More Pretty Little Horses

I have progressed the horses since my last post. As you can see, I have reverted to using the Sulki outlines. Having placed them around the blanket, I thought I'd try stitching through them once again, and found it worked without any trouble getting my needle through. Maybe my needle is sharper!

I've also varied my stitches. Herringbone is emerging as my favourite. It gives a good fill as well as texture. With a variegated thread it is especially effective.

Chain stitch is also proving interesting and pleasant to do. 

                               My favourite effect is two colour chain stitch. It's more difficult to execute (especially in wool, because this stitch is hard on the thread) but a great rendition of 'dapples' I think.

I've moved to Mogear threads.They have some lovely pastel colours. I tried using them for two colour chain but soon gave up. They catch and tangle. Instead I am using two colours together, not as spectacular but an even better dapple!

By far the easiest and fastest fill is herringbone. 

I now have 38 horses on the blanket. I may yet add more if I decide they are needed for the overall effect.

I cut 38 shapes out of pink blanketing to match those already embroidered and have begun to appliqué, each of them to the back of the blanket to cover the back of each horse.  

                 

The first eight are in place. I'm quite pleased with this as a solution for covering the back. I don't want to back the blanket with a lining. I love the feel of the blanketing. Even if I backed it with blanketing, I'd have to quilt it to hold it in place and I don't want to do that. This method covers the stitching on the back, so it won't catch, but retains the feel of the blanket.

Once I've appliquéd all the pink horses, all I have to do is dissolve any remaining Sulky and blanket stitch the edge (!). That'll be another post!

Bush Sentinel Cushion Cover Experiment 1

 

One of my daughters needing new cushions gave me a reason to get out the Dijanne Cevaal Bush Sentinel panels I have had for a couple of years now. I bought them during the bush fires in 2020, intending to embroider them for cushions.  The pandemic overwhelmed the bush fire moment. I still think the panels are interesting and have potential, but I have been puzzling about how to use them in a way with which I am comfortable. The dilemma has been how to integrate a very European-influenced image into a much older history and tradition of Australian bush. The moment seems opportune, since koalas have this week been declared an endangered species due to the destruction of their habitat in NSW and Queensland.

I have four panels, two in a yellowy-gold and two in a deep orange. The cushions need to be 60cm square and the fabrics I had in mind were only half metre lengths. I ordered a metre of two more fabrics from the Aboriginal Fabric Gallery in Alice Springs, Goanna Dreaming by Heather Kennedy and  Bush Plum by Polly Wheeler Napurulla and  two more from Find a Fabric in Queensland, . 

When the fabrics arrived from Alice Springs they seemed to work with the yellow-gold fabric.  I also bought from the Gallery a small book that was helpful.   I haven't been able to find out much about the author, except that he has published a number of booklets that are held in the National Library of Australia and three of his booklets, are sold by First Nations businesses.  I found the chapter in this book really helpful. It gave me an idea of how to link this European-derived figure to the First Nations fabric - the notion of sentinel to spirit and landscape.

My next challenge was to frame up a panel so I could stitch it. The shape, especially its narrowness, did not lend itself to a hoop. I dug out a scroll frame I had purchased somewhere alone the line, but never used, and the jointed Nurge seated stand and managed to get them working together. The clamp on this stand is inflexible but could be made to work with this frame.

I also gave in and used double-sided tape to attach the panel to the scroll. The tape on the scroll was so tough I couldn't get a needle through it.

The result, however, was excellent. The clamp needed continual tightening, but the system allowed me to get on and do the embroidery comfortably.

I worked the gum blossom in padded satin stitch and pistol stitch using both linen and silk  thread. The banksia is in straight stitches and bullion knots. I had intended to leave the black sections un-embroidered, but  after I had put in lines of gimp along the centre of each leaf on the left of the cloak I added some lines of green silk. I also abandoned the Nurge stand in favour of my Lowery - much more stable.              

I cut around the figure, rather than using the whole panel, because I wanted to merge her into the landscape. 

It was only as I began the appliqué that I realised I should have purchased 1.2 metres rather than the 1.0. in order to get a 60cm square. I seem to be making more of these mistakes as I get older. I managed by creating a join and appliquéing the figure along the join, then inserting a zip along the top.  I have three more of these to make - and I have bought 1 metre for each. There are a couple of work-arounds I can try.

I'm quite pleased with the result.  ( I did iron it, but I then transported it, so it needs to be ironed again). This is large - the figure is 40cm high.

