a stitch is just a stitch or a stitch

Long short stitch::Split back stitch

 My post today is  to show a bit of an "experiment" I did in response to a post at Jude's Magic Diary.  November 22nd. Jude did a video on dense stitching where she discussed filling in the negative space with her split back stitch.  This prompted me to ask, in the comments, " i don't know if you noticed but on the cloth that i'm working on now, LEFT, the filled in figures are done in long and short stitch. as you point out the space does provide another element...lift, dimension and it does take a while. I'm going to try the split stitch on the next figure I will be filling in but i just wondered if you have an opinion on these two stitches, different contrast kind of thing." To which Jude responded,  " what i like about the split stitch is the spliting of the stitch actually, it connects the stitch in a more durable way and makes a more integrated surface. more like a woven tapestry without too much pattern in the stitch itself.  i kind of made it up before i even knew it was a stitch. i also like how splitting the stitch spreads the thread, widening it and also allowing you to shift the position of the thread by catching it, moving it into place and then anchoring it. it hugs the cloth really nicely." Therefore, I offer the image above as a demonstration of the two stitches next to one another. Jude also mention the suzani (no relation, ha...sorry about it but couldn't help myself) stitch as another stitch that adds density. November 22nd Magic entry (for members)


Visually the stitches might look the same but technically there are some differences that I have observed. The split back stitch for one is "easier" to do in the respect that the orientation of the stitches are consistent.  The long and short stitch has to be formed in such a manner that oddly shaped corners can easily throw off the pattern.  The long and short stitch is really done best on measure canvas, like needle point and crewel. One other observation that I made and want to stress, is Jude's suggestion to "thumb" press the stitch when you make it and before you "split" it.  I initially did not do that and then I took a closer look at Jude's example, watched the video from her sidebar stitch reference and noticed that she explains the pressing.  Once I started doing that it made a big difference.  Since you will be most likely using more that one strand of floss when doing this type of fill work, the strands can twist very easily - the stitch will not lay flat on the surface of the cloth and you end up with a "skinnier" look spot...and there is some loss of the tapestry effect that you would get otherwise.  There really is a lovely texture that is created with this method...but as Jude points out, it is a time consuming stitch and you will use a lot of thread so if you want to maintain the color of the area that you are working in, have a good supply of the color.  It is a silent, slow, calming stitch that takes concentration and therefore, for me, relaxing.  I can drown out most of the noise around me as I'm holding the cloth and focusing on that little patch between hands, cloth, thread and myself. 


 I'm showing a few example of the stitches just to illustrate the technique:






           stitch comparison

I am also include the stem stitch here because that is what I used to outline the figures.  It is another stitch that my mother used a lot and taught me.  She was an absolutely magician with the Long and Short stitch.  Today sadly her hands and mind don't have the patience for such detailed work...but the clothes hold their memories well.

 I am going to have a detailed update on my cloth and memory, which I was to include here but decided to keep it separate.  But in the interim here is a shot of a corner I just finished, hoping to catch your fancy.

                                      

Can a shadow cast her own shadow back?
The "boxed" shadow is done in split back stitch,
whereas the retreating shadow is done in
Long and Short stitch. 

powerful threads

I saw this today and thought is worth sharing.  I found it very moving,
especially the last word.  Sadly that had no punctuation mark

shinyslingback:

Lise Bjorne Linnert

www.lisebjorne.com

Desconocida Unknown, installation Leonard Pearlstein Gallery, Philadelphiacommunity art project, 5300 hand embroidered nametags in protest of murders of women Ciudad Juarez, Mexico2006 - ongoing

this evening I pulled up more information for the above project as I found it so compelling:  (sorry for the length) from  www.lisebjorne.com :

DESCONOCIDA UNKNOWN UKJENT

4100 hand embroidered labels, sewing pins,
site specific installation

Desconocida Unknown Ukjent is an ongoing community art project, using embroidery as a tool to protest and show solidarity with women´ fight against abuse, femicides and human trafficking. The project was initiated in 2006 in response to the critical situation in Ciudad Juarez, a city on the border of USA and Mexico where 800 women since 1993 are known to have been brutally murdered and hundreds have disappeared, suspected kidnapped to trafficking. None of the crimes have been solved and the Mexican Government remains passive, often hindering the process of justice.

