Color experiment

Color has always been tough for me… I tend to use analogous color schemes — like yellow-green, green and green-blue, so I can avoid the entire issue!

Color experiment

But I spent quite a bit of time learning – once you can pair value (how light or dark an area is) with color-brightness and contrast, and complimentary colors, the world opens up. I play with all of this in paint first these days – no intention of creating finished or resolved work from them, just little experiments in what works and why, and my color choices in threads need to be ripped out much less now, although I have discovered that what works in thread on a small scale may not work when enlarged — for example, three colors that work as a small face don’t necessarily work together when enlarged to an 8 1/2 by 11 inch piece of work. This seems to happen more in thread than in paint for me, at least right now. Still working that out.

Color experiment

I’ve been trying to learn this academically for a long while now – but the more I read, or even pushed buttons for (online resources follow) the less I understood. It finally took getting a bunch of cheap acrylic paint and doing it myself to actually grok it. My experiments may be ugly, but they did what they were intended to do! (I used quite a few of them as backgrounds in my journal, or I’d post more of the photos here.)

Stumpwork detail

If you’ve been following me you know I took Sharon Boggin’s Encrusted Crazy Quilting class. I’m loving it to death. Every time I take another class from this lady I find another layer of myself and how to work it into my work.

In this case, I’m trying to find more depth in my work. A friend of mine, one to whom I’ve taught stumpwork techniques, laughed heartily when I told her this. I think she missed my point. Stumpwork is dimensional, yes, and very pretty – I’ll keep teaching it and doing it. But texturally, it’s not particularly layered or deep. I can find cool thing after cool thing in historic stumpwork designs, but in general they are beside one another. The thing about what Sharon does is the sheer baroque depth of it all –

First Encrusted CQ Block

So anyway, class completed, my block now looks like this (click the photos for details):
And I’ve finished a second one:

Second CQ block

And working on a third and fourth (they’re lighter). These four will turn into a small wall hanging, taking lessons from the Sumptuous Stitches class, and the Studio Journal class, I have built to a theme of Madame Pompadour: something I came to as I realized that my blocks all reflected the colors in paintings of her in my print collection. It’s evocative, there won’t be anything specifically figurative, but I’ll know. Although I am toying with the idea of using her quotes in the sashing when I put it together. I rather like “Intelligence has no gender.”

Gardens and their denizens have been favorites of embroiderers for centuries. Spiders and their webs hold pride of place in crazy quilt blocks. In the renaissance and Tudor embroideries, all manner of creepy crawlies appear among the flowers.

But did you know that bellydancers also have a love-hate relationship with the creepy-crawlies? Costumes have been decorated with sparkly versions of butterflies, dragonflies, and so on — usually things with wings (although leaving hte garden mataphor for a moment there have been some unfortunate run-ins with seafood and misplaced, disembodied hands, but hopefully those are rare…)

What interests me is the fact that it seems to be very difficult to do insects on bellydance costumes in a less-than-tacky manner. Butterflies with bra cups for wings, usually made out of those sequinned camisoles that were so popular back in the day (Camisoles and tops that I often love on their own, with a pencil skirt by the way…). Dragonflies on the belt with the body vertical in… umm… suggestive locations. It’s all been done. And often in beautifully executed sequin embroidery.

I have an idea for a garden/insect costume myself, despite the current “thou shalt not even go there” attitude that has developed from the above sad costume choices. Wish me luck — I’ll probably need it. But I’ve got other costumes to develop first… and I have GOT to get back to beading that turquoise bedlah I’ve been documenting here!

Indigo:

I’ll admit it. I failed horribly. And I’ve had more than a week to find it.

Indigo is a color I love – a deep blue with a hint of purple in it. It is also not a color you see often, at least in the form I expect it. My midnight blue hipscarf comes close — in fact, it’s the color the International Order of the Rainbow for Girls (IORG) used when I was a member – it annoyed me then, too – there’s no purple in it. Hence, to me, it’s blue.

My irises have indigo in them as I remember — they haven’t bloomed yet. I did not think I would fail to find a color I love so much. I was wrong.

Has anyone else found anything they’d call indigo? If so, I’d love to see it! Post a link in the comments and I’ll find time to come look. I promise on that one. I LOVE indigo!

Next, Purple, violet, whatever you want to call it! And I’m still on the lookout for indigo.

This week, it’s blue. Which is almost unfair, since so much in my world is blue. When the EO and I got together, we both a bit surprised to find that we also shared a love of blue and silver.

So anyway. Blue things. I wanted to include a photo of the Carolina sky, but the day I went to take the photo the clouds rolled in, and it looked like Seattle!!!

Next week… Indigo… blue or not?

Block one with many (not all) seams stitched!

