Santa Clara: Contemporary Hand Embroidery Workshop

Irene Brummer

 Last October, I taught my Hand Embroidery workshop to the Santa Clara Valley Quilt Association in Santa Clara, CA. We had a packed class with 20 participants. The skill level ran the gamut from people who had been embroidering for most of their lives to those who had never done hand embroidery before.
   Everyone was remarkably patient and enthusiastic, and I was very happy to see all the finished samples entered in the guild's semi-annual show a couple of weeks ago.

Tracy Visher

  
   This piece was done by Tracy Visher of Sacramento, CA. Tracy made a whole set of pillows for her patio furniture, of which this is one. Tracy is a very accomplished stitcher who has been doing hand embroidery for years, so I was glad she enjoyed the class.

Mitsuko Sasaki

   This beautiful piece was done by Mitsuko Sasaki. She has done a marvelous job, and I love the additional edging she added to her piece.

Roberta Pabst

Betty Eastham

   I offer the option of doing this design in either the Bright or Neutral color palette. Roberta chose to do her piece in the neutral color palette. The neutrals really help you see the impact of values in your work. One thing that really makes mandala type designs 'pop" is the variation in value and the detail and scale of the shapes in each concentric row.
 

Sandra Crane

   And last of all, we have Sandra's lovely piece. I love the way everyone has put their own spin on this embroidery pattern. You can see what a difference the choice in colors and the variation in the fabric borders can make to the overall impact of the piece. Thank you everyone for sharing your work!
   I will also be teaching this workshop, Contemporary Hand Embroidery, at San Francisco School of Needlework and Design on August 24, 2019.

Linen Tunic: My Garden

   A little bit of this, a little bit of that, and before you know it you have something wonderful, quite different, and really fun to wear. I have wanted to make one of the Japanese style aprons to wear as a tunic or top for quite some time. 
   My theme or story for this piece is my little front garden. It is quite wild and unruly, but it gives me a great deal of pleasure just to be there in the midst of the nasturtiums, ferns, and other growing things. Just as I no longer strive for perfection in my art, I have no desire to tame the great outdoors.

    After searching for ages, I finally came up with the closest pattern I could find to suit my needs; Simplicity #1133. This pattern had a huge dart along the side seam that I eliminated by pinning the edges of the dart together. I wanted to have one entire piece with no seams so I could freely paint and stitch away. It is made from the Natural Linen I carry in my shop.

   After sewing the garment together, my first step was to spray it with Jacquard's airbrush ink. After heat setting the ink, I started applying my nasturtium shapes and rectangular strips of fabrics. The flowers were glued on with a teeny bit of glue, and the rectangles were hand basted on. The last thing I want on a garment is a fusible that will be stiff and heavy feeling. 

 After machine stitching around the edges of the flowers and leaves, I painted in my moths with my Giant Moth Stencil using Neopaque and lumiere. Next came the really fun part as  I started drawing in the abstracted stem shapes for the hand embroidery to visually tie all the shapes together.

 I wanted to emphasize the edges of the garment, but I didn't want anything too fussy or exacting. I first worked a row for Cretan Stitch around the edges, then an irregular blanket stitch, and ended with short little stitches for just a little touch of added color. I found some beautiful old shell buttons that were just the right size for the tab closures at the shoulders.

  Detail of the stitching on the back.

   For the rectangular overlays, I used scraps of my hand dyed cotton. I love the way the fabric puckered up after washing to give it that beautiful bumpy texture. 

   Now I am getting ready to start another tunic. My next effort will be in black linen that will be cut on the bias, so it will be interesting to see how different the fit is. I am thinking rust tones,splashes of brilliant blues, and little bits of a lovely pearl gray hand dyed sateen. I haven't quite decided on a theme yet.

Inspiration: Where Is It Hiding?

   For the past two years, I've been taking an online course called the Art and Business of Surface Pattern Design to learn about art licensing. I am finally beginning the last module next week. One of our recent assignments was to design a collection of tea towels. The designs had to be hand-rendered, geometric, and mostly non-representational.
   I often get asked where I get my inspiration from. I suppose the answer to that question is that I am inspired mostly by nature, but I am also inspired by pretty much everything I see. 

   So, after searching for ideas, I began sorting through my photos for ideas. I came across photos I had taken of buildings  in  Ferndale, California. Ferndale is a picturesque small town near where I live with lots of interesting Victorian architecture from the late 19th century.
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   I began sketching some of the architectural elements from this building I noticed while walking down a side street. It is interesting to discover what is actually right under our noses, that we take completely for granted, and that we fail to even notice or appreciate so much of the time. I have seen these buildings for years, but it is amazing how oblivious I had become to their quirky and creative characteristics.

   Since I started teaching workshops on Block Printing, I am always in need of more block designs. So, I decided to make a few hand-carved blocks for printing on linen. I will be teaching a 2 day workshop on Block Printing on Fabric at Village Sewing in Santa Rosa on Oct.19-20 this year. 
   So I am experimenting with the different ways blocks repeat and create new designs, and I love the secondary designs that develop like with the triangular shaped block.

   I really love doing the block printing, but I guess I love the challenge of coming up with new designs even more. I am working now on tiled designs for block printing. It is so much fun playing with the different types of symmetry to see how many variations I can come up with.
   And the other day I had some friends here from out of town who hadn't ever been to Ferndale, so we headed over across the bridge to check out some of the amazing little shops and enjoy the sights. Of course I took my camera with me, and I found so many more details in the hand carved wood on many of the storefronts. Who knows how they might pop up in my future artwork?

Watercolors

I have signed up for Jane Lafazio's online workshop Sketching and Watercolor: Journal Style, and I just completed the first assignment. It is funny, but I have wanted to learn to do watercolor for a really long time. I have a sizable stack of books on watercolor techniques and botanical illustration by many wonderful artists, but they have sat there unused for years now.

This was my first assignment and my first watercolor as well. My shadow got way too dark, so I added the dark brown border to try to balance things out a bit. I know nothing about using water colors or pairing for that matter, and I am looking forward to learning more. This is really a lot of fun.

Pomegranate and Satsuma Mandarins.

Here is my second little painting. These paintings are quite small; they are only 5" x 7". It's so odd how I could never get up the gumption to simply do this on my own, yet now even at this crazy busy time of the year I am somehow managing to forge ahead.

I would love to be able to transfer some of my line drawings to fabric or paper so that I can either hand or machine embroider them, but I have not found a really suitable transfer technique as yet. For the marking for my machine quilting, I use a water-soluble fine-tipped blue pen on light fabric and for dark fabric I use the Staedler white water-soluble pencil. 

I have heard from knowledgeable people that the iron on heat transfer type pencils do not always come out. And Solvy won't work as I do not want to wash the project after stitching.

Any tips or suggestions on transfer methods from you readers would be greatly appreciated.