Momigami Landscape

 

This piece was inspired by a workshop from Cas Holmes for the TextileArtist.org Stitch Club. The challenge was to use found paper, crumple it to make momigami and then combine it with fabric and stitch to make a landscape. 

Momigami means 'kneaded paper' in Japanese and is made by crumpling up, spreading out and re-crumpling the paper many times to breakdown the fibres in the paper and make it more pliable and stronger for stitching. Cas recommended that we use better quality paper and magazines or packaging paper as these will have longer fibres in the paper. Recycled paper or newspaper has very short fibres and therefore not advised. The best paper is apparently mulberry bark paper from Japan, which is very strong and has traditionally been used to make clothing using this technique!

In her demonstration Cas showed us how you might fold the scrunched paper when integrating with you fabric. This made me think of rocks so I found a photo I had taken on the coast of Guernsey as inspiration for my landscape:

I chose papers from art and gardening magazines for the rocks. Some of the colour came off the surface as it became more crumpled but this was fine for the impression of rocks. 

I also experimented with painted lining paper left over from my cut paper collages and brown paper bags. With the latter I added some rub-on metallic waxes to see the effect. This picked up the texture of the creased paper well.

I started by tearing the paper into the shapes I wanted but this didn't look right so ended up cutting them with scissors. I laid them out on a rectangle of old grey sheet, backed with net curtain to add stability.

This was my initial layout with paper for the sea and a few scraps of fabric for the sky. I was lucky to find a great picture of fennel in a gardening magazine which I decided to use in the foreground to add some plants that weren't in the original photo. As wild fennel grows on the coast I thought this could work well. Therefore I also added some flat green sections to the right and a path so it looked like there was a path down to the sea.

I wondered whether the paper sea was too much of all the same texture so I tried it with a textile sea for comparison:

The sea was a baby wipe I had used as a mop up cloth with some threads of dyed silk waste on top plus the same paper rocks as before but with eyelash yarn for waves around them. I thought this looked better than the paper sea so this is what I went forward with. In addition I added a piece of pale blue organza over the paper representing shallow rocks near the shore to tone it down a bit.

I used black, brown, grey and green machine cotton to fix all the paper pieces down using mostly small straight stitches following the creases in the paper, with occasional back stitched or running stitch lines. For the sea I used tiny stab stitches for background and then caught down the other threads with small straight stitches. For some shadow beneath the rocks I cut some small pieces of dark blue organza and included them underneath the surface threads.

The it was time to add some embellishment to the rocks. I added patches of orange for lichen, couched down thicker yarns for texture, created tufts of lichen using turkey work stitch and loose french knots in purple for the Thrift flowers in the rock crevices.

In the foreground I wanted to add some fence posts and 'barbed wire' with a few fennel flowers embroidered over the top. I found a picture of a timber-framed building from which I cut the posts and fitted them into the garden picture. For the wire I used some thin black yarn, couched down with ordinary cotton. I then added the barbs by tying double strands of cotton on at intervals and cutting short.

Finally I added the fennel flowers by couching down the full thickness of floss for the stems. I used 2 strands to stitch the flower stems and the foliage. Finally I used a strand each of yellow and acid green combined for the flowers, making quite loose french knots.

I enjoyed making this piece but I think that the perspective of the rocks part could be better. I finished the piece by trimming off the netting backing and trimming any fragile pieces of paper overhanging the edge.

'Inheritance' - mixed media collage with momigami

At the start of the Covid-19 lockdown I had some personal news which made me consider what I had inherited from my Mom. She passed away 3 years ago due to breast cancer. As a result I made this piece in response, sparked by a community stitch challenge set by Cas Holmes.

All the fabrics in this piece are inherited from my Mom's stash. She made her own clothes in the sixties, often from furnishing fabrics as she found those more interesting. This is the case with the main brown/blue piece of fabric in this piece, which is from a shift dress she made and I had already cut into for a previous project. This piece is using the reverse of the fabric and the horizontal band at the top is the hem of the dress. For some reason she used white thread to sew the dress and pale blue to hand-stitch the hem! I love the fact that you can see her stitches in this piece.

I laid all this down on the reverse side of a piece of Sanderson curtain fabric - these were the bathroom curtains I grew up with! The edge of this is folded over on the right. These 2 pieces of fabric set the colour pallet so I went through my inherited pieces and found other fabrics to use.

