Originality and a Sleeping Cat

I was talking to my friend Carole Rinard the other day about the term "original" as it applies to artists' work in needleart. I was in a show last spring where I questioned to myself the originality of some of the other fiber artists' work. In EGA there is a strict definition of original work: "an original work is one which, the from beginning, is solely the creative product of the stitcher." The spring show featured a lot of different types of fiber art from knitting to tailoring, silk painting, and lace-making to embroidery.

Some of the work was obviously original and some was obviously done from patterns. Is a piece of machine knitting original if a commercial pattern is used, but the artist changes the yarn suggested? I do not think so. There is no great leap of creativity or no twist to it that made it seem unique. If the knitting machine artist came up with her own pattern and used her own hand-dyed yarns, well that is what I would say was original.

A Bowl of Flowers

original work by SKW, mixed media

from the collection of Laura Sandison

I think it is the same with tailoring or garment construction. Sewing a garment from a Butterrick pattern even if silk is used instead of cotton is to me not original work. The garment might be beautiful to look at and might be beautifully constructed. But it is still a Butterick pattern.


It is embroidery that know best. I know that if a person stitches a picture of flowers from a chart, that is a technician stitching someone else's original pattern. If that stitcher changes the big flowers from red to blue and the little flowers she uses a thread that the pattern did not call for, that is a technician taking a flight of fancy. If that stitcher takes the pattern and puts her own design of a sleeping cat next the big blue flowers, that is still not original work--it is an adaptation. If that stitcher takes the big blue flowers, the sleeping cat, and a bunch of robins from another pattern and puts them all into a sampler, that is still not original work, but an adaptation. When that stitcher takes the sleeping cat and stitches a pillow and chair, both her own work into the picture, that is original. No one else had a thing to do with the pattern.


Silk painters use brushes silk dye and paint, and resist to paint designs on silk fabric. A lot of times they use blanks or pre-sewn garments to paint on. In my mind this is still original work. The garment blank is like an artist's canvas. The canvas itself is not the point of the art.


In lace making the same things apply. A lacer can be the world's greatest technician, but she is not an artist until she starts designing her own work. Here in Albuquerque we are lucky to have Laura Sandison and Susan Peterson who fit into that category of great technicians and great designers of lace.


Work done under the eye of a teacher is very rarely original work. I was in a Rocky Mountain Region Seminar class quite a while ago where we were given a theme and instructions in making a mixed media piece. The theme was the four seasons and we were to use transfer paints with stitching over them to work to the theme. The teacher had several examples there to show us. Everyone else in the class worked to the theme, did the transfers, and stitched her own version of fall, spring, etc. I have long been unable deep inside me to do other people's ideas, so I worked to the seven continents producing flowers that would be typical of the continents (okay, snowflakes for Antarctica.) I was happy with what I did and the other people were happy with what they did. Since then I have seen a couple of those four seasons works shown as original work. No, they weren't original. They were done under the aegis of a teacher with her theme married to her technique she was teaching. Mine? Mine weren't original either. The only difference in mine was that chose my own theme.


Originality is a unique vision of the artist, from beginning to end. Unique is starting from scratch with your own thoughts and assumptions.

Elizabeth, Mary, and Bess

Did Elizabeth Tudor, Queen of England, have trouble matching silks? Did Mary Stuart, queen of France and Scotland (and claimant to Elizabeth's throne), worry about not having enough blank fabric around her embroideries for finishing? Did Bess of Hardwick, Countess of Shrewsbury, worry about rough hands when she worked with delicate threads? I bet they did.

These women lived in the 16th century. It is amazing to me that they most certainly had some of the same problems as we do as we step through the door of the 21st century. These women were all embroiderers. We still have examples of their work. I love to think of the thread that stretches from us back to the royalty and nobility of the 1500's, back to the workshops and design shops of the 11th century Bayeux Tapestry, back to the ninth century Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical embroideries, and surely back two millennia before that.

Elizabeth Tudor was a fine and noted embroiderer, especially in her early life. One of her pieces, worked in 1544 when she was a princess, was the outer cover and bookbinding of Miroir or Glasse of the Synnful Soul. The book was also copied out in her own hand. Elizabeth I fostered embroidery on another level. She chartered the professional embroiderers' guild in London in 1561, only a few years after she came to the throne.

Elizabeth had a troublesome cousin, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. Mary was romantic and unlucky, she loved intrigue and politics, and she was an embroiderer. She was imprisoned by Elizabeth for almost eighteen years, during which time she plotted her escape and stitched. Many embroideries have been attributed to Mary. One of the things that was certainly done by her was part of the Oxburgh Hangings around 1570.. Originally these were four wall hangings, designed and partially stitched by Mary and Bess of Hardwick. They were made of green velvet with small appliquéd emblems. The emblems were tent stitch on canvas, either square, cruciform or octagonal, and were allegorical pictures or mottoes. Thirty-four of the small appliqués have Mary's initials or cipher and are called the Marian Hangings. Of what must have been piles of needlework which she worked during her long captivity, only two other pieces are certainly Mary's, a couple of pillows in canvaswork now at Hardwick Hall.

Bess Of Hardwick, Elizabeth Countess of Shewsbury, was a famous needlewoman. She rose from being the daughter of a country squire to the second richest woman in all Britain. Her fourth husband, the Earl of Shrewsbury, was the "gaoler" for Mary Stuart for most of her captivity. Bess's household embraced many professional embroiderers and designers. Some of her maids stitched when they were not doing other duties. In Bess's later years, starting in 1599, she built a new residence for herself in the new "Elizabethan" style of architecture. This is the New Hardwick Hall. In this stately residence today remain many of Bess's embroideries. In fact the house is a treasure chest of Elizabethan period furnishings, accouterments, and ambiance.