I had volunteered to do some further research this year on the history of the Goddess in Embroidery for the World Embroidery Study Group at our Guild. I had scheduled it for July, but the person due to present in March has requested more time so I've brought mine forward. It puts me under a bit of pressure, but I think it will help me in working through this dilemma of cross-cultural imagery. I will keep posting as I work it through.

I've started work on the second panel - this time orange background. 

Mend and Make Do - or Repair and Renew

After many months of inactivity on the hexie front, on Tuesday this week I got out my winter quilt and began to applique the remaining 60 or so hexies around the edges. By Friday I realised I would be 3 hexies short, so I created 3 more. That evening I finished appliqueing them around the edge. This (left) is what it looks like. 

 

This is what it looked like when I originally finished it in April 2014.

In 2018 I realised that the wadding was leaking through the black edge, along the quilting, which was straight horizontal lines. I decided the best way to deal with this was to cover the border with more hexies. The easiest way to do it was to construct the hexies, then applique them to the black border. By March last year I had covered the top edge, one side edge and part of the second side edge before I ran out of hexies. I spent most of last Winter constructing the  77 hexies needed to finish it. Meanwhile I used the quilt on my bed with one and a half sides still not covered.

When the quilt came off my bed at the end of Winter  I had 75 hexies ready to apply - but other projects took priority and it remained waiting reproachfully in a prominent place in the linen cupboard. This week, when I finished the Remembrance Poppy, I bit the bullet and got the quilt out - it is, after all, only a couple of months to the return of Winter.

The appliqueing of the hexies was the easiest of the required tasks. The most tedious part was removing the tacking and the papers before they could be appliqued. Aside from the paper hexigons, that task produced lots and lots of tiny threads that refuse to budge from the hexie, or cling to the black background, or litter the carpet. 

My ort pot was put to good service! 

Fortunately, because these have been folded for ten months, they hold their shape when the tacking and papers are removed

meaning I could place them on the quilt with a couple of pins to get a layout without them coming apart.

While the actual stitching on of the hexies is easy, and a task for doing in front of TV, the manipulation of the fairly heavy quilt, with hexies pinned to it, was more challenging.  It's also not a project to carry around with you!

All in all, I'm pleased to have it finished. Originally, all the black hexies had either a red or a purple hexie in the centre. This is more difficult where I have appliqued the hexies, as the remaining black background is not always perfect hexagon shape. I also need a bit more red fabric and possibly some purple too. I am not worrying about this at the moment. I will look into it and count the numbers needed once I have the quilt on the bed for Winter. That might be an improvement for next year.

The River Matters

This is an unusually long post - recording the work of several months to create my entry in the   Guild's SALA Exhibition, which opened tonight. SALA, the festival of South Australian Living Arts, is held in August.  Entries in SALA have to be original. The Guild Exhibition is on until 11 August.

The Guild theme is  'a celebration of water'. The organising committee has printed some  sea dragons, sea horses and water lilies on to fabric blocks which can be purchased,  embroidered and developed in original ways. I bought some, but then I had another idea.

A conversation with my brother drew my attention to lines in John Williamson's 1988 song It's a way of life, 

With cotton in their ears and dollars in their eyes

Their banker grins and our country dies.

Last SALA exhibition the Guild's theme was 'Aviarius'' and I made a quilt around the song When the red, red robin. When a friend at the Guild asked me if I was going to embroider a song again, I formed the idea of creating something using John Williamson's words, in the light of the water crisis in the Murray River basin. We surely need to celebrate the life-giving river system as we seek to restore it.

In my stash I had a couple of felt flimsies I had purchased from Dale Rollinson. They were not the right colour for a river project, but they had potential in size and texture, so I searched Dale's Thread Studio site and ordered four more. When they arrived, I selected 'ironbark' as my background and 'emerald' for the river. This is the river affected by blue-green algae. I set aside the others for the back.

I practiced Quaker stitch on the lettering, initially using Appleton's wool, which I doubled to get enough coverage.

I then switched to tapestry wool, which worked better.

It was hard to keep the lettering straight on the felt flimsies. The lines and letters I marked with chalk disappeared into the felt within minutes. Even when I tacked lines the felt shifted as I stitched. I don't, however, mind the crude look.

I looked at a lot of photographs of the Murray-Darling river system and made a rough sketch of my design.

