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.
