07.26.07
Posted in Classes at 2:03 pm by deRomilly
This is the project after all the low-relief (and a few french knots) have been added. Not looking much like a beach right now, is it?! I know from my colored pencil work that the beginning layers you put in often don’t look anything like the final work — people become orange and hot pink before they look like a real person! If there wasn’t a point behind this, I’d be tempted to turn it into a shooting star of some sort. But I think it will look much better as it progresses… So, I’m off to add more, which is the focus of week three of the class.
Adding more… that’s something that’s hard for me, whether I’m writing, drawing, or stitching.
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07.24.07
Posted in Classes at 10:22 am by deRomilly
I finally dug my camera out from under the pile of papers beside my computer and took photos of my progress with the Sumptuous Surfaces assignment. Yay! Click the thumbnails to see bigger pictures.
The design process started with a mind map that began with “Peace”. Since the supply list had encouraged not just monotone, but neutrals I had chosen whites and ecrus for my color palette. Not something I usually work in, unless I’m doing dresden work. 
But hey, is challenge, yes? I’m going to need to expand what I have further into the beiges as well, I think.
I ended up playing with thumbnails on the theme of “sea changes”. The first set of thumbnails I still like, but I think they’re going to require full stumpwork, and possibly a slightly larger color range to realize properly, and I just don’t have time to fiddle with it right now.
So I moved on.
The second set of thumbnails is decidedly abstract, something I don’t normally play with. So this ups the challenge for me. I liked my last one, with it’s slightly curving lines and stars. No, I have no idea where the stars came from, unless it’s starfish. The thumnails are messy – just a way to get an idea on paper so I can remember it later, and maybe get an idea of how it may work. They are only about one by two inches.
The final design sketch is a lot less messy, and has a lot fewer lines on it. This is just the outline of the main areas, with no hint of the stitching, but a LOT of notes!
And I’ve had a chance to play a bit with the beginning of stitching this little monster. I used the Portuguese stem stitch to mark out the diagonal lines in the sand, and am using pulled work to add a little texture to the negaive space, letting it follow the same refinement the center line will follow: from rough texture at the bottom moving up through the buffing that sand and sea does to the smooth and even top right corner. The upper corner is pulled with small pulled cross stitches over three threads with silk floss. Just below that is an area of pulled cretan stitch, in a silk twist that’s the equivalent of #8 perle cotton. I’ll finish the bottom area, rougher, with pulled cretan stitch in a silk ribbon of similar color. And I may actually then lace the pulled stitches so that there is more ribbon on the top as well… I’ll have to see how that actually works in the white.
So, that’s the project so far. I should actually be caught up by Wednesday!
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07.19.07
Posted in General at 9:55 am by deRomilly
Something I am working on is Wild Abandon. This is a problem for me in two completely different ways. First, I tend to have WAAAAY too much of it when I am performing. Saqra once said in a workshop that you shouldn’t give the audience all of yourself in a performance: they know and still want more. The ballet tradition I come from, being less intimate, requires you to give your all (without appearing to). This is a problem for me in raqs sharqi, because I can burn out, and the point, for the most part, is control. Add this to the excercise-induced asthma, and I can kill myself in a 3 minute routine if I’m not careful. And I’m often not careful. Don’t die onstage, but as soon as I get off I collapse wheezing. Not conducive to extended living.
On the other hand, my stitching designs tend to the elegant and reserved. Sometimes this is construed as not having as much depth as it could. At others it’s construed as elegant! 
Finding a balance in this is my challenge. Hence the Sumptuous Surfaces class. I’ve always admired Sharon B’s deep, extravagent layers of embroidery on her work. (I even drink my coffee at work out of one of her limited edition mugs…I love it so much!) Somehow, though, I haven’t been able to break through the very elegant satin stitch and smooth couched gold that I discovered in the Chinese textiles exhibit that the University of Oregon’s museum of art has on display and in their vaults. I fell in love with the Ch’ing dynasty’s Imperial embroideries, and everything I do seems to reflect this. I want to add more European Baroque to my repertoire.
So. Now you know my two goals for this year: one in dance, and one in stitching. Keep me honest, will you? The final design is finished for the class piece, and I’ll get it photographed and uploaded as soon as I can get to my camera (the heart-sister borrowed it to take pictures of pseudo-nephew’s volcano erupting…)
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07.18.07
Posted in General at 11:39 am by deRomilly
I did indeed sign up for Sharon B’s Sumptuous Stitches class. And only one lesson in, I’m already glad I did. (Well, actually lesson two arrived in my inbox this morning, but I’m not quite there yet…)
I don’t know what I expected, but what I’m getting so far is a detailed design class that focuses on textiles. Yummy. I’m self-taught in the design area, so it’s rather nice to get some of the details and hints and “whys” that I might have gotten had I actually taken a degree program. A lot of my design learning has been book-taught, or instinct: I think I absorbed a lot from my mother, who was a graphic artist, even while rebelling against art in my growing up years.
In any case, the first lesson was to start with Concept. Mind mapping, which I’ve used to great effect in my writing, and being assured that any method of “just picking one to work first” including throwing darts at the list on the wall was perfectly appropriate has helped.
Googling “mind mapping” will get you more hits than you’ll know what to do with! I liked this step by step one. And this is the one that Sharon included.
I don’t design small. Because I’m expecting to actually FINISH stitching this piece in three to four weeks, I chose to work in the suggested 6 X 4 inch postcard format. It’s a challenge. As I said, I don’t work small. I tend to work both large and detailed. I’m a bit overwhelmed right now with design ideas, most of which need at least 8 X 10 inches to work properly. So narrowing the design down from the concept is difficult. I guess I just need to sit down at lunch today with my sketchbook and work thumbnails until I find one I like.
The concept I came up with was from starting with the mind map center of Peace and working outward. I’ve got quite a few ideas now from that one, but the one I lean toward in an exploration of the sea changes that come from finding inner peace: something that I’m in the process of going through right now. And probably always will be, for that matter! Sea changes, “Those are pearls that were his eyes” and so on. The process that takes a rough piece of glass and turns it into sea glass… I’ve also got ideas on the side of an oyster turning a speck of sand into pearls…
Glass, found objects, high-relief embroidery. These are things that I haven’t done a lot with over the years. So now I need to play with the ideas. When I actually have a sketch I’ll post a copy for you. Lesson two starts the stitching in the low parts of the design – that should go relatively quickly for me, so I feel I can take the next couple days to refine the pictures in my head a bit more.
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07.10.07
Posted in General at 12:13 pm by deRomilly
In my time away from fiber, I am a technical writer. I translate between the geeks who develop the application and the people who sit at the computer and actually USE it… As such, and since many of my friends are in tech support, I hear horror stories about things the people in front of the computers do, including using the CD drive as a cupholder, mailing photocopies of floppy disks through the mail to tech support to get help, and so on.
Now the Yarn Harlot is not a “stupid user” as some of my technical support friends call the cupholder crowd. She is a very smart lady who is also very funny and writes books that I devour whenever they come out.
But there was a disconnect between what her computer geeks were telling her in computer geekese, and what she was hearing in plain English… I see how this happened, and I know that it’s just like talking to a Brit about “being knocked up.” The words are the same, but the meanings are completely different…
See the story here, and then let this be a lesson to all: hire a technical writer to translate between the two of you! Or, at the very least, remind your geeky friends that words have different meanings in real English and in computerese!
(My consulting rates are quite reasonable…)
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