Tattoo Inspired

The other day, Bill asked if I was planning to get a tattoo. Like many marital conversations, it took me a minute to figure out what prompted that. It was the stack of books waiting to go back to the library.

To date, my interests in needle arts have been confined to the application of thread to fabric, not ink to skin. But I checked out a bunch of tattoo books to study the style of traditional tattoos. A couple of things had piqued my interest.

Don Ed Hardy

In the lunch line at the Missouri Art Education Conference in March, I talked to a woman who raved about a workshop on teaching kids to draw in the style of Don Ed Hardy. The iconic California tattoo artist's licensed images now appear on clothing as well as birthday suits.

I'm teaching an altered images workshop at a textile camp for kids this summer. When they start sampling on the first day, I want to be sure I have some images that appeal to them until they have a chance to develop images of their own. Something like tattoo-style images.

I thought about asking my nephew, a very talented tattoo artist, to draw something for me. And I still might. But I really wanted to see if I could sketch in a style that's tattoo-inspired but not tattoo-copied. It makes me uncomfortable to co-opt a culture without knowing enough to show respect and good judgment.

So my dollface doodles have been getting a makeover. I've been playing with biomorphic backgrounds, but don't think I want that much detail for these elements. I need to clean up some sketches, see how they transfer, and do some beading and embroidery on them. We'll see where this leads.

In the meantime, I'm planning to check out books on bonsai, motorcycle repair and animal husbandry. Just to keep my husband guessing.

Next time you're at the library, why not visit a section that's not on your normal path? Let me know what kind of unexpected inspiration you find.

Moonshine & Mother's Day -- Part 2

Last week I showed you an intoxicating creativity exercise I'm calling Bootleg Collage. And while playing with scissors and glue and the contents of your recycle bin is plenty rewarding all by itself, I promised you more. So just in time to make a special Mother's Day gift, here's how to transform a collage into a small piece of wearable art. (My mom is still on dial-up so I don't think she'll see this providing her friends don't forward it to her -- please!)

What You Need

• Inkjet silk
• Cotton batting
• Stiffener (like quilter's template plastic)
• Ultrasuede for backing
• Embroidery floss
• Embroidery needle
• Bar pin back
• Size 11 seed beads
• Nymo D beading thread
• Size 10 sharps needle

Print & Prepare The Fabric

1. Scan your collage.
2. Open a blank document and insert the collage image and any other images you want to print on a sheet of inkjet fabric, leaving about a 1-inch border all the way around each image. 
3. Print the document on inkjet silk according to the manufacturer's instructions. Let dry overnight before peeling the fabric from the carrier paper. 
4. Briefly soak the printed fabric in a basin of cool water with a drop of Palmolive or other mild soap to remove any unbonded ink, stubborn bits of the paper or starch used to adhere the carrier paper to the silk. Rinse, dry, and iron if necessary. OK, this sounds like a big deal but it only takes a few minutes, and if you've printed a bunch of images on the same sheet of inkjet fabric you get them all done at once.

Embellish The Image

• Cut a piece of cotton quilt batting larger than the image area. If you're not comfortable just holding it in place while you embroider, quickly baste it to the back of the printed silk.
• Embellish and border the image with some simple embroidery stitches. I used embroidery floss I painted earlier with Dye-na-Flow fabric paint.

Assemble The Pin

• Trim the excess batting.
• Cut a piece of stiffener (quilting template or recycled plastic) slightly smaller than the image area. 
• Place the inkjet fabric face-down, then top the batting with stiffener.
• Imagine you’re about to wrap a gift with the fabric. Trim the fabric, if necessary, so you have a small overlap when you fold the fabric on two opposite sides around the stiffener. Press the folds with your fingers. Make a few stitches on the back to hold those opposite sides in place. On the other two ends, trim the excess fabric and fold it like wrapping paper. Press the folds with your fingers and fold the ends to the back. Stitch to secure. Stitch a bar pin back in place.
• Cut a piece of Ultrasuede to cover the back. Cut two small slits in the Ultrasuede and position it over the catch and the arm of the pin back, covering the bar. You can stitch the Ultrasuede backing to the piece as you bead the edges.