I wanted to show the connection of the river to land and life and the impact of the greedy use of water. I thought of using various Aboriginal words and symbols for water but decided I did not have the authority or permission to do this. Instead, I thought I could use Aboriginal fabric. I figured that this was commercial product, and therefore in the public domain, available for incorporation.

I also searched for Aboriginal designed fabric with water themes and ordered pieces called Baanbaan, On Walkabout, Waterhole brown, Possum land and water blue from Aboriginal Fabric Gallery in Alice Springs. They were immensely helpful, rushing fabric to me before Easter. I also bought Dancing Spirit Brown and Snake and Emu from the One Stop Fabric Shop.

Over Easter I appliquéd, a few pieces of fabric to the flimsy and then embroidered a large tree overhanging the river.

I cut some gum leaves from another piece of fabric I found and appliquéd, them around the tree. It creates, I think, a good sense of a tree losing its leaves and beginning to die.









In the centre of the river felt I embroidered a map of the Murray-River basin, using gimp. The only way I could see to do this was using Solvi. The background is too soft and absorbent to use any marker. I don't much like stitching through a membrane but in this instance couldn't find another way.

I removed as much as the membrane as I could by tearing, rather than dampening the whole thing, as I wanted to wet as little as possible of the felt. It worked, but did need a bit of stitch repair afterwards.

By now it was becoming apparent that the pre-felted flimsy was not sufficiently stable where I had embroidered the tree and appliquéd the leaves.  I therefore applied some strips of iron-on interfacing to the back of the tree and needle-felted any areas of the flimsy that were sagging. I then applied a fine cotton backing the whole piece.







It is not perfectly geometrical, but, I think, close enough. I added orange trees and finished the reeds.


I needed to add more dead fish so printed a couple more photos, incorporating them with embroidered edges and extending the reeds.While I was about it, I extending the reeds around the edge of the river on the right bank.

Somewhere along the way, I had watched an episode of Heather Ewart’s ABC TV series Back Roads, in which she visited the Riverland. Right at the end, a farmer commented that “the river matters”. It stuck in my head and became the title of this embroidery.

 

I tried embroidering the title on the river, using Quaker stitch and some lovely variegated reddy-brown thread. To try to keep it straight and even I once again used Solvi.

I was disappointed in the result. The words were lost in the felt.

On the other hand, I had a lot of fun adding orange trees - needle felting the tops, (Veronica helped out here) embroidering the trunks with stem and Bokhara stitch and adding French knot oranges in varying shades of green to orange.

Throughout this process I shared my progress with my regular stitching friends  whose opinions helped a lot as I decided what to include or leave out.

I had a couple of attempts at adding some grapes and grapevine to the riverbank. I tried creating grapes from felt - but couldn’t get the definition I wanted.

 

Eventually I remembered my collection of iron-on transfers. I found a book of transfers that included a grapevine! I ironed sections of it on to linen, embroidered the linen, then appliqued this to the felt.

Satisfaction at last! It worked, though it wasn’t an easy process. The layers were, by now, quite thick and the linen edges frayed.  I needed to go around the edges with French knots to cover stray linen strands. This time, the reddy-brown thread worked well for the grapes!

Having rediscovered my iron-on transfers, I used a 1970s Hobbytex one of an ibis to create a banner on linen, adding the title text in Quaker stitch.

This gave the prominence I was after. The top of the banner is appliqued with French knots, blending with the dots on the fabric. The bottom edge is stitched with detached fly to continue the ibis’s footprint.

Appliqued animals add, I hope, a further sense of what we owe to the river.

It was time to turn my attention to the backing of the piece. Because I want this to be in some way a useful object, rather than a picture on a wall, I had conceived it as a small blanket or rug. I needed to keep it soft and flexible. The felt fabric is wonderfully soft, but won’t take hard wear.

My original intention was to back it with another felt flimsy, then bind the edge using cotton fabric depicting fish, turtles and other sea creatures - creating the idea of an island - the land and the river surrounded by life-giving oceans.

However, in order to get the edges straight I would need to square off the felt, which I couldn’t do without losing some content. I discussed this with some members of the World Embroidery Study (WES) Group, who suggested the edge should be as dynamic as the river.

I wanted to use some appliqued panels of Spirits on the back, along with a Rainbow Serpent, who, after all, created the river.  I really wanted to use the Spirits - hoping, I guess, that they ‘have the back’ of the river. A double layer of felt flimsy would make a great rug, but not an even edge.

