A Bit of This and a Little of That...

Early in the pandemic, The TextileArtist.org offered a free six-week Community Stitch Challenge. Each week a well-known embroidery artist offered an instructional video and a creative challenge for participants. A dedicated Facebook group featured the work of students who responded to the challenges. I enrolled and learned a great deal. I've always liked embroidery, but this is a step beyond- very creative and inspiring. You can still follow along with those original six challenges which are on the website linked above. This wall hanging/art quilt is the result of artist Anne Kelly's video challenge in Week 6. Anne is a UK-based textile artist who likes to include repurposed textiles and folk art images in her pieces. My collage is designed on a background made from a vintage hanky and a lace tablecloth. It also has bits of lace and fancy trims along with beads and a braided yarn edging. It was great fun to work on, especially because it's a repository for so many little things that were part of my extensive stash of questionable textiles.

One thing that Anne likes to do is over-stitching on textile pieces. You can see in the close-up that I chose a decorative machine stitch in variegated thread and sewed parallel rows over all of the elements in the collage. I must say it took a little courage to do this because I liked the piece before the stitching was done. I was concerned how it might look over-stitched. The dense stitching does mute the colors a bit, but overall I really like the effect-soft and quilted.

You can see more of Anne's remarkable work on her website. She's had installations of her work in Canada, Australia, and the UK. I'll share some of the other projects and exercises in upcoming posts. I've been concentrating on smaller projects lately because I've finally begun a much-needed tidying up of the sewing room. It's taking quite awhile and I'm becoming reacquainted with lots of fun stuff!