Bead The Edges

• Anchor a thread and pick up two beads. Take a small stitch one bead width away through the fabric and the Ultrasuede backing. Pass the needle back up through the last bead strung. Pick up one bead, make a stitch, and pass through that bead again. Repeat the pattern. 
• When you get all the way around, pass through the first bead again, pass back through an adjacent bead and secure the tail with a couple of small stitches.

 There you have it:

• a simple gift that will fit in the palm of your mother's hand
• a gift that will spark conversations when she wears it (My daughter made this for me..) 
• an opportunity to use a creativity exercise in a project, and
• an opportunity to learn some new techniques.

I do hope you'll give the collage exercise a try, and let me know how you like it. But if you're running short on time (Mother's Day is May 9), you have permission to use my red flower collage for your own personal use.  Just right-click on the image to save it to your computer. (My mom -- the retired schoolteacher -- won't mind a bit.)

Observations on Observation

Remember back in olden times (a couple of years ago) when, during the first week of January, everyone rushed to the drugstore to have rolls of film (look it up on Wikipedia) processed after the holidays? Did you hear last year that Kodak no longer makes Kodachrome film? Digital camera technology has changed just about everything related to taking pictures. Just about. What hasn't changed is this:

The greatest skill any photographer can hope to possess is that of observation.

That's from a post called 4 Practice Techniques to Develop Photographic Observation  by Christina N. Dickson at Digital Photography School.

This is right in tune with the exercises I use in my Local Color workshop, where we use digital photography to capture observations, rather than images. I love prowling around with the camera, as if I needed an excuse to slow down and really see what's in my own back yard.

But during the holidays, things move so fast all I can do is occasionally grab the camera, point and shoot. Past practice at observation helps me stand a better chance of capturing the spirit of a moment. When I come back to these hurried photos later, I'm not surprised to see things I didn't consciously notice at the time.

I may crop an image and use fabric paint and markers to make a picture I print on fabric more like the idea captured in my imagination. And for me, there's always stitching. You have no idea how much I can't wait to embroider this thicket of willow. To me it represents the thicket of responsibilities and opportunities that loom before us, and the strength and resolve we need to bolster us until we can spot a rabbit path through it.

The Age Of Discovery

Last week I made an MP3 player cozy using a technique called cross-knit looping. While I was stitching, I had some time to think about how much my world has changed recently.

In rural areas like ours, internet options are very limited. Until two months ago, we were still on dial-up. Now, with a faster connection, pages load before I’ve lost interest and I’m learning a lot. In the last few weeks, I feel like I’ve traveled around the world and through time.

That reminded me of an article I read some time back by Jennie Durkin. Published in 1989 in the Bulletin of the Needle and Bobbin Club, it’s called Loop-Stitch Embroidery: Peruvian and Elizabethan. Thanks to the University of Arizona, here’s a link to the PDF.

Durkin’s study of Peruvian textiles led to her recognition of an apparent connection between the embroidery version of cross-knit looping (from Peru’s Nazca region) and Ceylon stitch (which apparently was not used in England before the reign of Elizabeth I).

A skilled embroiderer in the Elizabethan age would have been able to look at a sample of a foreign technique and figure out how to reproduce it. There may be no direct connection between the Spanish conquest of Peru and the English court, but there were plenty of indirect routes by which the connection could have been made. As she says,

“The absence of direct contact did not prevent the spread of potatoes and tobacco by the later 16th century. The nature of the interest in embroidery at that time required only one example to reach a competent embroiderer.”

As my voyages continue in my own Age of Discovery, I can’t help but wonder what the Virgin Queen would have worn if her ladies had been reading the blogs.