2100 individuals in 27 countries have so far participated in the project. Each participant embroiders the name of one murdered woman in Ciudad Juarez on a white cloth label, 2cm x 8cm. To remember all the unidentified victims of similar crimes worldwide, each participant also embroiders the word unknown in their own language and alphabet.

By June 2010 more than 4000 labels have been embroidered.

The situation in Ciudad Juarez gives a cruel picture of the dark side of globalization, corruption, and the in-balance between the people of power and money, and the huge population of poor, in desperate need of job. Ciudad Juarez is a typical city on the US/Mexican border “hosting” nearly 400 international factories, so called Maquilladoras or Sweat Shops. Companies such as General Electric, Sony, Nike, Gap, and many more, change their companies name when they cross the border to employ Mexican workers, in majority women, for a very low cost. They do not pay tax, neither to Mexico nor the US, enhancing their profit. The possibilities of jobs bring thousands of migrants to a city like Ciudad Juarez, hoping for a better future, living in shanty-towns and becoming a very easy target for crimes.

According to the lawyer Micheel Salas, on of the lawyers who took Mexico to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights over the deaths of eight women in Juárez City in 2001, states that in 2009 ‘184 killings of women took place, the highest figure since 1993; prostitution has grown 400% in Juárez City and disappearances have also grown 400%; and in March 2010 so far 34 young girls have disappeared.’

Desconocida Unknown Ukjent will continue as long as the situation in Ciudad Juarez remains unchanged and people are willing to participate in the project.

Desonocida Unknown Ukjent has been shown at:
Trondheim Center for Contemporary Art, Tronheim, Norway, 2010, The Leonard Pearlstein Gallery at Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA, 2010, Stenersen Museum, Oslo, Norway, 2009, The Gallery at University for Creative Arts, Epsom, UK, 2009, SOFT Gallery, Oslo, Norway, 2008, Luleå Summer Biannial, 2007, The Station Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2006
Upcoming Venues:
Hå gamle Prestegard, Norway, 2010, The Pallant House Gallery, Chchester, UK, 2010, Chicago Cultural Center, USA, 2011

From the catalogue DESCONOCIDA:UNKNOWN,UNIVERSITY FOR THE CREATICE ARTS
EPSOM, 2009
LESLEY MILLAR TALKS TO LISE BJØRNE LINNERT

How did you find out about the women in Juarez?
The project came about when I in 2005 was invited by the Station Museum of Contemporary art to do a work dedicated to the women in Juarez and their situation. I took a long time considering what I could do. I wanted to create something that would spread the awareness so that we couldn´t stay outside. We can read about the situation in Juarez or similar situations and think “oh its about them” but the essence of what is happening - the abuse of women – is happening everywhere, all over the world. I wanted the work to be a protest, and I wanted it to be a community project, a piece of work made together. Eventually I came to embroidery because I wanted it to be a typical female activity. I wanted it to be connected back to the women but not in a way that celebrated the violence, or focused on the women as victims. I wanted it to be the opposite….


And the name tags?
I think we all have a relationship with names – it is the first think we learn to write and by choosing to embroider the names and by choosing to embroider the name and name tags we would remember that name and connect to that name in a different way. Embroidery is something that is time consuming, almost meditative, and very repetitious in the movement. For me it was also something that traditionally is done with love, For example my grandmother would embroider the names tags for me….

Once each of us has taken the responsibility for embroidering a particular name, it somehow becomes that person. 

This project is also about the embroiderer, who, through embroidering the name of a particular woman, is also leaving their own identity/thumbprint through the embroidery. It is like thousands of thumbprints that I have collected, all the people who have embroidered. Each has left their own handwriting, even if they have only used capital letters, it is still very different from the next one and I think it is interesting what you say that by giving a name we give identity because that is what I see hen I look at the wall of name tags. Not a mass of name tags but each individual one, each with its own dual identity – that of the named and that of the embroiderer.

INSTALLASJON DREXEL 3

a few left over thoughts...

White as an Indian Pipe

Red as a Cardinal Flower
Fabulous as a Moon at Noon
February Hour–

Emily Dickinson (1250, year 1873)

If  you have ever seen Indian Pipe–white and waxy–growing like some walking dead thing under the pines, hidden among the debris of fallen leaves, left over from the previous summer, rebuilding the earth that has become their final gesture to their woods and forest.  It’s gorgeous and haunting. Its other name is “corpse plant." Indeed, they have a hauntingly somber aspect, attracting and still repelling you by their death evoking appearance. They also do not want you to disturb their resting/growing spot. If you do, they will not be taken peacefully.  When you pick them they get back at you by turning black! That glowing whiteness that so attracted you will turn brown, not necessarily  wilting or shrinking but disappearing and  the only thing that is left for you to do...is place them back on their leaf bed to be subsumed.

