This piece came out of the class in the Spring 1988 term in Camberley, under Rosemary Culshaw. Poor Rosemary wanted a disciplined piece with regular shapes in it, hence the Roman Keywork border, which was there to keep her happy! I wanted to stitch a picture by Joan Miro which I had found on the Internet! So this work is a compromise - I like to think it is a happy one!
The file is an 85 Kb one so I have put in the little thumbnail so that you can download the big file if you want. If anything I suppose the top is on the right, but it's really a matter of where you like to put it. On my screen the colours come remarkably true in a JPG - the uncompressed file is beautiful but quite hopeless for the web! I think you can see the stitches reasonably well.
I started off with a theme of triangles within the constraints of the Miro outline, but as time went on I found that this was too constraining and ended up with squares. Needless to say, any follower of Kaffe Fassett had to have his squares asymmetrical, though Kaffe's are not so obvious! Some of the fibres will be unfamiliar to American stitchers - the area on the left is stitched using shetland wool dyed by a lady in England almost as a cottage industry. The arc of french knots on the bottom right uses a viscose ribbon by Stef Francis, who is also responsible for the cotton couched arc at top right. Apart from these fibres, the piece includes coton perle, embroidery floss, DMC gold, and Caron Watercolours. The canvas is fourteen gauge.
The gaps are left because teachers in this country seem to want gaps, though when I challenged Rosemary she said that it is an additional texture, which I guess is fair enough.
In fairness to Rosemary, when it was finished she pronounced it exciting! I certainly enjoyed doing it.
Robert Tusler
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