Twisted Textiles

I hope I spelled that right.
Okay, I’m posting this REALLY quickly because I REALLY should be in bed right now!

This is part of what I’ve been working on the past few days…I won’t say exactly what it is, but I’ll say that it could very well end up on a runway someday. No, it’s not going to be run over by an airplane, I mean it’s part of an outfit.

But you already knew that, didn’t you?

And I probably won’t be keeping the bows—they’re a bit prissy for my tastes.

Been thinking about squishy things…tiny, stuffed, cute things. I just finished writing a post on Craftster about my stuffed grasshopper (whom I’m trying to find a name for) and was thinking about trying some smaller stuffies—they would be faster and therefore a more immediate reward!

I made these two stuffed Imps a few years ago (before I had a blog!) and decided to dig them out and revisit them. They are based on the Imps in a PC game called Fashion Fable by Creatrix Games. The company is making a new game this year called Lila Dreams, and I’m really itching to make some 3-D versions of the characters in it…the art is gonna be beeee-autiful.

I found this skull already gridded-out (via a fellow Flickr member —It was just screaming to be turned into a cross-stitched gift for my husband. I knew it would be perfect on the slippers that I’ve been promising him for awhile now… (click on all photos to enlarge them)

I liked this particular skull design ’cause it was slightly asymmetrical, so I…

• Printed out two of ‘em (one was mirror-imaged) and set to work finding some material. (I haven’t done cross-stitch in literally a decade, and I knew I probably wouldn’t for another 10 years, so I wasn’t going to invest in any more supplies…)
• Found a scrap of black fabric and pieced it to fit my embroidery hoop.
• I wanted my skulls to be slightly smaller than the printed version for the slippers, so for a moment, I considered totally “free-forming” the cross-stitch loosely onto the fabric… … …
• Realized that I’m waaay too perfectionist-oriented for that. And I was too lazy to try to resize the grid and re-print, waste paper etc.
• Drew a larger grid (16 squares) directly onto the printed out diagram, and then used a white chalk pencil to draw the same grid onto the fabric.
• Am pleased to say that it worked out nicely, once I re-taught myself the basics of making TINY… little… X’s…. in perfect… tiny… rows…. *gah!*
• I appliqued the skulls to the fronts of the slippers with invisible stitches. Really that was the most aggravating task of all.

And cross-stitching is actually more relaxing than I had remembered
(I think I would have been bored if I were following a pattern/grid exactly. The difference in scale and the challenge of adjusting the stitch numbers as I went along was a nice change.)

Oh yeah! And I made little skull buttons out of my new favorite clay (they’re on the sides of the slippers)j. I also did some larger stitched X’s for extra extra decoration. Sometimes, we like to go all-out on the embellishments.

This quilted painting was inspired by a dream I had. I blogged about it previously, before I even did any quilting, but the color in the photo turned out too yellow. Now I’ve got a photo that I’m satisfied with!

I couldn’t really paint exactly what I saw while I was sleeping, but this is very close to what it felt like. I also kept the color palette very minimal to make it more dream-like.

Here’s the description from my journal:

I’m wiping down the outside of some windows that frame a front door of an old farmhouse, glass is very high, some areas are like stained-glass. Somehow I know that there is nobody living here, but it is still occupied in some way? I’m supposed to be going around the side of the house to meet people (a gathering? near the storm-cellar perhaps?) but I stop to sponge off the dirt from the glass to the left of the door.

I move on to the window to the right, and as I near the bottom of the glass with my sponge, a reflection of a face shows in the glass—it appears that a small child is inside looking out, but it’s face is very dis-figured. I am shocked to see it and exclaim, perhaps even jump back in surprise?

As I look to my right on the other side of the porch column, I see a child standing there, ready to lead me to the gathering place. She must have been the image that I saw reflected, but her face is very normal, round; actually neither boy nor girl (no remembrance of hairstyle). The texture of the glass in the window must have made her reflection look grotesque but I have a feeling that she manipulated the vision deliberately, calmly, just to frighten me.

She smiles still, and is very stoic as she beckons me to follow her.

Here’s another quilted painting (I love doing these!) except this one is on silk, and I used a method of batik to preserve the white areas.

I also quilted it by hand using embroidery thread, which took about 10 hours…I was sooo nervous about using the machine on the silk! It may have been okay once I had basted the three layers together, but at that point, I figured I’d finish it by hand to be absolutely sure (because the silk is so stretchy on the bias!). It’s about 12 inches in diameter, so it was manageable in an embroidery hoop.

Just for fun, we also placed the lights behind the fabric for a photo, which really emphasized the “stained-glass” quality of the batik. (click the thumbnail for a larger version)

I’ve also –FINALLY!– learned how to bind the edges properly on quilts and such…so this one was my first attempt at a completely circular object. It turns out perfectly if you remember to cut the fabric on the bias!

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