Emily Dickinson’s first book of poetry, published posthumously, has the Indian Pipe on it's cover. 

The flower on the cover was done by Mabel Loomis Todd (Emily’s brother’s long-term lover and fascinating woman in her own right.  She and Austin are the reference in my previous post when I mentioned the path being, just wide enough for two lover to meet upon.)  Mabel Loomis Todd painted her a picture of these flowers  sending it to her to which Emily  wrote back her thanks, “That without suspecting it you should send me the preferred flower of life, seems almost supernatural, and the sweet glee that I felt at meeting it, I could confide to none” 

From pages 172, 173, and 174 of Marta McDowell’s book, Emily Dickinson’s Gardens, McDowell writes in length about the Indian Pipe. Besides discussing its importance to Emily, she also gives a primer on the flower itself. “The Indian pipe (Monotropa uniflora) is an unusual plant, visually and botanically. It looks like a waxy albino stem of lily of the valley, completely white and leafless….it is an angio sperm, a flower plant, but one incapable of photosynthesis. Unlike the green growing things around it, it can’t manufacture its own food but relies on symbiotic relationships.” McDowell wonders too if this is not referential to the "virgin in white" that we've come to think of when  thinking about Emily and her reclusive life at her home in Amherst.

I use to see these in and around the Berkshires, where my sister lives, when I was able to travel.  We don't get them here in the city...so if some of you find yourself walking in the woods out in the Northeast, look down, maybe you'll find a little ghost among the leaves, peaking out daring you to see but not touch.  I've also been thinking that this might make a lovely white on white cloth for stitching.  Ah, to be continued...

And now for the grand finale....

 giving thanks to all my friend who may remember to hug a tree, and eat your greens and veggies.  yes, I'm a vegan.  So however you celebrate...enjoy. 

Sunday's eye candy: emily dickinson

actual fascicle, picture credit emily dickinson museum

 

Jen Bervin embroiders Emily Dickinson’s handwritten

punctuation and editorial notes 

I have to explain why I just fell in love with these images.  I am a huge Emily Dickinson gruppy...before my father's and now my mother's illness I use to go to Amherst every summer.  Go to her house, walk upon the creeping/creaking floor boards, try to find spells that might remind me of her, stand and meditate in her room, and finally sit in her garden...I've even wandered to her grave site.  After visiting her house I'd walk over to her brother Austin's house...along that narrow path that she described as suitable for two lover to meet along...and get lost in that world.  Lunch was had at an hold hippie joint called the Black Sheep! and a walk around the short turn to the historic society's museum.  But now...just lots of memories I'll try to keep hold of until I'm back there one day. However, enough about me...Sunday's eye candy...this beautiful work...What a great idea.  I copied but credited all the site that I got information from.  Hope this is enjoyable and as good a read for you as it was for me. 

Textile artist Jen Bervin has created something wholly peculiar and wonderful in her project The Dickinson Fascilies. During her lifetime Emily Dickinson tried to avoid publication, referring to it as “the auction of the mind,” and yet she continued to write, completing some 1,700 poems.

Between approximately 1858 and 1864, Dickinson grouped her poems into small handbound packets, later called fascicles. They are very humble bindings: stab-bound with twisted red and white thread and tied off teeteringly near the folded edge. The stitch held the stacked folded sheets together but made them a harder to open. [...] Her fascicles and fragments were dismembered, regrouped, scissored, and marked by her various editors as they changed hands and often her poems have been restructured and changed considerably for print.

Interested in the editorial patterns Bervin abstracted the editor’s notes, punctuation and other details from Dickinson’s poems and used cotton and silk thread to embroider the marks on enormous cotton sheets nearly 6′ tall by 8′ wide. I’m seriously geeking out over these. A fascinating idea. (via quipsologies)jen bervin embroidery from colossal (source for text and images)

Jen Bervin web page. if  you want more http://www.jenbervin.com/html/dickinson.html

A series of six large scale embroidered works by Jen Bervin based on composites of the punctuation and variant markings in Emily Dickinson's poetry manuscripts.

