting (and I will be saying more about that in another post), it is also Elizabeth Goudge’s story, woven around an imagined version on an ancient wall. In the book, “The Herb of Grace”, the painting is already in the air, in your mind as you read, long before the mischievous young twins start pulling wallpaper off the pantry wall to reveal an ancient fresco.
So although I’m not intending any humans other than Placidus himself to be in the painting, the family dogs are definitely going to be in there, and I am starting with Mary the white pekinese.
And here we go again – the sketchiest of outlines, a piece of gauze, and the sort of breathless pause you take when you Definitely Don’t Want To Ruin It.
As you can see, the stitched version isn’t the same size as the source photo, so I can’t quite lay the gauze over the top to find where to stitch, but I can compare the shapes I’m creating. The black thread (good grief, I’m using black thread!!) is a fine silk, as used on the woodpecker.
The grey thread here in the highlights is from a gorgeous variegated silk eight strand thread. I think I may have bought it for “Leaving The Tyne“, but to be honest, at this stage I have no idea! It’s going to be useful, though, because I have several shades to pick from within a single length..
And I am already startled by how well Mary the Pekinese is looking.