Back in November, I led a virtual tour for the museum where I'm a volunteer docent. I've been a volunteer at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) for almost seven years, and hadn't set foot in the building since March 2020. Talking about art and artists was so wonderful; I'm looking forward to leading another tour next month.
One of the artists I included in the tour was Alma Thomas. She's one of my favorite artists, and is responsible for my interest in abstract art and is an influence on my work. I wasn't a huge fan of abstract art prior to going through docent training. I appreciated it, but it didn't hit me in the way other works did. Thomas's work, and Lee Krasner's, changed that for me. Thomas was a late in life artist, coming to her own work after a long career as an art teacher in DC Public Schools. What I love about her work is the structured approach to abstract painting; you can see her pencil lines ("Alma Stripes") on the canvas. You can see the intention she had for each piece even though there's still the feeling of it being very abstract. I told my tour group about my experiences with Thomas's work and how she influenced my embroidery. Today's piece is one of those pieces.
I kept the palette muted, given my introvert-ing plan for the weekend (I don't needs neons today). I also planned the lines; there are 60 small lines, 5 per color. I also worked in the same direction the entire time, working from the bottom left corner, moving to the top right. Each series of 5 starts from bottom to top of the square. The first color is always the hardest; I had to count precisely and follow the bottom to top flow so it would work out the way I planned. Even with that planning and need for precision, this only took 40 minutes to complete, the shortest time period for any of the pieces so far (the North Star took me 45 minutes, mostly because of the chain stitch border).
Like Alma Thomas, I love color in my work. That's one of the things that drew me to embroidery in the first place; it's so colorful. Today, I worked with a muted palette, using thread from Sublime Stitching. I also love the back of this piece (see below). I'm going to need to do a piece from the back at some point this year.
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| The back (at an angle) |
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| My original sketch. I had to break some of the lines in two to get the right number of lines for the finished piece. I counted multiple times. Also enjoy the fact that I was going to do a piece about the fact that Nancy Pelosi has an impeachment outfit, but ended up not. I did 6 Days instead. |
Details:
Stitches: back stitch (border), straight stitch (also called a single satin stitch). This isn't a running stitch although it looks like one. Each stitch was done individually rather than as a single line as a running stitch is normally done.
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