Catch up with Venice project

Time to keep my Venice project up to date.
The first piece was inspired by a sculpture which was situated on the quay side where the water buses stop.  It was a large metal grid ball filled with small blue plastic balls and a few other colours mixed in.  At night it is lit by strong lights from the centre of the ball.





I interpreted this almost directly using blue sheer fabrics, creating an evening purse.  I cut out small circles of sheers using a soldering iron .  These were placed under the main layer of blue sheer.  I created the metal ball effect by machine quilting.  A silver chain was used as the handle and beads and embossed silver shim for bag tags.




Continuing with this ball sculpture, I put the image into Photoshop and applied a filter.  In fact, I applied several filters which gave me numerous effects.  I decided on three of the colour schemes.  These were to become a triptych, printed on cotton and then painted and quilted and embellished with beads, sequins and couched decorative yarns.  The first printout didn’t go exactly to plan so it became a bag.



The next three images show the panels of the triptych.


These will be mounted onto box frames covered with canvas and painted with white gesso.
When I was creating the black leather door pieces, I stitched out a small digitised version of the door design.  I made this into a pendant.



I always like to use text in my project and depict the name of the place in some way.  This mobile used the letters of Venice.  They were digitised and stitched out onto satins.  I did two for each letter which were then placed back to back, stitched together, edged and beaded.  They were then strung together to create a hanging.



While I was stitching out the main header letter V, I hadn’t positioned it correctly or given it enough space around it.  However, as I never discard anything, I rescued this and created a bag tag. I cut out the letter and stitched it onto painted pelmet vilene.



The next piece was created by printing an image of the Grand Canal from the Rialto bridge onto acrylic acetate – OH projector acetate.  Once the image was printed it was laid over a sheer fabric and then over pelmet vilene.  The sides of the box were made from free machined green satin.



Using the water of the canals and the reflections of the gondola heads in the water as the design source, I created a cuff.




The fasteners were beads, painted with metallic acrylic paint to match.
When I was creating pieces using the music mask as the design source, I had a couple of small embossed shim masks which were still unused.  I decided to make one of them into a post card.  Painted pelmet vilene was the base.  I made some fibre fabric from dyed fibres and machined this onto the vilene using vermicelli stitch.  I hand stitched the red embossed shim mask on top of this.  I added beads to represent the sparkle of the water.



I used the second embossed shim mask to make the front cover of a note booklet.  I used a music machine pattern to couch down the dyed fibre fabric.



The next piece for this post used the name of Venice again.  I used each individual letter and layered them in Photoshop, overlapping them and distorting them until I had an abstract of the name.  I digitised this and stitched it out onto dyed fibre fabric laid over a satin.  It was then outlined with couched gold thread. The remaining area of the fibre fabric was stitched down using free machined vermicelli stitch and finally small beads were applied randomly over the surface.



The final piece used the same technique.  This time the letters were placed in a line and distorted to create an abstract.  It was digitised and machined the same as for the bag. This time I made the fibre fabric large enough to cover the front and back of a book.  It was couched in place with rows of free machined wavy lines to create the ripples of the water in Venice. I used a spare piece of printed acetate showing a small scene on the Grand Canal to create a book tag.



This brings me up to date with finished pieces.
At the moment, I am free machine quilting two large art quilts.  These will be the subject of the next post.
Today I was giving a talk about my Egyptian project and tomorrow I will be leading a dayschool teaching some of the techniques I used in the project.  I hope they will enjoy it.
Until the next post. Cheers everyone.