So, I took the leap, and decided to make one of those larger pieces I told you earlier I had planned but feared to begin!
This beauty from 1946 has been in my care for quite some time now, waiting for a special project to come along. And then the boxful of turquoise spools of thread came along. Seeing many of the same small thing automatically makes me want to create a surface out of them. Using 70 spools of thread at one go is at the same time exhilaratingly wasteful and somehow elevating. A single spool, or three, can be interesting and pretty, but seeing a big, big lot at once is a different thing altogether.
I don't usually take many photos mid-process, but for some reason I ended up taking quite many this time, and wanted to share them with you, too. I mostly work quite late at night, so the photos are pretty dark. (It still gets dark quite early in the evening, but that's luckily changing soon!)
This is where it all began. I had the idea of framing something with the spools, but I'd temporarily forgotten having this photo. When the photo revealed itself to me during a studio tidying session, I instantly paired in my mind its hand tint tones with the colour scheme of my turquoise spools. I seldom make anything very colourful, but these two were just so perfect together I went super bright (on my personal scale).
That embroidery took hours and hours. This photo was taken while pondering what colour to choose for the box housing everything. I'd originally had turquoise in mind, but as soon as I ran into the perfect red in my paper drawer, those plans were abandoned.
Gluing the spools and weighing them down as I go.
Still missing something here. Together V and I determined this piece would benefit from some shiny element. That's where the sew-on-gems and nailheads came in, and I'm very glad they did.
Last week I posted a piece I refer to as the Teacher - this one got the nickname of Spool Lady quite early on. It gives me a not so elegant Log Lady vibe, so I should probably rename this lady asap, don't you think? Any suggestions?