Velvet on Canvas

One thing that is taking up all my waking hours, on the hand stitching side, are these lovely 6" x 8" squares. A piece of velvet, in various shapes, has been appliqued on painted canvas and then hand stitching in hand-dyed threads (silk or wool or cotton) covers the sides.

But you would not believe how many HOURS went into each of those little pieces!

Colour Wheel Recommendation...

Hi to ReBecca and Heidi - thanks for joining and subscribing to my blog. To answer ReBecca's question about the type of colour wheel shown on the July 20th entry - the one I use is by Joen Wolfrom called the 3-in-1 COLOR TOOL. It is available in most reputable quilting stores.

She breaks colours down into 24 pure colours but on the card for each one, she has also added the tints (white added), the shades (black added), and the tones (grey added) to make the entire colour family.

Here is the wheel as it applies to my piece on strawberries, along with a close-up of some of the cards.



I have sorted every piece of fabric I own, every machine thread, every hand-stitching thread and yarn, and every bead into the 24 colours. Here is a photo of my hand threads (in my new resource room) in the 24 colours...

and a close-up of four of them...



I really like this system and find it makes it so much easier to start working on pieces having everything broken into the 24 colours. She also discusses the five basic plans for picking a colour scheme and has information on the back of each card concerning (1)monochromatic, (2) complementary, (3)analogous, (4)split-complementary and (5)triadic and how it applies to that particular colour. This is a wonderful tool I can highly recommend to any type of artist.

Berries, berries everywhere!

Here is another piece, one that I have been very happy with. I was trying to convey the richness and juiciness of a generic berry and by using a hand dyed velvet as the background, I have densely stitched with my sewing machine to make the shapes pop out of the velvet. I used over ten different colours and thickness of threads for the background and the colour blending was very successful. The piece is very textural and lush with its depth of colours.

This first photo is the starting point with the background showing the synthetic velvet which has been dyed using iron-on DEKA paints; the colour wheel which helped decide upon the range of analogous colours to be pulled out; and the selection of threads to be used in hand and machine stitching.