What's in the background ? #the100dayproject

Have you wondered how these garden vignettes (#100gardenthreads) begin?

What's in the background to these creations?

It literally takes hours some days to audition fabrics for the piece. The technique I use involves small scraps of fabric, cut or torn and then stitched over. Each day, I look through my stash and try to find the right colour, perhaps a little texture, even a pattern for a particular leaf or flower.

Sometimes, I cannot find the right colour so I often hand colour with inks, dyes, and/or paint and quite often, with coloured pencils (Prismacolour).

That isn't really the beginning - I spend a lot of time in the garden looking carefully, cutting samples of leaves, branches, flower stems, and of course photographing the specimens. Indoors , I work from cuttings and photos and drawings because by the time I am ready to interpret a flower, it may not be still blooming in my garden. And of course, the birds and other creatures don't stay around while I stitch their images.

Day 42 is a good example of the background to a #100gardenthreads creation - eucalypt leaves.

Fortunately, they are in abundance all year around in the garden, so it is easy to bring a few inside to work directly from the and try to colour match a fabric. In this case, I chose recycled t -shirt material for the colour and texture, with a few leaves cut from silk screened and hand dyed fabrics and doilies to add the variety of tones. I also did some quick sketches for for composition and cut a few leaf templates to try them out for size. Then the free motion stitching - it is really the least creative part of the process. This is done on my trusty Bernina sewing machine #550, with feed dogs lowered, and all going well, it is the quickest part of the creation.

Materials : cotton fabric, recycled stretch fabric, doilies, thread, coloured pencils.

Techniques : free motion stitching, hand colouring, raw edge applique

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Empress Wu Designs with Wilma

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