Recently I have been focusing my depth of field on backgrounds in my art. Simple is beautiful. but as I discover some of the more detailed and deep layering in mixed media art I want to figure out how to apply that to my tixtile work. A while back I took Sharon Boggin’s Sumptuous Surfaces class — which set me on this path. This year I am taking her Encrusted Crazy Quilting to continue this line of thinking. What better format for adding this kind of depth than crazy quilting? I stitch slowly, so I can’t promise you quick results on my original blocks (though I seem to be moving faster than I originally expected!)

In addition to the quilting class, I took Kelly Kilmer’s Prompt a Day mixed media journaling class last month. Can’t justify the time this month since I havent’  done all the prompts from LAST month yet! But what I’m finding is that the more layered the background, the sharper, and more prominent the focal image appears — a way of adjusting the depth of field in hand-made art as well as photography. This should be an interesting experiment.

I highly recommend sidestepping out of your normal media choice and play for a while. The results to your focus may surprise you.

Then I moved out here.  In the spring. Which supposedly starts in February when the first crocuses and daffodils bloom. And peonies. Well, you saw what happened to my peonies this year.  The daffodils met a similar fate, although they are tired and still pushing along.

So. Green. Every shade imaginable.  On my way home from work today I passed a grove where I swear there are at least 30 different shades of green in a 10 by 10 foot patch. Many of the yellow-greens that for a long time I believed lived only in my Crayola box, and not in nature.

And just because I intended these to go in the yellow post and was thwarted by snow from taking them…

So on to the pretties! As usual, you can click to make bigger.

So. Three photos.  All of bananas. Well, one banana.  Tonight it’s supposed to snow. So there may be photos of daffodils in snow later, like the peonies.

The entire banana. Quite a pretty shade of yellow. Delicious, too.

The END of the banana is just plain interesting. It LOOKS like it’s been burnt where it’s cut off the tree.

I LOVE the details when you look at it up close.

And this weekend there were lovely yellow costumes on a couple of the dancers. I’ll provide links when my favorite photographer puts her photos up.

Next week… green!

Options for the non-drawing designer!

• Make geometric counted work by making shapes on graph paper and repeating, rotating and connecting them. Yes, this is how I come up with some of my more elaborate pillow patterns, as well as my small motifs for my samplers.
• “Specialty” stitches make nice band samplers, vertical, horizontal, and round on different fabrics, worked in squares or shapes, and so on.
• Free embroidery can be designed from your own drawings, yes, but you can also combine sources of images from copyright-free materials, for example, Dover pictorial archives (royalty free), or other clipart. If it’s for personal use, you might work needlework from a coloring book page (note: be very aware of who owns the copyright of any image you plan to use on something to sell or display, whether it’s your stitching design or a finished object. If in doubt, write to the artist or the publisher or to be really safe, both, and ask permission. The worst they can do is say no or ask for a portion of the sales for royalties, and most artists are extremely friendly when approached politely. You might even make a new friend!) Personally, I still sometimes use the Dover series, especially the book and CD combos – the computer makes it really easy to copy, paste, resize, rotate, and otherwise mess with the image until it’s something I want to stitch.
  Note: Dover also will send you sample pages weekly of some of their pictorial archives if you sign up for them at the Dover Website click on Free Samples in the menu bar at the top.
• The Dover and clipart method can also be used to create cross stitch by tracing the outline onto graph paper and then playing wth colored pencils to color in the appropriate squares. This takes practice, but actually is the same method I use with my own artwork when designing. This can also work with photos you have taken, and you can also use a program such as PatternMaker by Hobbyware, or PC Stitch to do this playing quicker, with DMC or Anchor colors, and then print a chart directly from the software. These programs will also take your artwork or photo and convert it directly into a needlework chart, but I don’t recommend that method – the design generated is usually huge, uses a huge number of thread colors one or two stitches at a time to visually blend the color in the photo. Basically you get a huge mosaic design that once stitched you need to stand across the room from to actually see the image. It can be an interesting exercise, it can be a nice starting point if you want to clean it up by hand, but I find that tracing the outlines and choosing my own colors produces a better product in the long run.

There are a lot of construction flags. I was trying to avoid actually taking pictures of oranges or carrots. I didn’t manage it.  But here we go:

The orange sweatshirt on the construction guy with all the orange traffic cones in his truck:

First I felt the need to cheat and use the doodle I did on an orange scratch pad at work:

I resorted to photographing the ads:

I found the orange lid of the glue at the office:

Then I noticed that the book I’m knitting from has a great deal of orange in it:

And I finally resorted to food: oranges, and then noticed the baker’s chocolate in the baking cupboard of things I can no longer eat:

And I took a close up of the bag for the oranges because as well as being a beautiful deep orange, the texture was just so cool!

So. Did YOU find anything neat and orange this week? Trackback or post a comment so I can see, too!

Edited to add: Next week… Yellow!