There has been one of my all too frequent gaps in posting. Again it is because I have been doing a lot of making, mainly on my inspired by Fabergé eggs. I have also moved on to working with wook appliqué and embroidery and have gone back to my old highly decorative and surface worked style. This is one of the new series of eggs (and I will post about all of them eventually). It is worked on a thick but light Welsh woollen background, with the egg itself made from an Irish tweed from a sample pack. I chose the tweed to try and echo Fabergé’s trademark guilloché enamel. This involved many coats of thin enamel over a tooled metal base. I believe it is called Guilloché after its inventor M. Guilloché. This is an egg showing the technique.
Strangely whereas enamel is cold and hard and durable, the soft, thick highly susceptible to moths tweed seems like a brilliant way to render the guilloché in textiles.
This piece, which I have called the Turtle Egg, also shows what I mean by being inspired by Fabergé rather than copying him. I don’t particularly like the neo-classical style of the eggs, but I find them endlessly inspiring for my own ideas. I heard an interview with the singer PJ Harvey yesterday in which she said she does a lot of research and reading for her albums but when it comes time to write the songs she puts it all aways and just writes what comes out, in effect her own response to the material. I think this sums up what I do much of the time. I do my research, look at the picture books I have amassed and then wait to do what the cloth tells me to do. I find this a highly satisfying process.
After choosing the delicate tweed I found a leftover circle of cloth from another project, already pressed over a paper form. I appliquéd that and then started to add the beads around the edge of the egg. Tweed and wool in general don’t fray particularly badly, unlike silk, but they still need gentle treatment until the edges are secured. After that I stitched on the turtle, which is a charm that I bought for three pounds in a bead shop. It was a happy accident that the cloth circle and the turtle fitted together so well. As I was sewing I became aware that I was working in bronzy tones, but that the tweed was a very soft blue, green and pink blend, and so I put a ring of turquoise beads around the inner circle. I finished by stitching colonial knots in a beautifully variegated perlé cotton around the turtle.
I made this one in an evening and it was really relaxing to make. One of those pieces where everything comes gently together rather than having to be wrestled into place, which is a story for another day.
