A Creative Approach — Project 2 Developing your marks — Stage 4 — Preparing to create textures

In this exercise I had to look through some of my previous work and think about them in terms of textiles and creating textures. I looked at some of my sketches, but one stood out the most is the Agapanthus root from stage 3, exercise 2 — it’s the ugliest topic and drawing but I think it does show a lot of texture. It’s both rough and shiny, lumpy and distorted, it has hard and soft parts, and chaotic stringy parts.

Here’s the drawing and original photo:

Whilst I started to embroider just a small part of the root, I was swept up by it and wanted to finish it so I embroidered the whole piece instead. I used a mixture of matte and shiny threads, thick and thin. Stitches included running stitch, back stitch, satin stitch, chain stitch, and a couple of crouched stitches. The colours closely match the original (well, as well as I could given the threads I have at home). I used a mixture of short and long stitch lengths and narrow and wider stitch widths to try capture some of the space & shape of the root. It doesn’t look exactly like the original though I think I have managed to capture some of the textures.

I’ve been reading through the book “Hoopla: The Art of Unexpected Embroidery” by Leanne Prain, and there’s a chapter called “A Brief and Incomplete History of Embroidery” which mentions,
“Early embroideries were stitched to tell religious and social histories, and they depicted scenes not only of peaceful domestic life, but also the horrors of conquest.”

Agapanthus plants are a pest in the Australian native bush — they are an introduced plant, and whilst they might be OK for paths and lining highways, they are not meant to be planted in bushland. J tries to remove them as much as possible — he’d pulled this one out of the garden and was showing me how the shoots sprout all over the main root. So, whilst this isn’t a war of invading peoples, it is a smaller scale war with the Agapanthus to try remove them all. Once they flower and the wind spreads their pods and flowers, they spread quickly. So this picture reminds me of the horrors of the Agapanthus conquest of the garden and J’s hard, great work in trying to lessen their damage to the Australian bush.

A Creative Approach — Project 2 Developing your marks — Stage 3 — A Sample

For this exercise I chose one of my ink drawings which is mostly line based. I hand stitched in running stitch and stem stitch — in different directions and with a mixture of threads, some shiny, some matte, some thick, some sewing machine rayon so very thin. A couple of the diagonal sections turned out quite textural and layered. They have multiple threads and layers so are quite raised on the surface of the fabric. These probably would suit the following exercises. The stitches are all line based stitches though, so it shows how they can be used to create both line and texture.

Here’s the ink drawing which was used for inspiration. The top two diagonal / horizontal sections are a bit different — I was enjoying seeing the different light on the threads poke through as I stitched, so this is a bit of interpretation rather than accurate portrayal of the original picture.

The range of threads used in my sampler:
scansilk – colour # 1804 100% rayon
scansilk – colour # 1805 100% rayon
DMC #8 colour 321 coton perle
DMC #25 colour 915 mouline special
DMC #4 2346 coton retours mat
On the Surface – the second one on the card – Couture Red (CRT113)

The fabric is olive green linen from my fabric stash (this was my partner’s Mum’s fabric).

A Creative Approach — Project 2 Developing your marks — Stage 2 — Exploring marks and lines through stitch techniques

For this exercise, I started with machine embroidery. I dropped the feed dogs and put the fabric into the hoop, but I had to remove the footer each time I had to start sewing. The first stitch I tried, the machine just sewed on the same spot — almost like satin stitch. I found it really hard to move the fabric around. So I ended up taking the fabric out of the embroidery hoop, lifting the feed dogs again and sewing normally. This time I used red thread so it’s easier to see the stitches (the first exercise was off-white on cream calico so is harder to see the stitches clearly). I didn’t have any other machine threads of different weight to try the hand wound bobbin.

