tenuous...

today i took my bernina in to be cleaned and serviced and, i must say, it's a really strange feeling not to have my sewing machine beside me in the studio. it was making me feel adrift...at loose ends...but it is a good thing to be challenged to create work in a different way every now and then.

so, i picked up a needle:

tenuous. fabric on paper. 4.5" x 7". 2013

"tenuous" describes exactly how i felt when i worked on this. but it worked out well and i'm really happy with it. i sewed the fabrics together first, then to a piece of watercolor paper with the cross-stitching and then glued that to another sheet that is 7.5" x 9". i like that it relates clearly to my small quilts; similar but different. curious where this will lead...

i've also been doing some works on paper, with embossing and perforations, on paper i have printed first with a manipulated digital image. i love to blur the image so that you just get a sense of the image's origin... (a vintage quilt square)

raku bowl. embossing, perforation on digital color print. 11" x 14". 2013

really hard to see, but if you click on the image it will enlarge. the paper is white, but if i lighten the scan too much i loose the embossing... i love the subtleties of these pieces, but its next to impossible to capture and image that's of good enough quality to submit to juried shows or even put on my website. got to figure out how to fix that!!!

: : karen anne