Wednesday 28 February 2007

Gold Leaf Foundation

© JEC/Carol-Anne Conway

I was up a little earlier today, so instead of fritter my time away on frivolous housework, I put in a little stitching time. I was really keen to see how the boroyori thread would look stitched, so I made a start on the second weft foundation. I am really please with the effect. The gold twisted into the thread shows up randomly along each thread so the foundation appears to be flecked with gold.

© JEC/Carol-Anne Conway

This green is the colour that least grabbed me when I first saw the threads. I am very fond of green in many varieties. There are a few shades that I am not overly keen on, probably because I don’t know how to deal with them. I’ve said before, I am not very confident about selecting and coordinating colour. I have a colour wheel and try to follow colour wheel principles but I still feel uncertain. Anyway, back to this green. It is a very blue green, in fact in some light it looks blue to me. It is located close to the blue foundation that I stitched on Sunday, which makes that area very dark. Both of these foundations will have other stitches superimposed on top, which will alter the balance, so I am still trying to reserve judgement. That said, it is a lovely shade and looks really good twisted with the gold.

Happy Stitching

2 comments:

katiejayinpa said...

I read your blog all the time..i love yor work and i love Japanese embroidery...I would love to be able to take classes but i am neither anywhere near Atlanta, or a teacher(am in Western pa) and am not able to afford to do too much anyway....but! i can still enjoy and learn a little from what i see. One thing i do know some little bit about is color..from what i can see the color green you have is called Pthalene(I think that';s how it is spelled) when you buy it in oil paint tubes, and i seem to remember that it was called hunter green in the crayon box.......gggggg.....

There area couple of ways to play with color...one is by going to the closest walmart and just picking up as many paint chips as you feel comfortable walking out of the store with.....lol.....or buying a set of paint chips from a paint manufacturer..sometimes a paint store will have one they will sell you pretty cheap....

another is to uyse a tool that i have at the bottom of my blog....it is limited, but not too bad! Another way is of course to just simply either stitch stitch a 10 by 100 strip of some color on one side of a piece of fabric or even weave and then next to it, down the row, stitch blocks of other colors to see how they interact.....or you could actually do some painting with acrylics and by mixing you would be able to get very very close to your thread colors....

Gardeners have a saying that there is no such thing as a weed, just a growing thing that is not where you want it..........gggggg...

the same goes for color...no such thing as an ugly color...only a color that does not look it;s best where it is, or isn;t doing the job you want it to do!

I hope you will not be offended by my presumption here.....i love your stitching and i love color....

ktj
http://thenkp.blogspot.com/

coral-seas said...

Hi Katie, I am far from offended, indeed I welcome the information you gave about Pthalene green and your tips for exploring colour.

If you are interested in learning silk embroidery, Helen M Stevens has some online classes which may suit you. If not, her lovely embroidery is worth taking a look out. It is not Japanese embroidery but there are a lot of similarities.

CA