I made this piece from a workshop led by Sabine Kaner. Sabine is known for her very colourful embroideries using wool, felt, knitwear and other thicker fabrics. Her pieces are fairly abstract.
Her method involved crumpling different thicknesses of paper, drawing over the resulting lines to make them more prominent, simplifying or cropping the result if required and then tracing it onto fabric to inform an abstract piece. Some areas can be coloured with paint or ink, some areas filled in with fabric and some with stitch. Unfortunately crumpling paper to generate a composition did not appeal to me as it had no meaning. Instead I chose to trace the following photo I took of the bark of a very old oak tree in Shropshire.
One of the aspects of Sabine's work that struck me as interesting was the way she frames her pieces with pieces cut from knitwear and I knew that I wanted to try this. I have an old wool jumper that was accidentally felted in the wash but I kept it as I loved the colour so this informed my choice of colours for this project. I searched out fabric scraps to complement the cherry year jumper:
Next I arranged the fabrics by tonal value and, using my original photo as reference, I marked on the tracing whether areas should be light, medium, dark or very dark in order to inform my fabric placement. I made a second tracing to use as a template and marked each section with a number to show the front of each piece and keep track of which piece goes where. After carefully cutting out each piece I used them as templates for cutting round my fabric, which I had backed with squares of bondaweb.
Then I could begin filling in the gaps with embroidery. I worked in a hoop and used a variety of threads - silk, wool and embroidery floss - and a variety of stitches, such as satin stitch, long and short stitch and couching. I enjoyed trying out all these different techniques.
Once it was completed I turned to the border. I bought a cheap artist canvas and used that to determine the final size. I cut a rectangle from the jumper, keeping the waistband ribbing intact to use down the right-hand side for interest, and then cut out the centre for the embroidery. One thing I really love about these projects is the constant problem solving in order to achieve your vision. I realised that I couldn't keep the ribbing in tact and have it wrap around the frame so I came up with adding some additional red fabric I had around the outer edge of the calico to secure the whole piece to the frame. I did this with a running stitch and then stitched on the red woollen border with tiny stab stitches, both around the outside and inside edges.
It was quite tricky to get the edge fairly straight and even, given that the jumper is stretchy, but as it was well felted I could trim it back as required.
Finally I wrapped the fabric around the back, held it with drawing pins temporarily whilst I used a staple gun to fix it to the back as neatly as possible.
I called the piece Ancient Heart. I absolutely loved making this piece, the story behind it and the final result. I tried fabrics I have never used in embroidery pieces before and enjoyed making new textures with my stitching. Plus I have had great feedback from friends and family, who all love the colours I have used.