I made some parallel lines, moving closer together until they made a solid area (albeit small solid area!)
and I tried some circles, though they’re a bit wonky. I also tried some “squaretooth” stitches as I liked the shape of these. I must have a tension issue as there’s a bit of puckering of the fabric where the stitches have pulled the fabric around the stitches. I did try different stitch lengths. When I did the test swatches I found that tension=3 was the best setting, so I kept this the same for all the stitchings

Front side of the fabric:

Underside of the fabric:

Next I tried some hand embroidery using different weight and colour threads.

The sample on the left (red thread) is a mix of running stitch – using different stitch lengths, stem stitch, back stitch and a short satin stitch.

The sample on the right (blue thread) is a pattern of horizontal and vertical running stitches, using similar colour range and slightly different thread weight. Horizontal threads are made with “mouliner special” DMC 25, colour way 796. The vertical threads are slightly thinner, DMC #8, colour way 820.

Front view:

Rear view:
Once again, I like the underside of the fabric, especially when viewed from a distance.

For the next sample, I used a piece of cotton I’d dyed at a Shibori workshop a few weeks ago. To make this piece, I’d put a coin in the centre of the fabric, then wrapped it in string. you can see the fine, lighter coloured string markings on the fabric. I sewed some straight lines, squaretooth lines and zigzag lines in red cotton. I also tried circular lines around the centre where the coin imprint is, and some diagonal lines too. The centre of the fabric puckered a bit, so it’s raised compared to the surrounding fabric. When I scanned it, it squashed down and covered some of the stitches

11/08: Today I tried some darning stitch (Sue Stone calls it needle weaving) — though I changed the width of the stitches so the first are further apart than the latter stitches. I also changed thread — from a thin cotton to a thicker embroidery thread. It was like weaving with the needle & thread. I think it could have been a bit neater, and now that I see it with varied stitches, I prefer the more uniform, loose weaving that Sue Stone does to my experiment. I will try another later to more closely match how she does hers.

A Creative Approach — Project 1 Marking marks — Stage 3 — Exercise 2 — Using marks to create surface textures

This exercise involved recreating the textured surfaces of objects.

This first page has a drawing trying to replicate the texture of patio tiles, and another showing the branches and remaining leaves of a tree that had lost its leaves during winter — as viewed from the patio whilst looking across the garden. I painted the watercolour wash over the ink drawing in the evening, and thought I was using a brownish grey colour but when I checked in the light of day the next day, I’d actually used a purple colour. Oops. So the colours are not 100% accurate but hopefully the feel of the texture shows through:

The second group of drawings are of the leaves on a pencil pine. At first I thought the segments of the leaves were like little nodules, so I drew the first one (top right) with drops of ink, but when I looked closer I noticed that there were small crosses along the leaves segmenting the sections. I thought this would suit cross-stitch, so tried to draw it in inks and then paint over the top. the problem I found is I couldn’t mix the correct lighter shade of green to draw the crosses. On the weekend I only had my inks and bamboo pens as I was away for the weekend. When I came home I painted the crosses on, though my technique isn’t that good — and probably the paintbrush I used wasn’t fine enough, so the crosses are a bit rough:

The last one is trying to replicate the textures on a root of an Agapanthus plant. These plants are a pest in the native garden so J pulls them out whenever possible. He was showing me the shoots coming out of the root. I thought it had a nice mixture of textures — smooth surfaces, hard and soft parts, fibrous, stringy parts and soft leaves. Also I liked the concentric ridges around the root — it reminded me of how I actually draw a cylindrical surface on paper.

Even though the Agapanthus root is quite ugly, I quite like how this textural drawing turned out.

A Creative Approach — Project 1 Marking marks — Stage 3 — Exercise 1 — Using marks to create surface textures

This exercise involved using marks to create surface textures — working from visual sources.

For these exercises I used pages from a magazine – “belle” magazine, june/july 2013

This first one is trying to replicate the textured rug, using graphite and charcoal pencils:

For the second drawing I was trying to replicate the soft, blurred, smudged look of the glass. The blue definitely worked better than the yellow glass. The yellow paint was too wet and just came out as flat colour.

In the third one, I tried to replicate the curves. I didn’t have silver pens or paints so I used blue Copic pens for this attempt: