Tag: Designing
Stella’s Birds – Doing the Leaves..
I started with a bit of a blind alley…
My natural tendency is to barrel in with glee and use a different stitch for every element, but I am learning (somewhat belatedly, it must be admitted!) that moderation is a virtue in design as in life.
So after a couple of blind alleys – wheatear stitch doesn’t sit happily with the crinkles of the vine leaf! – I have actually been quite temperate. There are three leaves in the design, and after some thought and experimentation I’ve settled on the same stitch combination for all three of them.
I’m using some of that gorgeous Studio Flax linen thread, which has really rewarding stitch definition, so it seemed as though more knotted and twisted stitches were in order.
I chose to use Palestrina Knot Stitch (entered in the RSN stitch bank as Double Knot Stitch) for the outlines of all three leaves. It’s strongly textured, so it should stand up to that Portuguese Knotted Stem Stitch, and it’s flexible enough to follow all the crinkles of the vine leaves.
For the veins, I chose to use ordinary Twisted Chain Stitch, working it carefully to keep each chain stitch looking separate. Twisted Chain Stitch can be worked drifting towards Rope Stitch (this is discussed on the RSN Stitch Bank page) and indeed, in other parts of this panel I expect to use that variation.
Stella’s Birds isn’t going to be a sampler in any formal sense. But as I push/pull between throwing every stitch in my shelf full of stitch dictionaries at it, and restricting my stitch choice in the interests of providing a bit of calm at various points in the piece, I may find myself demonstrating some of the breadth of execution available in all of them.
In all cases, however, Harry The Hound Of The Doleful Countenance has been overseeing operations!
Starting, at last, on the Lotus Flower Coat
You might recall that a gorgeous piece of turquoise tweed came my way and provoked thoughts of a jacket or coat decorated with lotus flowers. So, not part of the “Dreams of Amarna”, but once you have an interest in something, or an attachment to a design style, it never really lets go!
And I didn’t find myself a Twixmas project, so rather than having a small pause, I’m moving straight on. It will be worked in the hand, so it fits the challenge of not needing the place the Christmas Tree lives, and to be honest, I’ve not been finding the last few months stressful in embroidery terms (in others, yes!) and I don’t feel I need a reboot. So, onward!
Anyone who attended the ThreadTalk I did for the Embroiderers Guild, or who was reading my planning for Stella’s Birds will be familiar with my paper cutouts by now! You can see that this isn’t quite right. It looks a bit too abrupt, the spaces are maybe in the wrong places.
This is altogether better. It’s not so abrupt, it’s paying heed to the botanical form while keeping to the stylised appearance of the original ancient Egyptian inspiration.
My intention is that the shapes will be filled with rows and rows of line stitches, chain stitch and feather stitch variations mainly, and at the moment I am planning to leave a line of untouched fabric showing around each of the elements. Once I have the thing finished, I can decide whether to fill in the gaps!
I’ll be using a mix of threads, too, wool, silk, cotton, some plain, some variegated.
Stella’s Birds – Starting the Embroidery..
You have to start somewhere, don’t you!
Once I had finally become happy with the design for Stella’s Birds, I thought it was Time To Start.
And you may remember that I mentioned when I was working on the Jacket of Many Flowers that I have learnt, over the years, that when I’m working something like a spray or branch of flowers, leaves, and fruit, I need to start with the branches. In the past when I have started with leaves and flowers, the whole design has remained “spotty” and unconnected, and I don’t feel that I’m making progress.
That’s so dispiriting that these days, I do the branches first.
I’ve used soft cotton in a warm pinky-brown, and chose one of my favourite stitches, Portuguese Knotted Stem Stitch (link to the RSN stitch bank entry). It leaps forward very satisfyingly, so it didn’t take me long, once I got a chance to settle down to it, to get the branches done.
However…
I wasn’t entirely paying attention.
I remembered to leave a gap for one of the bird’s tails, but not the other. And as I look at my other choices of thread, this pinky brown has no other friends. So I may decide, at a later date, to remove part of the branch stitching to allow for tails and feet.
I have a slight fear that I may even have to remove all of it. I love Portuguese Knotted Stem Stitch, but it is full of personality, and if I don’t get the balance right in the rest of the stitching it might unbalance the whole thing!
Stella’s Birds – design settled!
I took my problem with Stella’s Birds to my Mam, who pointed out that grapes hang downwards from the vines. You can tell I’m no gardener, can’t you! So I turned the triangular design upside down and started playing with curved branches. That immediately began to feel better.
Then I found a Delft tile of a bird in flight (still in the vaguely mad territory of the medieval inspiration) and that unlocked the headache I was having over the feeding bird. The placings for the birds were fairly straightforward – I’m simply alternating them and placing them in the right part of the design area. The leaves and grapes were trickier, because the angles they sat at were going to matter.
So – remember my Thread Talk? – back to paper cutouts! – I started playing around with cutouts of the leaves and bunches of grapes, to get the spacing to make a bit more sense, and finally decided to have three bunches of grapes, and three leaves, to go with the three birds (who have now been informally named Bitey Bird, Stabby Bird and Shouty Bird!).
At which point, I found myself quoting from My Fair Lady : “By George, she’s got it!”.
So, time to do a tracing, transfer it to my fabric, and then also transfer it to a piece of paper so that I could play with balancing the solid bits and more open bits of the design.
This is about as far as I can go without having the actual stitched textures in front of me. Solid emphasis on the vines, the grapes, and the leading edges of the wings – yes, I’m sure about that. Other details – maybe filling in half of the vine leaves, some of the details on the birds – they can wait.
Time to get stitching!
Starting to plan Aethelflaed’s Border
As I get nearer to stitching the border for the Aethelflaed Embroidery, it is starting to become imperative that I make some plans for it.
This is why I started to work on painting, originally – not to become a painter, but simply to make design mistakes more quickly and easily than in stitches!
As I began thinking about it, and since I am conceiving of four panels which will between them cover four now lesser-known characters in politics and religion during the medieval period, I came to the conclusion that I should keep some themes across the four.
I’m keeping the background of trellis couched laid silk, for a start, and it will be the same blue, although I may make a change to the order of dark and light in the trellis couching itself.
The dog roses I used for William Marshall will appear in Aethelflaed’s border as well. My researches haven’t turned up any specific flora associated with Aethelflaed, but there’s a tale that the Viking attack on Chester was routed with boiling beer and angry bees, so I’m experimenting with beer barrels and bee skeps.
And there will be a different cross at the cardinal points of the embroidery. These first efforts are patterned after sketches I’ve made at some of the exhibitions I’ve visited, showing elements of the Staffordshire Hoard and other items. Garnet and gold is a combination very strongly associated with the Anglo Saxons, and I’m having a lot of fun playing with details.
Some of the ideas are not really working, others I think definitely are.
I’m certainly not yet ready to assemble a finished design. But at least there may be some signs of something to work with, and after all, I’ve still got a few weeks of thinking time while I do the laid and trellis couched border!
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!
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.
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.
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!