More Cigarette Silks

In an earlier post this year, I lamented the lack of cigarette silks in my collection of vintage textiles.  I have corrected that now, with this recent antiques mall find:

This is an unfinished project, done in the crazy quilt assembly style.  Most of the pieces are true cigarette silks, printed with flags of various nations.  The silks are larger than the two that I have already, these are about 3 X 4".  Two pieces are commemorative ribbons from social club events with a European ancestry requirement.  These identical ribbons are dated 1927, and I have no idea yet what language they are imprinted with... will have to investigate "Kesajuhlet."  The world of old social clubs and secret societies is a whole areal of study on their own, a fascinating study.... for someone else!

The silks are machine sewn to a piece of muslin backing, then lengths of satin ribbon were machine sewn over the seams,  The maker hand stitched over almost all of the ribbon with a herringbone stitch.  What I want to know (and never will) is why the yellow herringbone stitching on the top horizontal row stops half way across, and why four of the silks are upside down.

What is fun for me is making connections with these vintage objects,  I'll never know the maker or the answers to the above questions, but I am certain that the hand stitches are done in Glossilla Rope embroidery cording ("Brighter than Silk").  I found a stash of new-old-stock Glossilla at a recent quilt show:

I have found it to be impossible to pull through regular cotton fabric, but it works well for couching or for the weaving thread in whipped and threaded back and running stitches.  Someday soon I will try it through silk.

Adventures in the Bluegrass

My annual trip back to Lexington, Kentucky always leaves me completely spent, but as always, a good time was had.  The main purpose for the trip is BreyerFest, the convention for collectors of model horses.  Since I lived in Lexington for five years, there are places that I got to know that I must revisit.   

This year, I planned to spend half a day in the beautiful Lexington Cemetery.  I have been playing with making rubbings of interesting gravestone carvings with crayon on fabric.  On previous visits to the Lexington Cemetery, I discovered several graves that had long, profound poems carved into them.  Way back, I made some rubbings on paper of them that I now cannot find.  I want now to make some art quilts incorporating those poems.  Of course, I never wrote down the sections where those graves were located.

 

Even at 9 AM, it was awfully hot and humid.  I wandered through a couple a sections, and made a few uninspired rubbings.  One was a nice Celtic knot pattern:

I drove to another part of the cemetery, wandered a bit more, still not finding what I wanted.  By accident, I found the resting place of the notorious General John Hunt Morgan.  I have a tenuous connection to the Confederate general – I’m fairly certain that Morgan passed by the property I now live on during his brazen Ohio raid.  At this point, I realized that I would have to come back in cooler weather for the sole purpose of finding the graves I wanted.  I had thought that I would have a nice start to a new art quilt featuring gravestone rubbings, but not yet.   

Then it was on to another favorite Lexington spot, The Stitch Niche.  This is a nice yarn and cross stitch shop, but I do not knit, crochet, or cross stitch.  As I’ve indicated in other posts, I use all sorts of funky yarns as embellishments, and there are a variety of fancy threads marketed for cross stitch that are also great for hand sewn embroidery (think crazy quilts, Carol Ann Waugh’s Stupendous Stitches, etc.).  I have really gotten to love the varied lines put out by Rainbow Gallery, and the Stitch Niche has a small selection.  I think I bought at least one of each of the different lines that they had:

 

It is raining now, much needed.  Since I cannot attend to the garden, I will be trying out my new fancy threads.  I need to start a crazy quilt sample for the upcoming shows.

Pinning Down Pin Looms

Last week, I had to make a seven hour round trip in one day to pick up three pieces of my artwork, not exactly something I was all that happy about.  It is a trip I make on occasion, but I usually make the trip a several day visit, not just for business, but for friends as well.  There is an antiques mall at the halfway point between the two points that made my journey.  It is a perfect time to get out and stretch, and hopefully find something for my varied collections.  On my journey last week, halfway down the first row of showcases, I find this:

A set of vintage Weave-It pin looms!  One four inch square and one two inch square, in the original box, with the original needles.  No instructions, but I have a modern Zoom Loom that is nearly identical in design.  This little treasure made the long day worth while.  I certainly don't need anymore distractions from the various half finished projects that I have going, but I have of course been playing with my new "toys."

I had no problems using the Zoom Loom instructions on the vintage looms.  The two small squares in the upper left corner were done with Valdani #8 cotton, the rest with assorted fancy yarns.  Somewhere, I have a book on pin loom weaving, I need to find it.  More on that next time...

Embroidery Stitches

Whenever I get together with other art quilters, talk often turns to techniques and where one gets their ideas or where they learned a certain way of doing something.  I have been wanting to talk about textile art resources for a while now, so here is the first of a periodic series on what I have been using to learn.  NOTE:  I do not receive any compensation for mentioning any book, product or individual on this blog!

 

I have been working on a (somewhat) weekly project, making a fabric postcard sampler of hand embroidery stitches.  The amazing array of textures created by hand stitching in crazy quilts and ribbon embroidery was probably the biggest factor in my finally learning to sew and jumping into art quilting.  Over the past few years, I have amassed a stack of books on fancy stitches.  I keep coming back to four of them more than any of the others.

For my weekly stitch samples, I have slowly been working my way through the Embroidery and Crazy Quilt Stitch Tool by Judith Baker Montano (C&T Publishing, 2008).  You really can’t go wrong with any of her books, but I feel that this is the best of her stitching books if you want to learn stitches.  No images of her stunning stitch work here, just clear instructions on creating some 180 thread and ribbon stitches, very easy from which to teach oneself.  My little project consists of making one postcard per stitch, and I use as many different threads as I can, resulting in my own visual stitch journal/”dictionary.”  It is a great reference for choosing a thread and stitch for a certain look that I want to achieve, and sometimes it is a reminder that some stitches don’t look so great in some threads.  If something doesn’t work out, I leave it as a reminder. 

Another stitch guide that I refer to frequently is Creative Stitching by Sue Spargo (self-published, 2012).  This source covers only about 50 stitches, and there is some duplication with the Montano book, but there are enough other stitches not in Montano to make it worthwhile.  Spargo also gives helpful recommendations on what needles to use for each stitch.  

Once I’ve mastered the basics of some new stitches, I look to Montano’s Free-Form Embroidery (C&T Publishing, 2012) and The Magic of Crazy Quilting by J. Marsh Michler (Krause Publications, 2003) for endless inspiration on combining and altering stitches by stretching and overlapping. 

As I mentioned, I have other books on embroidery stitching, and there are more than that out there, these are simply then ones I use most often.