Chapter 11 Disintegrating stitches

Following my feedback from Sian, I will return to the disintegrating papers and stitching but firstly a few photos of the reverse of the disintegrated stitched samples.

All the samples are the same size but for some reason the ipad doesn't seem to thinks so. It's quite interesting looking at the back of these hand stitched pieces, not something I had considered before. I am sure traditional hand embroiderers would be horrified at the tangled mess at the back of my work though!!

Disintegrated designs grouped together

Sian also suggested going back to the stitched circles and trying to create star like shapes by overlapping the circles.

First attempt....

Circles drawn onto one sheet of brown paper,were then machine stitched

Here's the result after some stitching.

Then I decided to add some water. Big mistake golden rule when making lace like fabric....join all shapes. Here's the result,so back to the drawing board.

Messy and not what I wanted at all.

Attempt number two

This time I used smaller circles and more of them.

Now to add some machine stitching.

Reverse side

I then added some oil and rubbed at it until it started to disintegrate. This took some time because I had used 2 pieces of brown paper to support all the stitching. Here's the finished piece, I think next time I would go with one piece of paper and water rather than the oil or another option could be to oil the paper first and then stitch into it.... Maybe