A new edition on the series is available now from Granary Books:

Jen Bervin, The Dickinson Composites, Granary Books 2010
Unbound pages and sewn samples from the Dickinson Fascicles
Edition size: 50. Order here.

The Composite Marks of Fascicles 40, 16, 38, and 34. Sewn cotton batting backed with muslin. Each quilt is 6 ft h x 8 ft w. 

Emily Dickinson avoided publication, calling it “the auction of the mind,” but penned nearly 1700 poems in her lifetime. Readers are familiar with her characteristic dashes, but fewer have seen her equally ubiquitous crosses (+ marks) or the variant words to which they correspond because they are rarely reflected in print editions.

The variant words are preceeded by the + mark and often appear listed in clusters after the poem but before the horizontal line Dickinson drew to signal the end of a poem. To read the variants, you move backwards through the poem trying to find the point of insertion, the corollary word or phrase (preceeded by a +) that the variants refer to in the poem. They are sometimes quite close in meaning to the marked word, but in other instances, they are as far ranging as "+ world, + selves + sun."

Between approximately 1858 and 1864, Dickinson grouped her poems into small handbound packets, later called fascicles. They are very humble bindings: stab-bound with twisted red and white thread and tied off teeteringly near the folded edge. The stitch held the stacked folded sheets together but made them a harder to open. The poems are composed on stationery typical of the nineteenth century, vertically folded sheets, plain, laid, or ruled paper with a small embossed image in the upper left corner. The packets contain eleven to twenty poems per grouping.

Detail. Jen Bervin, The Composite Marks of Fascicle 28.

In 1981, Harvard University Press issued a landmark two-volume facsimile edition of Dickinson’s handwritten manuscripts, edited by R. W. Franklin. The edition includes forty of Dickinson’s fascicles—stab-bound packets (non-nested sheets of folded paper) containing eleven to twenty poems per fascicle. The manuscripts also contain a number of unbound sets; her late fragments and letters have yet to be published in facsimile editions. Dickinson’s own publication of her poems is highly specified given that she enclosed poems and lines from poems within letters in correspondence, tuning them subtly for different recipients.

Dickinson’s editorial legacy is complicated at best; her fascicles and fragments were dismembered, regrouped, scissored, and marked by her various editors as they changed hands and often her poems have been restructured and changed considerably for print. Even the current variorum edition of Dickinson’s work persists in defying her line breaks and removes or replaces her crosses with other marks (brackets and numbers to clarify, i.e. change, the system that Dickinson authored). By imposing conventional views of literary authorship (as expressed by book publication) and divorcing her poems from their formal integrity and its intended specificity, the implications of an unusual, complex, pervasive system are harder to understand.

Jen Bervin, The Composite Marks of Fascicle 28. Cotton and silk thread on cotton batting backed with muslin. 6 ft h x 8 ft w.

I wanted to see what patterns formed when all of the marks in a single fascicle, Dickinson's grouping of poems, remained in position, isolated from the text, and were layered in one composite field of marks. The works I created were made proportionate to the scale of the original manuscripts but quite large—about 8' wide by 6' high—to convey the exact gesture of the individual marks. I scanned Dickinson’s manuscript facsimiles (about twenty pages per fascicle), edited them digitally to form composites of just the marks, and used a projector to transfer the marks onto cotton batting (to suggest a highly magnified page) prepared with a hand-sewn center line (a stand-in for the folio fold) and machine-sewn lines that replicated those of the light-ruled laid paper or blue-ruled paper. I embroidered Dickinson’s marks in with handspun hand-dyed red silk thread.

The fascicles from which I made composites showed clearly identifiable shifts in the size, gesture, frequency, and distribution of the marks. In contemplating such an odd physical study, one naturally forms one’s own questions about the nature and meaning of the marks; it makes their presence on the facsimile manuscript page more striking, systemic, factual—and their omission from typeset poems more evident.

I have never doubted Dickinson’s profound precision, however private, nor that the energetic relation of these marks and variants is anything but integral to her poetics. I have come to feel that specificity of the + and – marks in relation to Dickinson’s work are aligned with a larger gesture that her poems make as they exit and exceed the known world. They go vast with her poems. They risk, double, displace, fragment, unfix, and gesture to the furthest beyond—to loss, to the infinite, to “exstasy,” to extremity.

