New work

Still using black fabric. This time I wanted to merge my older, compact, solidly filled up, stitch-upon-stitch style with the new, black fabric, more texture oriented, looser collage style. No 3D stars or stitched-over objects in this one but I did collage in a few small pieces of fabric and it is stretched onto a frame. As usual a variety of embroidery techniques are used, but I took some of them further than I usually do: the pointillism, most of which is made with metallic thread, is a mix of colored dots - some areas with a total multi-color mix, and others made up of different hues yet still keeping a single tone. There are a few small sections where the pointillism is on plain, un-colored fabric. The three-dimensionally rendered parts are rendered, I hope, with more realism than I have yet achieved. I make much use of the smokey monofilament thread which is becoming one of my favorite flosses. I'm finding that French knots are a good solution to fill in areas when I have a loss of ideas.

This took longer than expected and I had to leave out some images that I wanted, otherwise I would be working on it indefinitely.

New Work - "Mask / face / head"

I was working on the piece in the last post and decided there needed to be some kind of mask / face / head somewhere. I started creating one on a separate, smaller hoop and about a month later I was finished and ready to add it. However the face / head that I ended up with was just too big. So, I decided to use it as the 'center point' of an entirely different work. I stitched it to some larger fabric pieces but it looked a bit naked all by itself, so I added some collage elements around it. I started with a few small scraps of black fabric and eventually added pieces of velvet, lace, trimmings, and other odds and ends including stitched over shapes, not unlike the star shapes I have been doing in previous work. My inspiration was African and Indian clothing and fabric I have seen adorned with various different items. I wanted to keep everything black on black as I have been doing, and of course a photograph does not capture this well.

The face / mask / head was made with metallic floss - both 'pointillized' and also stitched over with smoky monofilament floss, and white cotton floss.