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:

Delphiniums scrap collage on netting

This week I finally finished my Merill Comeau inspired piece, which has taken about 6 weeks to complete but I really enjoyed every part of it and love the end result. It is called 'Safe in my garden where the delphiniums grow'. The challenge was to take scraps of fabric, collage a background onto netting, then add a flower or plant on top which represents how you are feeling during lockdown. I am not a sentimental person and don't really subscribe to the idea that flowers have 'meaning'. Instead I looked to my garden and was inspired by the delphiniums that I have watched grow from a few inches high at the start of lockdown to full bloom. Their colours are amazing - the blue is almost luminous and their shape distinctive enough to attempt in fabric. I found out that they are called delphinium after the Greek for 'dolphin' as the unopened buds look a bit like a dolphin leaping - see second photo below.

I started on the background. The guidance Merill had given was simple and obvious, but really helpful - use brown tones at the bottom, green in the middle and blue/white/grey for the sky area at the top. She suggested leaving scraps in the shapes they are as they come out of your stash, which I tried to do. This was all pinned down on a piece of net curtain, which I sprayed with starch. I knew that the background had to be taller than wider - it came out 49cm x 36cm.

Laying out the scraps was really fun. I left some areas that just have netting and no other fabric in the sky and used quite a few pieces of organza. I also used the wrong side of some fabrics to tone down their colours. I ended up with this:

I didn't want to start stitching it down until I had laid the flowers and leaves over the top in case they didn't stand out on a fairly busy background. So I then had to work out a layout and cut out all the other pieces. I went for 3 stems of delphinium so I could show the different colours of blue.

To make the flowers I literally drew round a flower and made a card template. I had some hand-dyed blue fabric that had all three blue colours in it (this was a very lucky find in my stash) and cut round the template. I used Inktense pencils to add some additional colour variation and details before gathering it up with needle and thread to give a 3D shape. I cut a trefoil shape out of some cream cotton and sewed that to the centre, along with a scrap of beige scrim. Finally I added a blob of yellow Intense to the middle. I was pleased with how this came out so I repeated the process using different card templates to make all the other flowers. 

To get the unopened flowers right I used a reference line drawing off the internet and made a 2-part template for the partially opened flowers. A major characteristic of the delphinium, also known as Larkspur, is the spur at the back of each flower so I wanted a few flowers that showed this, side-on. I used some silk carrier rods that had been dyed with the main fabric for these. I have never used these before and found them to be the perfect shape but quite unstable - they de-laminated very easily so lots of PVA needed!

Making the leaves was similar - I drew round a real leaf to make a template, cut it out from an old duvet cover and added details with Intense pencils. These were very very fiddly so only 3 were made. I ended up with the following layout:

The non-descript leaves at the bottom were cut out from some curtain fabric and just fill in the gaps. I wanted to add Camellia leaves to the bottom left so again drew round a real leaf but this time cut them out of shot taffeta to mimic their glossiness. I overlayed these with half-leaves of organza to represent how they catch the light and cut a stem from a row of chunky brown corduroy!

Finally I added a couple of stems of a climbing pink summer Jasmine that is in front of the delphiniums in my garden. I made the leaves in the same way as the delphinium ones and hand-painted the pink flowers with Inktense pencils. I made a complete muddy hash of the first one I did but started again, with a much more delicate touch and amazed myself how realistically these came out.

Composition complete, I now needed to stitch it down.To remove the flowers and leaves from the background I covered the front with a piece of card and flipped it over and then covered it again and flipped it back. At this point I couldn't see how I was going to finish the piece without it puckering up too much and being unmanageable. I remembered I had a rectangular embroidery frame for a previous piece and by a huge stroke of luck it was just about the right size for this. I was glad that I hadn't cut off the excess netting so could use drawing pins to keep it taught on the frame.

Stitching down the background was easy and fun - no right or wrong, just lots of random straight stitches. Stitching into it with the netting on the back made it very easy and lightweight to handle.

Then I started stitching down the flowers and leaves. I started with the delphinium stems using my photos above as a positioning guide. The stems were cut from T-shirt fabric, which wants to curl naturally and I liked the 3D shape so I couched down string and floss to provide support underneath. Then ran an ordinary glue stick down the top to keep the stem fabric in place whilst I stab stitched it in place.

