I am at my mother’s for Christmas and so brought some hand sewing with me to do so that we can talk as we stitch. This is a piece from the Destructive Character project I blogged about recently. Basically it is a by-product of a lot more resolved piece for which I wanted to spray some buttons gold. I was just using ordinary spray can paint, nothing fancy, but I thought it might be interesting to see if they would leave a resist print and rather than do it in paper I thought I would use the unlovely fuchsia pink lining fabric that came in a bag of remnants that I had to buy for the lilac fun fun scrap which I mentioned in an earlier post.
Well, the print worked quite well, but the whole thing was unlovely, so I started to embellish. It is fascinating with this project to see how hard I find it to take away rather than add to. This is my normal style – pile it on and layer it up. It is my go-to approach and this is the same. The base fabric is so synthetic that there is very little I could do to strip it back without just revealing the wadding. So this one will have to be a build up. I started stitching round the circles and at first I was going to minimise the straight lines linking them, but actually thought that they made an interesting design, like the sort of things my colleagues who work on network theory draw – only a lot simpler. Then I remembered I had some quite hard to work with pink and gold threads that were exactly the right shade:
The difficult thread to work could well be couched onto this or become small tassels. Keep everything it always comes in handy!
The white circles are from a highlighter pen because I thought I might draw on the piece, but probably won’t. I may well crop it, but I am interested to see how it starts to come to life with only a very small amount of hand-stitching done. It might be a nice Christmas project, because it shouldn’t take long to finish. If it were red and gold or green and gold it would be perfect. Anyway, more photos as the project progresses.
