The Beauty of Creating Textile Artworks

Layered stacks of rich mottled fabric in earthy reds, rich greys and blues and a few fresh yellows.

Billows of translucent interfacing with webs of pencil lines drawn across it.

Heavy shears that sit just right in my hands, and slide past each other with a slow, satisfying schnick.

Tiny scissors that snip letters out of paper. Garamond 160pt. Pages and pages of letters that form words and then sentences on the fabric.

And then the paint. A dollop of blue, a little bit of yellow and the tiniest bit of red. Then white, and more white, and scraping the very last white out of the paint pot. Mixed to a delicious pale warm blue. Paint spread over the screen and then forced through to the fabric beneath, hoping for crisp clean lines. Rushing outside to clean the screen, more snipping of paper, more paint, more squeegeeing, more cleaning, until hundreds of bits of fabric have letters inscribed on them.

Hands that move from fabric to fabric to scissors, lifting, tweaking, cutting, then pinning, stitching, pinning, holding to the light, more pinning and stitching. Hands that never cease to amaze for their ability to make complex movements over and over, at lightning speak, and without conscious thought.

Snippets of beautiful fabric layered on more snippets of beautiful fabric, held together with fine pins that are just strong enough not to bend with every use. Thread unravelled from spools, passed through the needle’s eye, and then gliding in and out, in and out, connecting snippets as a new fabric is formed, thick with the bulk of joins and folded fabrics. A new fabric that forms new images. Images that form in layers. Interfacing, fabric, paint, thread, and later, more thread. Like paintings built up with layers of paint.

There is more layering that needs to happen still, but the artworks are taking shape, and I can’t wait to share them with you!