The little project that could....

My newest textiles project that has been eating away at my brain involves a self-portrait done in embroidery. Having been an art student for so many years, the number of times that I've been instructed to do a self-portrait is too many to count, but this one is a whole new venture; portraiture is hard as it is. I've decided that because I've had the opportunity to do so many figure studies, I should take advantage of this knowledge and try to work as realistically as possible.
But I've had a hard time working this one out. All of my sketches are rendered the way that I want them to be in pencil, but I know that the translation from sketch to embroidery thread is going to be hard to manipulate.
I finally settled on the idea to create this piece as if it were a drawing/sketch from one of my notebooks. So I started by creating a college-ruled piece of notebook paper with my sewing machine. Here's a picture of the beginning:


The final piece won't include all of the loose ends, but you get the idea. The rest of the piece will be made up of embroidered versions of actual sketches from my notebooks from the last few years. I'm looking forward to going through my notebooks to revisit my thoughts and ideas from the past.

I heart textiles

In preparation for having to create an embroidered self-portrait for my textiles class, I've started a little side project/practice session. I can remember embroidering pillow cases and handkerchiefs with my mom when I was little; the time when I lived for baking cookies, napping in the garden and playing with the cat. It was a rough life.
Now I'm attempting to treat thread as I would treat paint or a pencil. Each stitch is like a brush stroke. I'm making up my own and reintroducing the classic stitches into my vocabulary. I did this piece in the Fall that ended up as part of a series that was in the Stillwell show:
I really enjoyed this and have wanted to explore it further. I like the idea of working with one continuous piece of thread, the thought that if one area is snipped, the whole thing falls apart. It speaks of fragility and impermanence, two things that I've been dealing with lately in my work.