I added the delphinium, jasmine and other leaves at the bottom with backstitch. The jasmine stems are 6 stranded floss, couched down with a dark pink spiralling stitch. The camellia stem was attached with stab stitch and the centre of the leaves with backstitch. However, for the veins on the camellia leaves I used long straight stitches, bent into shape with a small retaining stab stitch - a technique taught to us by artist Emily Tull. I liked the effect this made, almost looks like the camellia leaves are quilted.

Finally on to the flowers. I used tiny stab stitches for the jasmine flowers. For the delphiniums I attached the open and side on ones with small stab stitches but backstitched the buds. The buds were quite fragile by now so I first stuck them on with a bit of glue stick to give them support. The last step was to backstitch in the stems joining the flowers to the main stem. I had to be careful to do this neatly on the areas with just net in the background, running the end of the thread back through my stitching on the back to the stem before jumping down to the next flower. Here are some close ups of the final piece:

To display this piece I can thread a wire or stick through the channel at the top and possibly hang it in a window. Both the delphiniums and jasmine have finished flowering in my garden but I can gaze on them all year round when I look at this!

Stitched containers and bleach printing

I have joined the new Stitch Club being organised by TextileArtist.org  https://www.textileartist.org/. The first workshop was led by Debbie Lyddon and the challenge was to make a container for a meaningful object that reflects what is inside. We were encouraged to include a grommet in the container to reveal a glimpse of what was inside.

I made 2 responses to this challenge - a practical container for some gardening snips and a book cover to hold my Mom's school exercise book from her sewing class that I have inherited.

I started by finding some firm fabrics - navy-blue cotton drill and some denim cut off the bottom of a pairs of jeans from my Mom's old fabric stash. I experimented with decorating them by printing with bleach and painting freehand with bleach.

I used ordinary thick household bleach painted on leaves pressed down with a plastic box. I wore gloves and glasses and laid the fabric on an old board covered with a bin liner.

This worked really well and I was amazed by the detail you could get on the leaf structure just using this crude method.

I loved this but it didn't reflect anything about the contents of the sewing book so I decided to try printing with sewing objects out of an old inherited sewing basket.

The ends of cotton reels worked quite well as did thick needles and bodkins. Overall I thought it might not be very impactful so I also printed some objects with acrylic paint. The larger scissors in the picture were a cardboard template I made from drawing round my small Fiskars scissors. I hoped that the thin card would absorb the bleach and then print a good image when held against the fabric. This didn't really work out.

Having had this useful trial run I then printed my final fabric. The exercise book has a round logo on the front so that seemed perfect for the grommet element to reveal. I cut this out first and then printed the fabric. I wanted to use the hem of the jeans as the top of the cover.

The bleach printed scissors on the front didn't turn out quite this well so I touched them up with the paint brush but all the other things worked fairly well.

I particularly liked the buttons with bleach and acrylic.

Yes - the jeans really are this dirty. My Mom could be quite impulsive and must have chopped the bottoms off to make shorts before they made it to the wash basket!

To practice sewing the grommets I started on the smaller container. First I created a pattern - see above. I used jewellery wire to make the small grommet to make a hole to hang the pouch up in the greenhouse. I used 3 rounds of wire - it was thicker than recommended but was fairly easy to sew. I used some old cotton thread found in the inherited sewing basket, which was maybe not thick enough but was all I had. It seemed to sew ok with a big needle.

I then assembled the pouch using the sewing machine to attach the front and back before cutting off the dip on the front to show the snips when in use.

I then strengthened the top edge with a similar technique but this time using kitchen string.

This was more difficult and I had to solve a number of problems like what to do about the seam allowance inside and should the string sit on the front edge or the back?

You can see from the photo that I tied the string together with a bit of thread to ensure it kept its shape. In addition, a tip we were given for these grommets was to always cut the hole in the fabric smaller than the finished size as the hole stretches as you stitch it.

Overall it came out fine and feels quite strong.

Having practised both methods I decided to use thinner garden wire to make the grommet on the book cover as it was important that it made a strong round shape. Sewing this in went ok - you need a lot more thread than you think! We were advised to sew in the grommet before making up the container.

I then had to decide how to finish it off. I didn't want to lose the character of the jeans so I decided to sew the bottom hem on the machine and then finish the right hand side with satin stitch in orange thread to match the top-stitching on the jeans. Finally I added some press studs to close off the side and retain the original fell and lap seam of the jeans.

Getting the hole and the logo to line up was difficult and I had to undo the bottom seam a couple of times to get it right but overall I am pleased with it.

Here is one of the pages from inside the book - when you read this you realise how hard it is to write instructions for what we do instinctively. (She didn't always get an 'A'!)