I know, I know, it’s been a while since I last posted. Life has been a bit busy and there has been some bad news but today I finally go around to photographing a project I wanted to share.
Up until the other day I was doing a ton of knitting so I have a good amount of knitting pictures and some new projects that I need to take pictures with but today I want to share another non knitting related project. I had fun showing off my door display in the last post so I thought I’d finally take this baby down off the shelf and get some good pics of it while the lighting is good.
I guess it was the spring before last that I took an art history class. I was just working on some general ed credits. It fit my schedule and more importantly, it was at the extension campus in my town so I could walk there instead of taking the two busses it takes to get to the main campus!
Anywho, along with a journaly type thing that I kinda half assed, the major semester project was a collage piece that represented our lives or an important aspect of our lives. You know how it goes with artists, you aim for one thing and sorta see how it comes out in the wash.
When I was very young, my dad taught me to sew by drawing a picture on a piece of fabric and telling me to follow the line with the needle. I can now do some more practical sewing, mending seams, replacing buttons, sewing together pieces for a project, etc… But one of the things I still get great joy from is this amateur sort of embroidering.
So, I bought a piece of foam board, mapped out some randomly sized squares and rectangles in pencil and got to work. At first I tried just following the line but it turns out foam board is a somewhat different animal than fabric.
In sewing on the trim I realized that I needed to pre-poke the holes in order to get the needle through…then I realized I needed to put some thought into where I poked the holes if I wanted a design and not a mess. I gave myself about 2 weeks to finish this bad boy and know now that it’s more like a month long project…especially since I was working , babysitting, and going to school at the time.
Anywho, I would sit for hours just poking holes with a straight pin along the lines I’d mapped out. That took forever, but it was the easy part. I then had to decide what the heck I was going to put on this thing!
In the daycare I worked in, I’d been going through magazines collecting images for the kids to use for their own collages. Collages were my professor’s main focus this semester so it kinda blend into other aspects of my life. So I went through the images I’d cut out for the kids and selected some of those, printed some pictures off the internet, printed out some of my own photographs and filled in with some embroidery on the board itself and some small embroidery projects I’d done in the past and a couple I did specifically for this project.
This post will be more picture heavy than usual but I’m very proud of this thing. Lol, I’m an artist in my own way but I don’t draw, stick figures tend to give me trouble. So I felt good when the other art students in my class ooed and ahhed over my project. It seems kind of silly but those little bits of validation can make a big difference for one’s ego.
The back is one of my favorite parts. the front is neatly arranged the way we try to present ourselves to the world and the back...like the inside of my head, is chaos.
