design-newyork.com

I haven’t forgotten about the tortoise. I just haven’t had the chance to get to my table saw and cut out my background piece for it. Hopefully when I go over to my parent’s house tomorrow night, I’ll run away from the holiday celebration for a short period of time and hack some pretty birch plywood into small squares and use one for my tortoise. However, this doesn’t mean I have not been making stuff. I’ve made some delightful animated gif ads for NewCastleNOW.org. Look, a rotating globe ad:

I iz proud. Right now I am working on a massive (I mean MASSIVE) embroidery project for my kitchen. I have a big piece of Formica blocking in my refrigerator that I want to cover. About eight years ago, I was on grand jury duty and started an embroidery piece to kill the time while I waited for the train, sat in the courtroom, etc. Then it sat in a Williams & Sonoma bag in the basement for seven years, and recently I unearthed it and had an “Aha” moment. Sho’ nuff, it fits perfectly in the spot I want to cover. So I have picked it up again and am sewing on it like it is going out of fashion.

It’s a rectangular piece of muslin I painted black, about four-and-a-half feet by two feet. I painted some muslin red and cut out the shapes of maple leaves. Then I ironed the leaves onto the black background using fusable web, a glue sheet that melts when ironed. Now I am making the veins and color differentiations with thread and, because I am me and I am anal to the max, I am using itty-bitty little stitches. Here are some pics to give you an idea.

It’s going to resemble maple leaves frozen into the surface of a lake. After all the leaves are stitched, I’m going to stitch silver thread all around each leaf to look like frost. Then I’m going to finish the edges of the tapestry with ribbon and hang it from a rod.

Stitches on leaves with my toes for scale:

Two more leaves, one unfinished (you can see a small bit of unfinished leaf in the one with the yellow tones):

I think it will be a nice wallcovering, and I like the fact that something that sat neglected in my parent’s basement for so long has found a purpose. It’s going to be a while before it’s finished, I have five more leaves to go. I’ll update it as it happens.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 26th, 2008 at 4:33 am and is filed under My Art/Design/Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.