This piece is my response to a workshop in Stitch Club from Textileartist.org by Jette Clover. Her challenge was to find a postage stamp of a winter scene and make a 20cm square collage that evokes the mood or atmosphere of the image in a fairly abstract way. She wanted us to use mostly white and to stitch the stamp into the piece. Her video of her creating one looked so simple - sort out a few fabrics, assemble the piece on your background square, add some simple textural stitch, sew on your stamp and you have something beautiful! In reality this was a real challenge as I shall explain.
The first challenge was to find an image. I do not have a stamp collection so I looked through my photos. I chose this image from a park in South Korea. We visited in January so although there was no snow and the sky was clear, there was a bitterly cold wind and the lake surrounding the temple was frozen. I printed out a page of the photo plus some smaller 2x3cm versions to use as my 'stamps'.
Using the photo as a guide I pulled out a load of fabric scraps that I might use - Jette called these 'maybes', which is a good description I think. I ended up with a pile of whites, blues, browns, blacks and a bag of sari ribbons.
Then I cut a square of white cotton, 20cm x 20cm and began to assemble my collage. I soon realised that to evoke the mood of a cold frosty day with bleached out colours required you to make very specific choices about the colour of the fabric used. I only had one possible scrap for the sky - a piece of hand-dyed silk habotai that I bought in a craft pack so that was easy. After that the choices were far more complex. I suppose I fell into the trap of trying to recreate the landscape in the photo straight away, rather than the atmosphere of it.
I tried lots of different layouts for the fabric - a darker lake, more textured foreground etc. Above is an idea of some of the permutations I went through - there were a lot. What is really useful is to take photos on your phone all the time to compare. This gives you some distance from the composition and allows you to critically evaluate what is working and what is not.
In the end I went with pale icy blues for the lake and a very pale foreground in the spirit of a light natural palette. This photo shows my choices without the coloured bands of grasses. I actually really like it like this but decided to put the grasses in as the colour of these is what attracted me to use the image in the first place. Aside from the sky I used a ripped piece of interfacing daubed with Brusho from another project as the horizon on the left and a baby- wipe mop up cloth from the same project on the right. On the left below that is a strip of dark sari ribbon. On the right is a scrap of wool layered with painted silk organza. The lake is the reverse of a furnishing sample, layered with a piece of silk. The foreground is furnishing fabric samples. I sewed all these pieces down with machine thread using tiny stab stitches.
Next I added the layers of sari silk ribbon for the top band. Some were taffeta and some chiffon - all were very crumpled so I ironed them and pulled at the edge to make them fray more before randomly ironing creases back in! Once I was happy with the placement I stitched them down with running stitch along the length. I could then go back over the whole hill section with straight stitches in black machine thread to give the look of winter grasses, shrubs and trees. I also added a length of sari cord, which is black and brown to provide some definition on the right hand side with a few white straight stitches beneath for frost.
For the lake I cut a piece of synthetic lace to represent icy patterns and covered it with a piece of pale blue organza. I secured this with random white stitches to give the impression of the light falling on the ice in a diagonal line to the foreground. I also added some thin strips of a darker blue organza at the edge below the hills to give depth.
I repeated the same process with the sari ribbon for the lower grasses except this time I added a piece of purple scrim behind to give some more depth and texture. To be honest after stitching you can't really see all the effort I went to to get creases into the ribbons so I wouldn't bother with that step again where there was going to be a lot of stitching. In these grasses I used 2 strands of embroidery floss for the stitches, quite a few colours and tried to build up the depth with lots of random crossing lines, finishing with the single strands of pale grey to give frosty highlights. On a few of the grasses at the back I added extra straight stitches at the top to mimic seed heads.
Finally right at the bottom I decided to add a bit more blue organza to lead the eye down from the lake and a squiggle of orange/purple sari cord to represent the edge of the paving around the lake.
To finish I had to add the stamp element. I experimented with giving it a deckle edge with special scissors but in the end decided that was too much so just ripped an edge. I coloured the ripped edge with a tiny bit of blue Inktense to take away the stark white paper before sewing it down with running stitch. The final element was the Korea script, which says 'frozen lake'. I copied this off a translation site using a brush marker onto a piece of paper that I had made in Korea at the paper museum in Jonjhu. This was made in the traditional way using mulberry bark pulp. I used an old card-makers trick to tear out the strip by 'drawing' a line where you want the paper to tear using a damp paint brush. I stitched this on using 2 vertical lines of back stitch in black thread to look like a banner in the corner.
Overall I am very happy with the piece and have got good feedback from other Stitch Club members. The only challenge to myself is how could I have made it more abstract and less representational? This is something I am still pondering - I am not really drawn to the abstract but I am intrigued by distilling out the atmosphere of a place in a piece so I will have to continue working on this.
