![\"Photo](\"http:\/\/www.blog.virtuosewadventures.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/02\/DigHousePhoto.jpg\")
<\/a>Photo of the Dig House (courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society)<\/p><\/div>\n
Mary Chubb comments in the book that the Expedition House is one of the houses of Akhenaten’s time, built back to roof level and then roofed, so of course I want to include it.\u00a0 The photograph I am using came from the Egypt Exploration Society<\/a>, and I simply sketched a freehand outline of the Expedition House on the cotton with a quilter\u2019s pencil and started stitching.<\/p>\n Dig House - Detail 1<\/p><\/div>\n In a sense what I am doing here is treating the original photograph as a pattern of dark, medium and light tones, and trying to recreate that tonal pattern. I hope that if the pattern in accurate enough, the whole piece will make visual sense as a representation in fabric and thread of the house that the members of the Expedition lived in.<\/p>\n The fabric and threads are by Stef Francis<\/a>, the fabric a fine turban cotton, overdyed in sandy and stony colours, and the threads, stiff linens and cottons, a greyish blue and blues shading into dark reddish browns.<\/p>\n Dig House - Detail 2<\/p><\/div>\n The threads are really much too stiff to work as well as I’d hoped. They are difficult to control and need a more substantial fabric than I am using as a basis. They are also not quite the colours they seemed on the hank, so the overall colour impression is unanticipated.<\/p>\n The stitches include herringbone, stem stitch, chain stitch, couched filling, even a sort of brick stitch \u2013 all simple stitches, but this is an exploration of the image and not really of technique.<\/p>\n Experiment in stitching the dig house<\/p><\/div>\n This is very much an experiment as I\u2019ve never worked with so sketchy (sorry!) a plan or so little on the fabric before when I\u2019ve been working on something so relatively complex. It\u2019s quite scary, but as I mentioned in a previous post<\/a>, over the past couple of years I have also been learning to paint in watercolours, and I\u2019ve discovered that in that medium I do much better when I don\u2019t put too much on the paper before I start painting. Of course I get many fewer \u201csuccesses\u201d than if I were to draw in detail from a photograph, but it makes me observe more closely and take more pains.<\/p>\n At the moment I am not entirely happy with the way this is turning out. I was hoping to use the fabric as a mid tone, but the threads are not close enough in colour family for that to work, and so I am having to stitch more of the design than I would have liked. I should maybe try again using a different fabric, but in the meantime, persevere with this to see what else I can learn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019ve been thinking so hard about Amarna over the past two years that I have begun to\u00a0 get itchy fingers. So I thought I would try something\u2026\u00a0 I don’t know whether this will find\u00a0 a place in the final pair of hangings, but it was time I started stitching! Mary Chubb comments in the book… Continue Reading Dreams of Amarna \u2013 The Dig House Experiment<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,13],"tags":[155,25,11],"class_list":["post-115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dreams-of-amarna","category-large-embroidery-projects","tag-dreams-of-amarna","tag-experiments","tag-research","radius"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.virtuosewadventures.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.virtuosewadventures.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.virtuosewadventures.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.virtuosewadventures.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.virtuosewadventures.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115"}],"version-history":[{"count":53,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.virtuosewadventures.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":777,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.virtuosewadventures.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115\/revisions\/777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.virtuosewadventures.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.virtuosewadventures.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.virtuosewadventures.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/a><\/a>