Tag: Tynemouth Priory
Thinking about a finish..
Tynemouth Priory has been in progress for what seems like forever. It was started when I was working on “Leaving The Tyne, 1915”, as part of the many experiments it took took to make that piece the success it eventually became. And it was: I am still very pleased with Leaving The Tyne, and extremely glad that my father saw it before he died, and maybe was able to see something of where my embroidery was headed.
I finished this version over lockdown giving it a new sky and a new river (rather sea-like, I admit, but if you know where the Priory stands on the headland, you’ll know that that isn’t unreasonable!). Then I stared at it perplexedly and put it in a box until Later. They say Tomorrow Never Comes, but the aphorism says nothing about the vaguer Later.
I have decided that Later is Now, if you follow me, and that since I am still quite pleased with it, I should mount it properly and send it out into the world for someone else to enjoy. That in turn means I need to decide how to deal with it.
Since the needlelace is raised, it can’t go in a frame, and in any case, I’m not keen on putting embroidery behind glass. So I’m trying to choose a fabric that I can mount it on.
Although having put all my photos in landscape orientation, I’m having second thoughts. I think I’ll turn the canvas into portrait orientation and then mount the picture above the centreline, giving a space of fabric at the bottom to lead in. I wonder whether that changes my decision?
Finishing Tynemouth Priory
I’m a little behind with posting this, but there were a few details to finish off-video…
I didn’t want to overdo the water, but I wanted to break up the pattern a little, to create the sense of foam on the surface. I’ve used French Knots, in white silk and very very pale blue single strands of cotton. There were more, but having put them in, I took them straight out again!
Finally, I got to add in the two needlelace slips. I hope you can see that I’ve added a few green French knots to help one section to bed in nicely.
The other one, I’ve twisted and pulled a little, and I’ve tried not to stitch it down too firmly or in too many places. I want the shadow of the slip to help create the sense of distance and disintegration, and I think it’s turned out rather well. I did jam it up hard against the rows of raised satin stitch, and again, I had to be a bit careful, to make sure I didn’t pull those stitches through to the back.
Finally, the first attempt at Tynemouth Priory for “Leaving the Tyme 1915”, finished in its own right. I suspect that when I frame it, I will crop at least some of the water out, but for sure, as I said in the video, adding it in if you didn’t do enough the first time becomes really, really trying.
As you know, I don’t feel comfortable planning to the last detail before I stitch. I like to have space to explore and experiment. That in turn means I have to be comfortable tweaking how I work and how I display what I’ve done, and it is often the case that embroidery responds to close mounting in a way that watercolours, for instance, do not. I would far rather do more stitching than I really needed to – even with an exasperating stitch like this! – than have to go back to it when I thought I was finished and my mind has moved on to something else!
Tynemouth Priory
Now then, this is an old friend, and everyone who’s been following my SlowTV Stitchery will be aware that since this is the Year of Finishes, I’ve decided to finish it. This is the first “Tynemouth Priory”, which I started, only to decide that the colours were all wrong against the Flag Sunrise, and I had to start again. I’m glad I did, because the second version fitted into the complete “Leaving The Tyne, 1915” very much better than this one would have done.
However, when I came back to it and started stitching again, I realised that the variegated thread I was using in the cloud may have looked right in the skein, but it wasn’t right when it was stitched.
Sigh.
Time to channel my inner Penelope, and unravel at night everything I had worked during the day.
I picked out two slightly different pale cream stranded cottons to take the place of the variegated thread, and a stranded cotton in a slightly lighter blue than the coton a broder, to go near the horizon, and I’m now reinstating it, with interesting diversions to create cloud-like effects.
At this point I was still feeling very tentative, but I think the sky is improving as I progress across it!
Episode 60 of SlowTV Stitchery is now live. In which is considered making a virtue out of a necessity, arguments with the ghost of Miss Hunter, and a plea is made for an Introduction to the Picts, all supplemented with some meditations on literary sources for future projects.