Seeds and Urban

I’ve settled on an urban theme for our latest challenge, and I’ve now completed two small pieces. We decided we’d complete one a month, and use a size no larger than 12″ in any direction.

This is my first piece, which was based on one of our local potteries  (which some people may recognise from the TV program Pottery Throw down). It was meant to be much more abstract than this, but somehow I got sucked into getting the shapes of the buildings correct. I used assorted fabric pieces, including some rust-dyed pieces, cut to shape, then overlaid these with sheers, and finished it all off by adding hand stitched details. In the end although it isn’t what I was aiming for, I think it’s something I can probably build upon for one of my future pieces. Overall I’d say ‘satisfactory, could do better’!

My second piece is a little more along the lines of what I was aiming for. This time I decided to go for more of a landscape view, and I like it much better. I used the same rust-dyed fabric for the sky and cut a piece of card to the shape of the industrial skyline, which I used as a template for stencilling the darker colour. I pieced fabric scraps together for the ‘ground’, and drew the lines of my design with a fine black pen. Then I covered the whole thing with a transfer printed sheer fabric to give some colour variation, before hand-stitching over the drawn lines and filling in all of the details.

I have to confess that I’m having a bit of a love affair with coloured sheer fabric at the moment, and with layering these with other fabrics to give depth, colour and interest to pieces. I used this method in my latest piece for the FifteenxFifteen group, which is the first in a series of pieces which will be based on the theme of Seed Heads.

For this one I used several layers of sheers which were coloured with transfer inks, and incorporating positive and negative shapes using a paper resist in the shape of honesty seed heads. Of course I’ve added hand-stitching both for the details and for the quilting – this is my favourite way of working. The series will consist of five pieces, and I am hoping to use a different technique in each – so maybe I should try hard to use more machine stitching in one of the pieces. The only thing is that I so enjoy hand-stitching, and I consider it to be far superior to my machine stitching (which I don’t feel very confident with). I suppose I will never get better at machining unless I practise more, so I really should make an effort with one of the series, but I can’t guarantee that the pleasure of the needle in the hand won’t win out!

Joan