Embroidery from Game of Thrones

Okay, I have not been doing much for the last month except torturing myself trying to take sharp pictures of resin pendants with the only camera I own, a slim little digital point-and-shoot. This setting, that setting, outside, inside, downstairs, upstairs, in my lady's chamber...

Sorry, got a little carried away there. I've got a couple of friends who understand photography and I've begged them for help, but it's difficult because they speak Photography. I'd understand them better if they spoke Swahili and that's not a figure of speech, it's the literal truth. Anyway, looks as if a slightly more sophisticated camera may be in my future.

The last few days I've been thinking that I don't want to make any more resin pendants if I can't find some way to photograph and sell them, and isn't it about time to get back to playing with fiber, maybe a small embroidery....Then a friend sent me a link to Michele Carragher's website. and there went the afternoon, drooling over her incredibly rich work - and yes, she does the embroidery for Game of Thrones. Now I want to encourage everyone I know to waste their own time looking at all the pictures on this incredible website. By the way, the home page has a link to a page called "How I Create an Embroidery." Don't miss it. And be sure to scroll down until you get to the jeweled bugs.

Dichrophane dragon in detail

Let's start by taking a look at the whole dragon. All the dichrophane was fused with the painted side down, so you look through the iridescence at the color. The two sample pieces I photographed yesterday didn't look all that different, but as you see, the colors really pop once you press the dichrophane flat onto a neutral surface. I used Pinata inks for all the colors; diluted for the wings, full strength for the body and flame.

There are plenty of subtle color variations within each piece, too.

Look how clean and sharp the pointy bits are! I embroidered over the edge of the whole piece to define the outline (and,to be honest, because I never totally trust fused things not to start curling up at the edges) and none of the dichrophane split, even when I got to the teensy little ends of these points.

I got out my embellisher and felted down lots and lots of coordinating fibers to reduce the glare of the dichrophane to a hint of glitz peeking through. Okay, a lot of glitz. It's still not as blinding as the initial version, trust me. The needlefelting worked because I was using mohair fibers and the base fabric was felt. It would also have worked if I had used a piece of cotton fabric bonded to felt as the base, which probably would have been a better design decision.

I didn't do much needlefelting on the flames coming out of his mouth because I wanted them to glow. I did add a little orange embroidery along the mouth to dispel the disconcerting impression (in the initial fused piece) that the flames were just coming out of nowhere.

So - that's it! You've got glitz, color, flexibility, fusability, no fraying, and you can stitch through it by hand or machine. I am so in love with this stuff!

Dichrophane!

That's what I'm calling the results of a happy accident. Because it's shorter than "Cellophane that's been abused until it looks like dichroic glass." A while ago, probably when I was avoiding some real work,I decided to try something I vaguely remembered from an English embroidery book.(Q: Why are the English so much more innovative and exciting in the field of embroidery? And so far behind us in art quilting?)Anyway, what I thought I remembered was something about coloring and heat-treating cellophane to create a surface for stitchery. So I had a package of iridescent cellophane, because I'm the kind of person who has things like that (Hmmm, I don't know what I'll do with this but it looks interesting) and I had some Pinata alcohol-based inks, which just looove nonporous surfaces, and I brought the two together. And when the ink dried I attacked the cellophane with my heat gun and created this amazing stuff. Here's how,step by step:

1) Acquire some iridescent cellophane.

2)Cut off a chunk of it. Actually, you see two chunks here, because I want to demonstrate different media.

3)Color one side, either side, with whatever works. I used alcohol inks for the blue-green piece and oil pastels for the other. There are probably lots of other possibilities. Experiment!

4) Use a heat gun to create a bubbly, wrinkly surface. Here's what it looks like partway through. If you hold the heat gun too long in one spot you'll get a hole in the cellophane, which is fine if the application you're planning requires holey dichrophane but rather a nuisance otherwise.

Ta-da!You'll get stronger colors on the colored side, more iridescence on the flip side.

So what's so great about this stuff? Well... it doesn't fray. You can cut intricate, detailed shapes out of it without any worry that those spiky bits on the edge are going to dissolve into their component threads. You can fuse it: after ordeal by heat gun, an iron isn't going to bother it. It's flexible. You can needlefelt fibers over it, which I often do to knock back the shine a little; you can machine-sew through it; you can hand embroider it with a big fat embroidery needle and it won't split. And that's just the fiber-arts virtues of it.

Tomorrow I'll post close-ups of the dragon at the top of this post and say more about the fiber-arts techniques involved.

Mary Ruth Smith workshop

This workshop was a couple of weekends ago; I finally got the sewing room cleared enough to put up the lights and photograph a lot of new stuff, which I'll be posting as I edit the pictures.

