A possibly recurring series of cool needlework things I find on the web.

I found this on an old post on Craft recently and was just amazed at the lengths artists will take things. It’s kind of cool, though. Go look and then tell me what you think.  Embroidery on Toast? Cross stitch on cereal? Cameos made out of oreos (OK, those are pretty cool…)

The artist is Cayce Zavaglia, and her work is amazing.

I’m going back to nursing an ear infection now.

New Elmow on Wednesday!

In the “How to doodle” post way back when, I examined how I doodle around geometrically, creating geometric designs, subdivided and filled with yet more shapes. That method can be done using dice for inspiration.

My organic doodling is less structured – take a scribble – any scribble – on paper or digitally and then expand on it.

How to Doodle

1. Scribble. I often use pencil for this. The key when making it is to truly scribble — don’t think and don’t try to make anything. In fact, scribble a bunch of these randomly on the page without looking. I like to keep a stack of pre-scribbled doodles to work with whenever the mood strikes, or several pages of them in my current studio journal.
   

   First Doodle Step

2. Now, pretend you’re a kid again, lying on your back on a hill watching clouds. What do you see? Each scribble is a cloud.
3. At this point I like to use a brush tip pen to delineate what I see. The brush tip makes it easier to make some of the lines stronger and more obvious. You can get the same result with a different color of pen, or a pen over pencil, or whatever works for you. Remember – you don’t have to use all of the scribble – you can make multiple pictures out of the same scribble, or combine more than one scribble into one picture.
   

   Finished and titled doodles. Click to enlarge.

There are no rules in doodling – and it’s about playing, not “real” art.

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.

That I forgot I had done!!

I was trying to pull stuff together to start embellishing those blocks for the Encrusted Crazy Quilt class… And found a block that I’d started and not finished a while ago. There were two little seams left to finish. So as a warm up to stitching the new one, I finished it.

It’s very simple as crazy blocks go, intended as a large pillow for the living room.  Made out of cotton decor fabric I was given by an interior designer from old samples (make friends — they give you WONDERFUL fabric!!) and embroidered entirely in cotton 6 strand floss, I think it will make a lovely pillow.  Detail photos below. Click any of them to view larger.

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!

This does not always work. While I have used more yellows and oranges over the years, blue, green and purple still overwhelms them in my stash and work. And always will, I suspect. Sometimes I don’t even notice the other colors around me. Even the acrylic painting I started last week turns out to have a predominance of blue and green!

Do you wear this kind of color blinders, too?

Over the next seven weeks I’ve decided to challenge myself to find the colors around me. One week, one color, until I’ve worked through the whole rainbow. This week I’m starting with red. I’m going to try to take photos of what I find in my life in these colors as I go and post them here on Saturday morning.

Want to play with me? Post photos to your blog or flickr account and then post the link in the comments when I post my photos on Saturdays.

This will be a short week, since I’m just starting, but since this Saturday is Valentine’s day, RED should be easy enough to find around us.

Come explore our colorful world with me!

They are, in a very literal way, true samplers. Moreso even than the ones I usually work on my own to play with patterns, colors and stitches. They are totally random, have no pattern to speak of, and have often been abandoned because of this lack of integrity.

Over the years I have taken to focussing more on where I place stitches on this type of thing – and my doodle cloths are taking on a more coherent sampler-y feel. More, actually, like a colorful version of my pen and ink doodling – where I tend to attempt to make every stroke count as a basis/practice for larger abstract works. Not that the true samplers will ever look like those, though! But I find myself transferring the pen and ink to fabric and stitching them more and more as well, as in the photo. Maybe I’m just getting brighter again (or having a second childhood) whatever it is, I think I’m enjoying it!