I think I quite like the text used as quilting. As I was working I thought that the stitched line was too spidery and that if I used the technique again I’d use a thicker thread. On reflection I’m not so sure – it might make the full text more dominant. The basis of this challenge was to focus on the detail after all!
In January I wrote about an alternative to the traditional New Year resolution – http://bilsblog.blogspot.com/2008/01/not-new-year-resolution.html and chose Play as my word.
This operates at several levels:
- related to the goal it means ‘work less and play more’. As I move towards retirement I need to shift away from work as a total pre-occupation. I enjoy what I do and spend ‘leisure time’ reading and researching around my job, but this will be redundant when I retire so I need to start replacing that activity with others.
It’s been a busy time at work but I have managed to work less at home, probably because I’m too tired in an evening to do much! I have deliberately spent less time reading/blogging around the day job, which has meant that I’ve managed to contribute to this blog more regularly – and I know I’ve benefitted from that.
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I spend a lot of time at the PC prevaricating and know that I need to be doing something more positive – I need to play (aka stitch!)
I have definitely spent more time in my sewing room than ever before and have finally (though not necessarily permanently!) conquered my inability to stitch/play for extended periods of time. I am now regularly losing myself in my work – no artificial cut-offs after 20-30 minutes!
- when I play (aka stitch), I want to experiment more. I’m taking small steps but doing this on my own seems to mean that there are never any giant leaps or sideways steps going on.
Hmmm – not so sure about this, but perhaps this is a hard judgement to make about yourself. What I have done is had a re-think about the definition of play, or more to the point have thought about how children play. And the key here is repetition – the same game, the same characters, the same toys over and over with little variation until something else catches their attention.
I think I”ve been quite hard on myself, not allowing myself to re-use colour combinations or techniques because I wouldn’t be ‘pushing’ myself. But if I’m really going to play not only do I have to give myself permission to re-use ideas I need to actively encourage myself to do so!
I’m quite pleased with the clarity of the reverse machine applique, but the large letters have left more negative space than I had imagined. Also, the letters are quite ‘baggy’ and will need some stitching to anchor them, so the original quilting plan has to be abandoned! I’m going to sample stitching the text from which these letters were taken across the full width of the piece. If I can match the colour of either of the fabrics then at first glance, it could give interesting glimpses of the text – without revealing the whole.
This month’s challenge – “Do you ever notice the little things, the small moments, the details in life? This months challenge is to do just that, pay attention to the tiny details. Sometimes the small things become emblematic for something larger. ” Some first thoughts:
Small – defined as below the average in size or magnitude. Limited in importance or significance. But for me small can mean contained, controlled, compact ……. things which fit into this definition have an appeal for me, particularly boxes. Boxes can contain secrets! I’ve used small pieces in the past to represent secrets and I find I’m here again – this time interpreting them in text. So much text that it can’t be read, or, enlarged so much that only a small proportion can be seen – thus losing the meaning.
I’m delighted with this month’s TIF challenge, though not with the final piece – I still have that map in me somewhere! BUT for the first time ever, I had an idea, I transferred a couple of images to fabric and then I played with them straight on to the fabric. This probably sounds sadly unexciting but for me – to be able to play with the placement of the photos, then make some marks with my water soluable pen and go straight to the machine is a huge step. Whether that turns out to be a step forward or backward only time will tell!!
Once again I’ve had colour reproduction problems, lack of day light is the main thing, though it wasn’t quite dark when I drove home today so there’s hope around the corner! This was made on slightly offwhite fabric with greyscale images:
And just in case you’re worried that the shadows represent any deep dark secrets from my past, don’t be, I just had an immense curiosity about them as a child!
I’ve been trying to draw some shadows for this month’s TIF project and been quite unable to get the distortion to look right. I have previously tried to work with images in Corel Photopaint but have never had much success using the Edge finding tool in order to grab an outline.
However, recalling the experiments in colour replacement I did last month it occurred to me that I could create a black and white image in GIMP from which I could obtain an outline. (Similar tools are available in Photoshop but they may be listed under different menus.) Here’s how I went about it.
This is my starting image, already cropped from a bigger picture:
First I indexed the image Image>Mode Indexed and chose to limit the palette to 6 colours:
Then beginning with the lightest shade I edited each colour to white until only the darkest area remained which was edited to black. (Sometimes it’s best to edit more than one colour to black depending on the shading in the original image.)
This left a fuzzy image with unwanted areas of black in the foregound:
A quick whizz round with a paintbrush cleaned up the image enough, to be able to move on to the next step:
I used the Difference of Gaussians tool. In GIMP this is in Filters>Edge-detect>Difference of Gaussians to create the outline below, which I scaled to fit my 12″ x 12″ work. It didn’t matter that the edges weren’t even, I smoothed those out when I cut out the template.
