Embroidery, Workshops and Weaving!

After enlarging photos of Koko and Kaiko and taking tracings and doing a little touch up drawing I ended up with an outline to use as a base for a work of Sumptuous Surface Embroidery. Using Encrustations for the dark points, I have thickly worked one paw and am moving along the tail.  I will have to work carefully on the face! I’m still not certain how to work it.

I drew the outline on even weave linen and decided on the colours and thread, and of course had to buy more browns, as brown is not one of “my” colours!  I made a start on the embroidery by embroidering the light colour of the back and front in a very tiny fly stitch. At a distance it looks like a thick outline stitch, but look carefully and the outer edge of the stitch looks like hairs sticking up with a solid inner line.

My thread stash!

My Encrustations

At the moment I am once again doing one of Sharon Boggon’s workshops, this time "Artists Studio Journal – A Designers Workhorse”.  Actually we are into week 3 which is very hard to believe! But it is going very well as usual.

My Journal page for my Journal Workshop

My new Louet Jane 27” loom arrived on Monday, can’t wait to get a warp on it. I bought it from Liz Calnan and Marie Clews, from whom I received excellent service. I am soo glad that Marie almost fully assembled it for me.

What am I trying to weave at present?  60/2 silk, which is driving me up the wall! It is for Christmas decorations for an Exhibition at the Johnston Collection (Fairhall in Melb.) for Christmas 2014. I have set it at approx 65 epi for a finished width of 16". I wound it on to my 18" Noble loom, but thought for once to check the number of heddles, before starting to thread! I wish I had done it before I wound on!  No way would I have enough!! So then I very carefully re wound it on to my old table loom (after doing some hurried repairs and adding over 500 heddles to it!!!!) only to find that the loom was not up to it, I could not get a shed at all! Hence my new Jane ggg.
I have backed the old loom up to my floor loom and threaded it onto that, using its back beam as the back beam.  Although I am now getting a great shed on most shafts, many of the threads that stay down when the others are raised are very loose!
I really don't know what to do with them. I have threaded a straight draw on 8 shafts and am weaving a 2/2twill.

My next project today will be trying to work out what the problem is!!!!

 

This material was supposed to be ready to make a Christmas Decoration to enter in the Geelong Show but of course……

I did have a remnant of suitable material and I made  a Christmas Bell out of material woven from 16/2 cotton warp and weft and 20/2 silk pattern weft in the Star of Bethlehem overshot pattern.The top is encrusted embroidery with fine commercial silk as well as some of my very fine spindle spun silk. It was an entry in our local show a couple of weeks ago, and is to be part of an exhibition where our guild along with other art groups in the Geelong region are decorating a National Trust house this Christmas.

Spread your Wings and Soar

                          Judy