ATV2 2:2 Drawing with Stitch

Brief: to develop three stitched fabric pieces showing:

• A sense of repetition
• Variety of scale
• A placement design

For this assignment I’ve chosen a variety of vintage fabrics from my own collection. Some are linen, table cloths and napkins, some are cotton lace, some are crochet doilies. Most are white or unbleached, some are embroidered, some printed, some unused and some stained, damaged, faded. I felt these fabrics were the right ones for my project, their textured soft feel, their age, their stories, their colours, their damage even, all lending themselves to being used to translate my original drawings of vintage embroideries into something new and exciting. The lace with its rhythmic placing of holes feels like a natural continuation of the holes and the grid I’ve focused on in some of my drawings.

I’ve done some initial explorative drawing and taken some photos of the fabric to let the ideas start percolating in my head before I start stitching.

I added some colour as an experiment which I mostly took from one of the drawings in the original series of drawings. But I ended up sticking with a very muted palette or cream, white, black and beige. The fabric informed this choice really and it’s worked out well I think. This is a first for me as I’m such a colour junkie!

I have created texture by folding and layering fabric, cutting into it and removing layers and in other places not having a backing fabric at all. My stitching has mostly been utilitarian, strong, blunt, zigzags on a sewing machine with black thread apart from the green hand stitching which was looser, more flexible, in a thicker thread but in one direction and fluid, full of movement.

Stitched piece 1

I’ve used a thin unbleached gauze and ironed pleats into it. I’ve experimented with a variety of stitches, I was trying to replicate the stitches through the pleats I’d achieved in my paper piece here

But this fabric not having anything like the structure of the paper it’s been hard to emulate anything even vaguely like it. Some of my stitching has ended up looking like quite traditional smocking and I didn’t just want to use a tried and tested method of stitching. Eventually I settled on using thin wire to stitch with and even though the pleats aren’t as stiff and three dimensional and it’s the wire that’s providing the structure rather than the base material being stitched into I’m quite happy with how the piece has turned out.

I thought it may have been “better” if I’d found a way to secure the pleats to the wire so they wouldn’t move and flop but actually it has made for a very dynamic fabric, one that changes all the time as it gets handled or stored.

These are the experiments I created before I settled on the wire:

Stitched piece 2.

I’ve chosen to stitch a rusty and damaged lace doily/ table cloth to a background fabric, pleating it randomly and using an obvious black zigzag stitch. The stitching is “ugly”, utilitarian, shouts at you. It forms a grid as in the drawings that inspired this. The piece during stitching felt fragile, unstructured, a bit wild, the pleats wanted to unfold and had to be tamed with pins. I like how the folds are only stitched down in places, suggesting a continuous pleat but not showing it very clearly. When I was in primary school, maybe year 3, there was a poster in the classroom showing circles with bits cut out. The cut outs showed a triangle. The wording said something like “there’s no shape clearer than an implied shape”, an imagined shape perhaps (translating from Dutch and across 40 years!) these pleats feel like that too, they are implied more than pronounced.

Afterwards I cut some of the fabric away in places. In some I cut through all the layers and in some I cut only the main or the backing away. In this I felt like I created a new lace, one one a very enlarged scale. This piece is quite uniform in colour but when placed against a window all the contrast of the original drawings returned and it makes for a very exciting display!

Stitched piece 3.

For this piece I started with a vintage hand embroidered linen table mat and added vintage lace in a grid. I stitched this on with the same “ugly” black zigzag stitch. It looks great against the light! But I felt it needed a little more and I used the almost abstract drawing of the flower (below) to inspire some very simple hand embroidery. I like that the stitches are huge and therefor move, don’t stay parallel to each other, are dynamic. I did introduce a muted green here as created a nice contrast with the fabric and the black stitching.