The Composite Marks of Fascicle 34. 6 feet high x 8 feet wide. Cotton and silk thread on cotton batting backed with muslin.

The Composite Marks of Fascicle 38. 6 feet high x 8 feet wide. Cotton and silk thread on cotton batting backed with muslin.

The Composite Marks of Fascicle 19. 6 feet high x 8 feet wide. Cotton and silk thread on cotton batting backed with muslin.

Detail, The Composite Marks of Fascicle 19.

The Composite Marks of Fascicle 16. 6 feet high x 8 feet wide. Cotton and silk thread on cotton batting backed with muslin.

Fascicle sixteen contains the first insert page, a smaller sheet pinned in with a straight pin. The hand-embroidered black text is taken from from this insert page and reads: And could I further / “no”? Emily Dickinson wrote in a letter to Judge Otis Lord, “And don’t you know that “no” is the wildest word we consign to language?"

image sharing friday

I found this piece tumbling around in tumbler and thought what a wonderful image this would be to interpret on cloth with stitching.  Very fine...no translation needed I think   http://printsandthings.tumblr.com/post/10346955687/kunizo-matsumoto

I've been thinking about cloth books, I use to do bookbinding and such, and have actually started on the first page of one, so the following image attracted me as well, caught my attention.  (I'm still working on my LEFT piece but it's nice to have something lighter to hold!) I think it's one of those portable kind of things, stitching pages for a book.  Something to work on at night while I'm dealing with mom...The above image actually probably caught my eye because Jude has been doing a few entries on her bird jacket/kimono and so I was predisposed to similar images...but isn't this a fabulous idea, a sample book.  The is a wonderful genre to explore, sample books.  There are all types and variations of sample books.  Before the internet, even electricity, and automatic moving horse carts!, sales people carried sample book on all sorts of imaginable items.  There would usually be a sale/receipt section in the back of the sample books and you would just fill out the form, sales person goes back to the base of operations and somewhere down the road brings back your order.  This even pre-dates the Sears catalog!  Well, I digress, again...but both of these images made my tumbler image file today so thought I'd give them a shout out for you too to enjoy.
Also from tumbler, with the following caption,
 "2011/03/27 

“I COULD GO ON THE OXFORD ASIAN TEXTILE GROUP’S FIRST OUTING OF 2011 TO SEE JAPANESE TEXTILES AT THE ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM… …ONE OF THE MOST WONDERFUL THINGS, IN MY OPINION, WAS A HUGE (C19?) PATTERN BOOK, FULL OF ALL THE DIFFERENT STENCIL PATTERNS THAT COULD BE PRINTED ONTO FABRIC TO MAKE INTO A KIMONO…”

http://printsandthings.tumblr.com/post/4140072329/i-could-go-on-the-oxford-

asian-textile-groups

site to go check out

I just came across a reference to this artist's work...very fanciful so I want to share the images so you might have one of those ah ha moments..reginera mseier.  you'll probably have to hit translate unless you read german.  this work is just a joy to think about and yet, still leaves you thinking.

A blessing and a thank you

My little goodie from Deanna arrived today:

Deanna was doing a give away of some of her beautifully embroidered buttons, and guess who won?

Deanna is a very talented and generous artist who lives over at:eclectic meanderings: Please go a check out her blog though I'm sure most of you already know her work.  They look even better in my hand.  She is doing some really neat work the last couple of days making cheesecloth beast...that roar!

GO: woman of vision

Happy Birthday Georgia: 1887-1986

gentle but capable of such grandeur

 

Abiquiu, New Mexico

A woman who's vision and strength opened the way.

It wasn't until I traveled through the southwest, went to Ghost Ranch, and Abiquiu, that I realized how your environment strength your vision and nurtures a soul.  The colors, the light, the mystery...only in New Mexico could these gesture have been hers...

So happy birthday miss....

Concept of the other: or to know thy self

She knew, "it's only real once."
1982, kodalith film printed
on black and white photographic
paper.  

I have been thinking about the concept of other ever since I started looking at the shadow idea.  Is the shadow just another component of other?

