Empress Wu Designs with Wilma

I have missed Tag Tuesday ...  When the theme chosen by Sandie was "Wings" , I thought I could add to one of my series as well as practise my machine stitching skills for #The 100 Day Project which seems to be monopolising my time currently. For my "wings" tags, I created two on the theme of butterflies. Both are free motion stitched on my trusty Bernina sewing machine . I then applied "heat and bond", a double sided fabric adhesive and cut around the stitched "portraits". The cut outs were then applied to prepared tags made from cardboard,  covered with  book text and painted with white gesso. The red cheeks are coloured with Inktense pencil.  Here are the first two in the Red Cheeks series ... and they fit the "wings" theme too. 

In my most recent series of works, Garden Stories, I drew inspiration from a workshop I did  in 2017 with British textile artist Anne Kelly. These  new works are a series of folded stitched books in response to the exhibition challenge by NCEATA ( Newcastle Creative Embroiderers and Textile Artists). We were challenged to print from wood blocks created by a local artist, Bob Seal. The blocks were stylised natural elements - a bird, a fish and a flower. When I saw the flower block, I immediately thought of a sunflower, so the plan was born... I have also recently become a fan of reverse applique so I knew I wanted to incorporate that as well as develop the layering and stitching approach we took in Anne Kelly's workshop. I used only one of the blocks  - the flower for this set of books, but added one other feature on each - bees, birds, or butterflies. The background is an old , recycled cotton table cloth  with a stamped, unworked embrodiery pattern)...