I went ahead and added the Spirits to the felt flimsy called “Federation”. I love the colours, and I also like the symbolism of federation - a difficult process, but one that gives all of us an obligation to the river system.

I backed them with iron-on fusible webbing, ironed them on, then stitched around the edges of each piece with French knots. It worked a treat on these fabrics.

I was then left with the challenge of putting the two pieces together. One suggestion from the WES Group was to layer the piece on to black, but to do this, I would need to put black fabric between the two flimsies and either needle-felt or applique the flimsies to the black.

After quite a bit of thought and experiment I decided to try to fold the back edge over the front and stitch it down with a fly stitch - more bird tracks!

The process of stretching the back edge over the front was not easy. I managed it on three sides, then added a strip from another flimsy to complete the last side. I used some lovely hand-dyed thread from the Stitchy Box subscription given to me by my daughter in 2017.

I am pretty pleased with the result. The piece is wonderfully soft to hold. I hope I have done justice to the river - and to its importance to those who live along its banks and care for it. 

I have turned this blog into a booklet that I submitted as part of the Exhibition entry.

Acknowledgements and Resources

There are still numerous Aboriginal language speaking groups along the Murray River (though nowhere near as many as there were before white settlement), including the Ngarrindgeri in South Australia and Yorta Yorta near Echuca in Victoria. They have cared for the river for tens of thousands of years and continue to do so.A helpful map and information can be found at http://www.murrayriver.com.au/about-the-murray/murray-river-aboriginals/

Fabric for this project came from:

·      Aboriginal Fabric Gallery, Shop 3 Capricornia Centre, 91 Todd Street  Alice Springs, PO Box 3098, Alice Springs, NT 0870, Australia, Phone +61 8 8952 6163 Email aboriginalfabrics@bigpond.com

·      One Stop Fabric Shop http://onestopfabricshop.com.au/  PO Box 371,

Figtree NSW 2525  Phone: 02) 42299262

The fabric is Dancing Spirit Brown by Colleen Wallace, Possum Land and Water Blue by Heather Kennedy, On Walkabout Blue by Karen Taylor, Waterhole Brown by Arma Price Pitjara and Snake Emu Charcoal by W Evans.

The felt flimsies came from The Thread Studio, 6 Smith Street Perth, WA 6000

Australia Phone  +61 8 9227 1561,  Email: mail@thethreadstudio.com.

Some of the threads were from those sent to me in 2017 as part of a Stitchy Box monthly subscription given to me as a gift by my daughter. https://shop.stitchybox.com/

Photos of dead fish on Menindee Lakes were from:

The New Daily https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2019/02/07/rescue-murray-cod-deputy-pm/

The Daily Telegraph, Jeremy Buckingham, Ex-Greens MP Inspects Darling River Fish Kill 19 January 2019

Members of the World Embroidery Study Group of the Embroiderers’ Guild of SA provided suggestions and feedback, as did Susan Butler, Jennifer Stehn and my family.

Guardian Cushion 4: Colcha Angel

The last of my Guardian Cushions is rather different in style. I really wanted to work one of Esther Vigil's colcha angels - from her Colcha book. Somehow, batik didn't seem to suit and I searched my stash for something more suitable, coming up with a piece of rusty red dupion silk.This set me thinking, so, rather than stitching the figure in the colcha stitch, I made a pile of my silk fabric pieces and chose some that I thought would look well on the dupion.
I then traced the pattern, cut some pieces and played around. I used an adhesive backing to attach the silk cut-outs to a cheese-cloth backing.


I decided this would look better if machine-appliqued rather than hand-stitched (I am stepping well outside my comfort-zone here!) so set to work using some gold synthetic thread.




When I had the pieces outlined and stitched together I plunged into stitching it to the background silk. The gold thread was clearly designed for use in an overlocker, or machine that held the reel upright, so I had many breakages and rethreading but got into a pattern of intervening in the thread feed to minimise the problem.

I modified the halo shape as it seemed a bit small. I'm not sure this was the best idea - but I stuck with it. The original shape was more in keeping with the oval stylised head, whereas the round shape halo might be better with more flowing angel hair.

Although I love the Dijanne Cevaal panels and the challenge of finding the right thread and embellishment, I was pleased to turn to the purity and vibrancy of silk for this final cushion. It's as an angel should be.

During January, while I have been posting these Guardian cushions (which could not be posted until after Christmas) I have been to the SA Embroiderers' Guild Summer Week - and also on holiday. I will begin posting those projects towards the end of this week.