Judith's Stitching Journey: Chapter 10B: Wallhanging samples

The next task in producing my wallhanging was to enlarge the A3 design to the final size of A1. Not as easy as I thought!! I confidently took my design into town to the print shop ... only to find that the print shop had disappeared!! None of the shops or the library were able to photocopy anything larger than A3. So ... I had two photocopies made - 1 x A3 and 1 reduced to A4 for my presentation board. Back home I took my A3 copy and cut it into 8 pieces. I then enlarged each of these on my own printer to A4 size and taped them all together. The resulting design is almost, though not quite A1 size but near enough for me to work out sizes for each piece of embroidery. The only problem now being that all that photocopying and enlarging has muted the colours considerably but I will refer back to my original papers for my stitching.

Moving on ...

We were then tasked with producing three samples for each paper used in the design. However, due to the large number of papers I used (10 in all) I quickly realised that once translated into embroidery this could end up looking very 'bitty' and took the decision to limit myself to just four types of embroidered pieces.

Fig. 10B:1

This photograph shows two methods for stitching the 'fire' sections of my wallhanging. The fabric I used is the lining of an old umbrella which was printed with Turner's 'Fighting Temeraire'. In the left hand piece I simply stitched across the flame shaped negative spaces. The fabric has formed a rather interesting texture in the process.
The little flame shaped piece on the right is formed by sandwiching three of the flames cut from the first piece between a sticky water soluble fabric and a piece of Romeo soluble film. I purposely didn't rinse all the film out so the threads are still a little firm and the fabric has again buckled. I really like this sample and would like to use this towards the centre of the wallhanging. My only concern is whether it would be considered too figurative?

Fig. 10B:2

My third 'fire' sample is worked on scrim with flame shapes stitched on top in a shiny yellow viscose thread. I'm aware that this doesn't show up too well in the photograph but in reality is quite effective. Because it has not been attached to any soluble fabric it has produced a lovely soft fabric which would be very easy to manipulate and stitched onto different colours of scrim (see images below) would, I believe, satisfy the need for different shaded areas without using totally different embroidery methods.

Fig. 10B:3

I stitched this solid piece of machine embroidery on a piece of soluble fabric to mimic the very bottom 'flood' strip in my design, which I think it does adequately, however the remainder of the wallhanging really needs to be more 'ethereal' and flexible so I would not choose to use this.

Fig. 10B:4

Because I liked the 'fire' sample stitched on scrim I returned to this for my next sample (10B:4). Having stitched over the scrim to open up the weave I then stitched waving lines in white thread across the entire piece. I like this but decided it as maybe a little too subtle.

Fig. 10B:5

... so I returned to the pure machine embroidery on soluble fabric and then stitched the wavy lines in cable stitch using a thick cotton thread. This is a definite possibility!!

Fig. 10B:6

Sample 10B:6 is stitched on totally the wrong colour of scrim to reflect the flood waters in my inspiration photograph but I only have a small piece of grey/pale blue scrim left (again, see images below) so decided to save that for the final wallhanging if necessary. I decided to try to get some texture into the 'flood' side of the piece so crumpled a piece of scrim onto the adhesive soluble fabric, covered it with a piece of non-adhesive soluble and stitched circles in a grey thread. Another possible winner which would mimic the movement of the flood water.

Fig. 10B:7

Fig. 10B:8

Fig. 10B:9

I decided to try for more movement by first stitching a piece of just embroidered circles (Figl 10B:7), and then a piece of scrim with holes cut into it (Fig. 10B:8). I used a dark grey thread on this second piece to better mimic the flood waters though would probably use the grey scrim for the final piece.

I had been thinking about how to join all these pieces together and decided that merely joining them with insertion stitches would make it tricky to get them to hang properly so went out and bought a piece of grey net. I crumpled and stitched these last two samples onto a piece of the net fabric to see how that would work. It does indeed work and the net blends into the background so from a distance the pieces of embroidery should look as though they are floating in air.

I have decided to use scrim as a background for all my embroidered pieces to make a co-ordinated whole... samples 2, 4 (with the cable stitch wavy lines rather than machine cotton) and 6. The black square in the centre of the design will also be solidly stitched onto a piece of scrim. The only exception to this 'rule' would be the addition of a small number of the flame shaped pieces added on top of some of the 'fire' areas of the design if this were not deemed to be too figurative. (I await advice on this point).

As a result of this decision with regard to fabric I have gathered together a selection of scrim pieces in relevant colours hand dyed for various pieces of work during this course and for earlier projects. I would certainly not envisage using every piece but there are certainly areas of many which could appropriately be used.