This woman does amazing things with stitchery. With her it's not embellishment; it's like overlaying a whole new surface over a patchwork of fabrics, or using close-packed black stitches on white fabric to define shapes in negative space, or screen-printing a face onto fabric and then totally covering it with French knots. I don't have a picture of the French-knots face, but here are some snapshots of samples she brought to the workshop:

I think this first piece was all worked in back stitch on a black fabric, but can't remember. The stitches here are so close together, it's like tapestry.

In this piece she's working within the shapes defined by patchwork, and the stitchery doesn't completely obscure the background but adds dimension and interest.

Figures in negative space, with no stitching or very open stitching. Notice the one in the middle that looks as if it was cut from a black-and-white print of bubbles? Those are actually individually hand stitched circles.

The contrast between simple applique circles at the center and closely hand stitched concentric circles radiating out makes the lines of stitchery appear to shimmer.

And here's the piece I started in the workshop.

I wasn't actually trying to make something like a tree, but the strip of dyed cheesecloth up the center insisted on looking like a tree trunk. After contorting it various ways I said, "Ok, be a tree if you insist!" and rearranged some blobs of transfer-dyed lace to be the crown of the tree. I even started stitching the cheesecloth in wood-grain-y patterns (just visible at top right of the detail).

I should probably mention that Mary Ruth doesn't work exactly the way I did. She likes to work on a piece of fabric stapled taut to a frame of stretcher bars. I wrestled with that damn 18" square frame for the entire first day of class. It's not me. I quilt without a hoop. I embroider without a hoop. On the second day I quietly borrowed a screwdriver and liberated my fabric. I'm just bringing this up because if you want to stitch as heavily and closely as she does, a frame might be the only way to keep the work in shape. For the level of stitching I'm putting into the piece, though, it's not really necessary.

Another detail, and some details

I managed to get a slightly better snapshot of one of the embellished circles in Dreamworlds, and now that you can see it I thought I'd add some details about the making of this quilt.

This thing got started because, while rearranging fabric shelves, I noticed that over the years I'd acquired a number of pieces of lace with metallic accents, and I thought they'd look good over black. The background is a black suede-ish FUO (fabric of unknown origin) which I picked because I thought the slightly textured stuff would make a better contrast than just plain black cotton.

I made the quilt as a collection of square and rectangular blocks, each containing one, or two, or none of the embellished spheres, so that I could work on the embellishments without having to manipulate the whole quilt top.

The first stage was to cut circles of metallic lace and fuse them to the black pieces. Cutting out the lace itself was easy enough - I ironed freezer paper circles on and cut around them - but fusing with black Mistyfuse was a total PITA. Mistyfuse is so light and wispy that it likes to drift and ripple and generally not behave like a flat surface. Cutting out circles of it to go under the lace circles was hard. Lining them up with the lace circles for fusing was even harder. No matter how carefully I placed the pieces before laying down the parchment paper and fusing, some of the Mistyfuse would manage to peek out from under the lace and make a nasty shiny blotch on the black suedecloth. I spent a lot of time scratching the stuff off with my thumbnail.

I feel really stupid about this because there ought to be an elegant solution to the problem - there should be some sequence of freezer paper, cutting, fusing where everything is held stable all the way through - but I couldn't think of one. It's like getting the cannibals and the missionaries across the river - until you think outside the box, at least one missionary always gets eaten - and I didn't get out of the box here. If anybody can think of a better way to do it, please tell me!

(But don't tell me I should have used Wonder Under. Yes, it's paper-backed, and that would have given me the stability I wanted. But it shows through the lace. I made some test pieces of lace-on-black using Wonder Under, white Mistyfuse, and black Mistyfuse, and black Mistyfuse worked way better than the other two.)

After that, it was just a matter of searching through and playing with glitzy fabrics, cords, ribbons, buttons and whatever else came to light in my stash. The only hard part was that I had to reorganize four more stash drawers just to find the stuff!

Each circle went more or less the same way. First I tacked it down around the edges, then I bordered the edge with some narrow metallic braid. (I did try combining those steps. It was a mistake.) Then I "cut" out smaller circles of synthetic sheers, using a Versa-tool to burn the circles out and seal the edges in one step, and didn't burn myself hardly at all. Well, not more than 2 or 3 times. Next came any other relatively flat embellishments, like ribbons, yarns, or satin cords. Finally I added gathered circles of wired ribbon, puffy yo-yos of sheer fabric, and buttons.

I hand quilted it with Sulky holographic sliver thread. This was my first time using the Vivian Mahlab school of quilting (don't sit at a machine, do it by hand, don't worry about tiny little stitches, make the color of the quilting thread part of the design) and I loved it. I really, really, really do not like sitting at a sewing machine and wrestling a quilt under the needle for hours; it was much more rewarding to hold this piece on my lap and see the bright sparkling lines move over the black. Anyway, I don't think the sliver "thread" would have held up in a machine.