Raw hide

Rollin’, rollin, rollin, keep them dogies rollin’…

So many artists say…

…..that the best way to keep work moving, is to work on more than one piece at a time.

This is the start of a new piece called “Raw hide” showing a printout  from my original painting traced onto the fabric with pencil and colored pencils. Adding color pencil to the fabric is a new thing for me-and it’s proving to be very helpful in selecting the range of color threads for different sections of the work.

The pencil drawing is not exact by any means, it’s a starting point.

Paint colors read very differently from embroidery threads so colors that work in a painting, will not read  the same when translated into colored loops. This leads to constant adjustments as colored threads are juxtaposed against each other.

Cora’s Thanksgiving Baby Cardy

…And the start of a new punch needle piece

Cora’s Thanksgiving cardy is ready! Of course, it may not arrive in Scotland in time for Thanksgiving but since Thanksgiving is not celebrated in Scotland -that’s ok. Fiona, my six year old grand daughter and fashion guru, says that this is a rainbow design, as the colors change and are in different combinations on each side and on each sleeve.

Meanwhile, I need to get back to my latest punch needle and finish  up before Christmas…

This is the beginning of a piece called ‘Young man asleap/dead’ and is a challenging piece. The image shows the work from the back, which is how the work is created.

It may appear incongruous to have dark subject matter for a punch needle made out of embroidery floss and only 8 or 9″ wide but surfaces, even surfaces of colored loops, can be surprisingly expressive.

For this work,  I have started to hand dye -on a very small scale-some white embroidery threads to try match some colors from my paintings for the punch needles. Now I’m thinking, because it really is very small amounts of yarns- maybe it would be easier to just paint directly onto the threads, rather than dyeing the threads in a dye bath. It will be interesting to see if the hand dyed yarns add/change anything in the overall composition.