I knew I wanted to incorporate this photograph of my Gran, Mom and me. I had never seen this photograph until we were gathering together photos to show at her wake but I knew exactly where it had been taken and it is one of the only photos with the 3 generations. I manipulated it with a sepia wash, printed it out onto ordinary printer paper and then used the momigami technique to distress it and make it easier to stitch into. I used a small amount of oil the first time but didn't like the effect so re-did it without any oil. Before laying it down I ripped into it so that I could use the motif from the dress behind, which looked to me a bit like the double helix of genes.

Finally I chose a corner of an embroidered handkerchief I found in her drawer and a strip of a shirt-dress she had made, again out of furnishing fabric. I fixed this all down with bondaweb and then started stitching. It seemed obvious to machine black lines to echo those on the brown fabric. I set the machine to a very slight zigzag to mimic the quality of the lines on the dress fabric. I finished off the ends within the photo but chose to leave them free at the bottom. I mixed 2 colours of blue floss to stitch a running stitch around the outline of the 3 generations in the photo to represent the family bond.

I wanted to add some free-machine flowers 'ala Cas Holmes' so chose the Marguerite daisy as my Gran's name was Marguerite. I drew it out free hand on thin white tissue paper copying a source image from the internet and then pinned it in place, with some small scraps of organza underneath the flower heads to make them stand out on the white background. After free-machining over the top I pulled off the tissue (tweezers essential) and added french knots in the daisy centres. Free-machining terrifies me as my machine doesn't really like it - the stiff cotton backing kept pulling the needle out, but I love the end result.

I then turned to the top and sides - I needed to soften them and bring them into the piece. After much playing around with tiny cut out pieces of fabric I settled on a re-interpreted floral design from some more Sanderson curtain fabric at the top and free extension of the floral and leaf motifs on the right hand side. Because the motifs were already cut out and I couldn't imagine sewing them all on ironed them all down onto bondaweb and cut them out again - good job I don't mind fiddly!

Whilst I was doing this the idea come to me to make a daisy chain across the piece to symbolise the link down through the generations. I made a sample of various ways of doing this and settled on using the cut-out daisy motif and backstitch stems.

On the left hand strip of orange I had the idea to use some buttons out of the vast button tin inherited from Mom. I chose some very seventies style wooden buttons with painted flowers that I can remember seeing in the tin when I was a child.

Finally, I decided to add french knots in the top band around the yellow leaves and flowers to echo the original Sanderson fabric. I also added them to the centres of the flowers. They look a bit like pollen, which is key to plant propagation.

I found that it was easy to make a complex work when it had so much meaning behind it.

Pounded Flowers

I just had a go at the not very genteel art of flower pounding. The results are very interesting and quite variable. This is a method to transfer the shape and pigment from flowers and leaves to paper or cloth. 

I had never heard of it until recently and then I heard about it from 2 different sources in 2 days - funny how that happens! It was fun, quick and very noisy!

I started by picking a range of flowers and leaves from my garden - lots to choose from.

I took a piece of thin white cotton, laid it on a piece of wood on a hard floor, with a tea-towel under the wood to stop it slipping. I selected flowers and taped them one at a time on the back of the cotton. Sometime I had to cut off the stalk or most of the back of the flower. Sometimes they stayed together and sometimes the fell apart - it was a learning thing! Sometimes I used a cocktail stick to help gently spread out any curling petals as I stuck down the tape.

Then - IMPORTANT - turn the cloth over and hit with a hammer, medium weight blows. Once the image was transferred peel off the tape and move on to the next one. I used a kind of clear parcel tape which worked really well on the cloth but was too sticky for paper.

I was intrigued by the look of the flowers after pounding and stuck them all down on paper.

I saw online that you should iron the cloth to set the images. I don't know what I am going to do with this experiment - obviously you can stitch into it or use Inktense pencils to draw in extra details.

Some flowers and leaves worked much better than others. The flowers with papery leaves such as field poppies, california poppies, cosmos, cornflowers etc worked the best. Pansies were really good as they had dual colours that were retained. Flowers that were tube shaped (Agapanthus, Crocosmia etc) seemed to be fleshier than daisy or more open types and didn't make a clear image. Pinks sometimes went brown. Bright reds and dark oranges usually looked like a blood stain! Blues usually kept their colour. Very thin leaves worked brilliantly but some hairy tough leaves didn't work at all. The Heuchera and burgundy leaves worked well, as did a soft fern. 

After publishing this post I came down the next morning to this sight:

A dahlia in a vase had shed its petals overnight. This is not a problem, I thought - this is an opportunity!

A rather beautiful one: