Words of The Fool, I

We’re thinking here of The Fool as a trickster sort of a figure, not as in “I pity the fool,” OK?

This is the piece I finished yesterday after many, many eons of stitching. Miles of stitching. Years of stitching.

[Click on any of these to make them lots bigger.]

Oy:  lots and lots of stitching.

It presented several problems along the way that I liked. I like challenges.

I was inspired by Theo Ellsworth’s drawings in Capacity. I really like that puppet head thing and thought about it, playing around with some little sketches in my journal. Then I realized that this photo The EGE took would work—the mouth would lend itself to manipulation.

Now, I’ve gotta confess that I hate photographs printed on fabric—you know, those family quilts that are just squares of photos on fabric, as if the person who made it was so entranced by the technology of getting the photograph onto fabric that they didn’t think anything else was required? Guess why I feel that way? Someone’s been there, done that—I remember the thrill of figuring out how to get images on fabric (with the help of Jean Ray Laury’s book, Imagery on Fabric—and if you don’t have this book, you’d better snatch up one of these copies right away) and look back at that stuff and think, “What was I thinking there?”

So I dicked around with the photo in Photoshop elements to come up with something like this:

And then something like this:

And then printed that on fabric I had already run through the printer once to get this on it:

It’s from that ancient journal where someone wrote some weird-ass religious tome, page after page of scary writing. I haven’t read most of it—just enough to go, “Whoa.” But the spidery writing and the faded ink are just perfect for backgrounds. I like to run things through twice, rather than overlaying in Photoshop. I’m not a fan of digital art—I like hands on stuff, things where you do as much as possible by hand. I love being able to print stuff off the computer onto fabric, but I have no desire to do all the work on the computer. Manipulating and printing photos is about as far as I want the digital part to go. Any more than that and it looks plastic to me.

It took me a while to figure out how to do the mouth so it could be stitched, and how to do the teeth, etc.

The letters—I showed y’all how to do those in that video, wherever it is (on youtube, if you really want to see it again).

There are felt hearts and red crosses—I bought some part-wool felt from Joggles and threw it in the wash to see what would happen. It got wonderfully funky, just what I wanted. I cut those from that. The paler hearts and red crosses—I cut those from bleedable tissue paper and wetted them and put them on the fabric. That was kind of cool, but the color was really faint, so I had to stitch a lot.

The pink fabric behind the words—I played around with creating a “word cloud” and printed that out on dyed fabric and then ran it back though with some text that kind of faded out as it neared the bottom—I don’t know what that was about, since it wasn’t out of ink.

OK. So that’s the basics.  I painted and outlined stuff with a Zig permanent marker. Then I started stitching, with the piece on stretcher bars. I got all the interior stitching done that way—I’m going to be working smaller from now on, I think, as I vastly prefer holding the fabric and working with it when I don’t have to put it on the bars for very long. But, on the other hand, it’s almost impossible to work the middle and hold things taut without those bars.

After I took it off the bars, I machine stitched my face—it was too puffy, and it needed something. That’s the thing:  I look at the piece and go, “It needs something,” and then set about trying to figure out what it needs. On this piece, the two sides really did look like two separate panels, and that’s not what I wanted. So a lot of the later decisions were about how to make them blend. For a while, I hated this piece. Nothing I did was helping. I did the white stitching inside the purple letters, trying to lighten up the left side. I machine stitched the pink background with orange stitching, trying to tame the pink and bring in more orange. Finally I just started doing a lot of outline stitching--it wasn’t until I started doing all that fussy outline stitching that things started to come together. That’s what I’ve been doing the last couple weeks.

Here’s the back—it’s actually a fairly bright purple, but it was hard to photograph:

This morning I’ve started “mending” some pieces—not mending tears or anything, but doing some stitching to make them hang better. When I was putting a backing on these to finish them, I stitched through the backing only when I sewed on the little rings I used for hanging. The pieces started to sag, and I had to take them down and iron them flat, and now I’m adding stitching around the binding. Turns out it looks a lot better, too, and it’s fun to see how I’ve changed the way I do these—I no longer add a backing or a binding, and I let all the stitching show on the back—that’s one of my favorite parts to look at when I’m finished, so why not let it show?

Whew. So that’s what I’ve been up to in all my spare time for the last several months. After this mending stuff is done, I’ve got three other pieces started—it’s just choosing which one I want to work on next. Or, really:  since I’m going to be spending a LOT of time on the road here soon, it’s getting all three ready for the hand stitching:  doing the painting and stamping and fusing and cutting and, and, and.

Yikes. Better get busy~~