 In order to know the self, other has to be acknowledged.  Could the shadow be one of your others? I put the image, above, here to also illustrate that this isn't something new.  (I will be doing an entry on some of my earlier photo work as well.  It was all non-silver, contact printing.  A lot of it dealt with "catching the shadow".)  I did make some notes, in my journal/sketchbook, awhile back when I was working on "waiting to mend," the piece just before "LEFT."  I remarked, in my notes, about how things were coming back to me.  Old ideas which never left...even technical devices that I had used when I was getting my undergraduate degree, were sneaking their way back into my thinking.  What work I did have out, a lot of it is buried and a lot of my sketches were ruined last year when my basement got flooded during a record setting down pour...first rule, don't store work in a basement (or books.)

The work I looked at reminded me of how I used to think, process and how I went about composing and putting ideas into practice.  I was always trying to figure out my place...the role I played in the circle that was my day/night, personal/social...even my interior self examined.  All my work, regardless of the media, was "image and text."  It was like trying to communicate (speak more directly.)

 Another remanent from the past is the opening paragraph from Nabokov's Speak Memory. "A cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.  Although the two are identical twins, man as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour.) I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth.  He saw a world that was practically unchanged - the same house, the same people - and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence.  He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell.  But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated."  This started me thinking, what if you did go back in time to a life your remember living...and you were not there.  That your past did not contain you.  Maybe like a shadow that doesn't appear some days. There are days (light) that causes us to not have shadows...is the relationship between object and shadow mutually inclusive/exclusive?

Words like ontology (of or relating to the nature of being), epistemology (nature of knowledge...how do we know), phenomenology (study of conscious experience), one -ology after another kept racing through my thoughts.  (I went to school when hermeneutic was big: methodological principals of interpretation.   Today these words still bounce around in my head but probably don't have as much of a blow. I mean, is questioning really going to give me answers, or more questions? )  And,  there is also that little matter of quantum theory that somehow sneaked in as well.  My interpretation of that went something like this.  Time is a linear concept.  We move through time, similar to a train that goes along a predetermined line (not to be confused with pre-destiny.)  Anyway, in my thinking, you could at any time slice into this "time line" and there you would be. So you could exist in multiple places at multiple time.  Also, at the time, I was very fond of T.S. Eliot.  Four Quartets, Burnt Norton, opens: "Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future,/And time future contained in time past./If all time is eternally present/All time is unredeemable./What might have been is an abstraction/Remaining a perpetual possibility/Only in a world of speculation." Read by me as, just what is time...no two timing devices (except the digital) ever seem to be show the same time...time really is an abstraction.  Our sense of time is really not a tangible "thing."  You can't hold it.  So how do we know of it's existence...?

So there you have it.  In a nut shell...Is it possible to be the being in the reflection and the reflection.  To see and experience oneself both in the present and the past...I see a lot of that in the work that I'm thinking about and doing.  It is very reflexive of who I am, my relationship to the other and who the other is.

A phrase that actually prompted the next piece, which I have sketched out (below) is,"her mother's shadow began to merge with her's,/She worried about loss, loss of her identity."  Nothing biographical about this!!!  Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror or a picture and thought about resemblance...that you were looking like your parents (maybe it's that latent retinal image, but that happens to me.)  The first time I really saw my mother in me were my hands.  I have my mother's hands.

This was the sketch I did based on the phrase:
"her shadow..."  It is a performantive piece.
You read the phrase as you get closer and
the voice should be whispered, reflective.

view #2

 closes view, #3

  But now for a little update on LEFT.

A look at the back.  After Jude  showed her magic diary cloth,
I had to take a peak too.  Not as good as Jude's but..

Where the rectangles all started.  I originally added
the cloth appliqued rectangle...which had the effect
I was seeking: slight relief off the surface, separation of the
object, boundary, barrier.  Then, what to do next? I decided
to continue the idea by adding a few more cloth rectangles, and
some that are just stitched.  The same day I decided to do this,
Jude Hill did a talk on pulling elements together, integrating elements
(I took this to mean union, cohesion not just separate
floating objects.)

view of the only two figures
that are seen as one: before
the larger figure starts to separate
away from the smaller figure

added stitch rectangles to the left
most figure (shadow is starting to
separate) . Larger figure is just
left of this that is in back
of the first cloth rectangle.

detail of center top section, mostly stitched rectangles

Imagine this as the right side of the cloth...should have rotated it! how the cloth
and stitched rectangles interact.

Hope you got through this post and that I didn't get too distracted

More images of the cloth can be seen on my flicker page:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/69022257@N06/