The new piece wants to be made. I keep finding myself sketching, rummaging through fabric, sitting at my worktable with my journal. I guess I'd better get working.
This scrap of vintage embroidery has been looking for a home. I thrifted it at an estate sale last year. The women who embroidered it had tons of linens, but her needlework skills weren't stellar. I've often wondered if maybe her eyesight had gotten bad over the years.
I reinterpreted the scrap here. I used tracing paper to trace over the actual fabric. Before transferring the design to fabric, the tracing paper assists composition. I can move the design around and decide how I want to use it, let it speak to the other elements.
And then I can iron it onto the fabric. I used Sulky transfer pens to trace the back side of the drawing and then set it to the fabric with a hot, dry iron.
I'm using a split stitch to embroider the design.
Waiting in the wings are embroidered and printed lines, birds and flowers, dense circles and pinwheels and bands of color.
As ever, I am thinking about composition, feeling limited by my knowledge. I am considering perfection versus messiness, precision versus speed, planning versus spontaneity. I am trying not to get bogged down in the details.
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