Themes from nature: Slow stitching, playing with collage, experimenting with hemp yarn on ecodyed paper and ink, and ink and salt works.

My slow stitching is plodding along, but it is beginning to come together as a whole.

 Here are some details from the quilt. 

As you can see, I am using a mixture of variegated cotton yarns and some variegated Perle cotton and a variety of stitches.  Although there are repetitions in the stitches, as there are in the use of the fabrics, colours, and motifs, I am trying to encourage the viewer to look at the details, but to also get a sense of the whole by avoiding symmetry.  I still haven't decide whether to add beads.  it may not need it.  We'll see.

 

Because I am trying to avoid being bored with my embroidery, I have been working with different media over the past  weeks.  The funny thing is that these pieces are also based on nature.  These collages are all finches.  It takes quite a while to collect the right colours and patterns from scrap paper and shape the pieces, but it is quite good fun, so I intend to do some more in this theme in the future.

When we were walking to a restaurant for a family yum cha, I saw some wonderful seed pods and eucalyptus leaves in the car park.  The seed pods now feature in a Japanese bowl I have in the living room, and the leaves are in a Danish vase.  This little doodle was created using inks as if they were watercolours and permanent ink pens. 

The second piece is made by joining 2 pieces of eco-dyed watercolour paper with hemp yarn.   I crocheted the leaves with the same yarn  and then sewed the leaves and the the stems on to the paperwith more of the yarn .

Some of my friends and family are biologists, and I think I must be a bit of scientist groupie.  I find the microscope images and the petri dishes of cultures full of  bacteria quite intriguing.  I decided to try and do artistic interpretations of these images using inks, salt and water on circles.  Then, I cut out the circles and glued them on blank greeting cards which I will give to friends and family. As well as being  like scientific images, some of the circles remind me of planets, some remind me of semi precious stones, and some remind me of the sea.  I am very fond of these, so I think I''ll do some bigger pieces in the future.