Just a very short post to say Da! Da! I have eventually finished my second pillow of dreams, the Shoes dream….and I have written another piece to accompany the recent post Slow Progress where I discussed the doubts and frustrations of making slow hand crafted work. At last it can be now be viewed in my pages for ‘Make It Through the Night’  as a the last section of  Ongoing Work which is found directly underneath the header image – which is an embroidered dream flower detail of another pillow from the same series

If you have not viewed this section it is set out in reverse order  so that you read/view my ideas as they unfold; this way you can follow the development of a personal set of work – with all its trials and frustrations over the months, and from this month the past year (I started this work in December 2009) so this section appears at the very end of the whole page and you will have to scroll down to it …. but anyone interested in the way someone’s mind works while working slowly through a whole series of interconnected and complex ideas which somehow are supposed to form a cohesive narrative or in this instance make for a comprehensive gallery exhibition, should find it of interest.

I wrote in the About page that I would show work in various stages of progress, successful or not; and as I have almost  finished the second dream embroidery for  my “Make it Through the Night” project, I thought I would show this at the “will it never ……. end”? stage.  This embroidery has been a real struggle to  make, which is so strange as I have had the drawing of my dream for over 10 years, have often looked at it and thought “one day”.

 

 

 

For several well considered reasons I decided to embroider it onto a bed sheet, therefor everything was life size – “a sheet of dreams” I started it in August and mention it in the blog “Samplers” and It took about one month of drawing, making patterns and sampling various techniques before I could start to make the work; then another month’s actual making before I gave it up – I thought that  if I shelved it I may eventually get the courage to continue the mammoth task of stitching it. I had made many samples and even got as far a printing an entire quilt onto the bed sheet, this took weeks so I was loathe to abandon it. But basically the sheer scale was just too daunting – I knew I had to hand stitch each shoe and there were about 10 0f them, and they were shoe sized and in a single thread, and I was losing the will to live at the thought of it. I didn’t blog about it at the time as I was unsure of why I was experiencing such difficulties and I certainly didn’t have the heart to write about it.

Meanwhile I made other works – some commissioned pieces which can’t be blogged until they are published….and so generally let the problem lie at a low level, to be absorbed knowing that eventually it would re-emerge…this is how work often resolves itself; you just have to be patient and let it suggest its own way forward…..then I made some handkerchieves for the same project, and realising how good it was to work small and quickly again – I thought I could maybe make the work smaller and embroider a” pillow of dreams” – after all, I reasoned, this is where you lay your head and where all the action stems from.

So I set to work again restitching the whole image onto a vintage linen Oxford pillowcase. The drawings remained exactly the same but now I used running stitches to make the quilt then padded it like a trapunto technique to emphasises the body shape that emerges from the distorted “patchwork”. This was all so really interesting to work, I was now on the right track and gone were the misgivings of “copping out” for a smaller scale.

I really wanted to get on with the shoes though, the drawings were taken from many old sketches and my own collection –

Some shoes I cannot bear to throw away and have used them for years for drawing classes – if you can draw shoes you can draw most things put in front of you.

Eventually I got to embroidering the shoes, they are quite small about 10cms / 2 inches long and are stitched in one strand of  silk, cotton or metal threads, I love glitzy shoes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of course the whole point of the dream was that I couldn’t wear the shoes any more, look closely at the lack of feet….yet  to be embroidered – I will address this issue later when I publish the finished work in the Ongoing Work pages. But meanwhile I set to to do the rest of the shoes – they take between 3 and 8 hours to work each one, but it is now driving me to distraction, I really dislike the days spent stitching these shoes……

Ironically I constantly bang on about how stitching is like meditation and I am presently running a project called “Stitching and Thinking” with a group of makers where we are considering the state of mind reached when the world goes away and its just you and your thoughts and the work; sometimes called a state of Flow, or old hippies used to say ” In the Zone” – wherever it is it is wonderful.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I haven’t been there for a few weeks while battling with these embroidered shoes…and I blame an “acquaintance” of mine, Nigel Hurlstone, who is a tutor on a course where they still embroider –  Manchester Met (MMU). He gave me a much needed and requested  mentoring session on the whole ‘Make it Through the Night’ set of work whose progress he has been following – we have a reciprical arrangement where he crits my stitched work and I crit his new written story – telling work.

But he inadvertently said something that absolutely made me loose faith in how I have made this piece of work – “what is really fascinating and worth you considering is that these shoes LOOK as if they have been stitched on the multi – head machine – but they haven’t ” – and he was right! The long and short stitches are so neat and precise they look machine made – I have been overtaken by technology. So I now have to rethink for what and how I stitch by hand….. how will this machine – made perception affect the way people appreciate my work?

One of the ideas underpinning my current practice is the notion of time taken: to hand stitch something which is very slow and therefor valued means that the subject or concept is worth consideration……but meanwhile I have to finish this piece of work – but am I wasting precious time when I could just give it to some one to machine it for me – I am not about to learn how to use a multi -head. But it does make me wonder how I can change my whole way of working in cloth when anyone can “draw” with stitch.