The historical thread of embroidery runs strong through all of us stitchers. We still do the old embroideries and still in the old ways, one stitch at a time with a thread and needle. We still have trouble matching silks. We still have problems with rough hands on delicate threads. We are the Besses, the Elizabeths, and the Marys of our time.

The Topic of This Posting is Books

In 1978 when I first joined The Embroiderers' Guild, I found myself in an active and friendly chapter that met in a church hall n Collingswood, NJ. That first meeting I attended was my second life epiphany where I found other people who were as passionate and dedicated as I was to the threaded needle. Those first years were a wonderful time for me with every day being a learning experience and every meeting having a new teacher. I was in that chapter until 1984 when we moved to Sandy, Utah, with my husband's job. The name of the chapter, now disbanded, was the Creative Needlework Chapter.

It was in that chapter that I met and had for teachers people like Jane Zimmerman who came out from California every year to teach on the east coast. Betsy Lieper first taught me crewel embroidery, the long and short stitch, soft shading, and how to do a perfect satin stitch. Muriel Bishop came from Princeton. Pauline Fischer came from New York to teach crewel on canvas. Ilsa Alther taught blackwork and Hardanger. Mary Fry came with some color studies and Ginger Di Pasquale came for igolochkoy. No one could have better teachers.

The topic of this posting is books. I can see that I digressed down Memory Lane a little. But the author of one of the books I am going to talk about I also met during this time at the Creative Needlework Chapter. Her name is Edie Feisner and she has written the best book on color that I have seen so far. As Carole Rinard and I write this Color Correspondence Course, we have looked at a lot of books on color, both old and new. Some are pretty good and some are pretty bad, but Edie Feisner's book stands out. It is called Color Studies and is a text book for Montclair State University, NJ. It is full of color pictures, diagrams, famous art, and student works. It is a complete study of the topic and very accessible. I highly recommend it. ISBN: 1-56367-213-8

Page from The Book of the Smiling Moon, an altered book by Shirley Kay

If one disregards the beads at the top, this page is a monochromatic color combination with orange plus neutrals. The splattered paint is tone of orange. If the blue beads are considered part of the color scheme, then it is a complement: blue and orange. Color combinations, tones, and neutrals are some of the topics considered in the correspondence course.

The second book I am recommending is Principles of Color Design by Wucius Wong. This little book presents color from a little different perspective than other books on color. Wong shows color in the context of design theory. The examples he shows are all his own work that are abstract designs. Because of this we learn about color from a pure and unified standpoint. This book is for a more advanced student of color, but very valuable in the understanding of how color works and how to manipulate it. I also highly recommend this book. ISBN: 0-442-29284-8

Mr. Wong has also written two books on design theory. If a person only had those two books, she could know almost all of what she needs to know about the pure theory. His books are excellent: Theory of Two-Dimensional Design and Theory of Three-Dimensional Design.

To bridge the first two paragraphs to this last paragraph, I want to mention Sandia Mountains Chapter, my current chapter of the EGA. We are also very friendly and very open to new things. Unfortunately in this day and age, national teachers are harder to come by because of the expense of traveling to such a far place. Also back in NJ we were new to embroidery and ready to learn anything and everything. Here in NM many of us have been in the EGA for three decades and more and have sampled most everything at least once. But we continue to get good national teachers, plus we have some excellent teachers within the chapter itself.

AoE and Personal Abstraction

Yesterday, the fourth Friday of the month, the Art of Embroidery met for its organizational meeting. The Art of Embroidery is a special interest group within Sandia Mountains Chapter. We study things that are connected with embroidery, but we rarely study just embroidery. This coming chapter year, from September through May, we are looking at drawing and sketching, at patterning, and at layering. I realize that each of these topics deserve a year each, but we are having just a taste of each.

I am leading the drawing and sketching, while Felice Tapia is leading the layering. and Carolyn Bivens is leading the patterning. In other posts I have talked about the importance of being able to draw in order to be an artist. I am glad that I was able to arrange having some drawing sessions with AoE.

A Page of Illustrations

Drawing, illustrating, and sketching. I wish I had better terms for what I perceive as the differences between them. Drawing is certainly the formal and basic way of getting information down on paper. Drawing is where images are recorded as faithfully as possible including shadows, textures, and the environment of the subject. This what I learned to do in Drawing 101 I took while living in Colorado. This is what I would like AoE to practice at. Illustrating is just getting a few lines on paper to show stitches or the outlines of designs. This takes a lot less practice than drawing.

Pear & Red Teapot

An abstraction

What I term sketching is really two things to my mind. The first is rough images suitable for an artist's journaling. And the second is my own interpretation of an image in my own drawing style. My own interpretation is an abstraction not only of image, texture, and environment but also of color. Obviously I do not have the correct vocabulary for that personal abstraction.

While on vacation for the past week I made several sketches and several of my own personal abstractions. The assignment for AoE for October was to do several sketches--every day if you could manage. Of the six of us in AoE four of us are quite experienced. But practice does only good. I was glad to see that everyone tried and came up with something. Drawing can be scary: fear of making a mistake and fear of not being as good as the person sitting next to you. I know because I have experienced all of this.

Moonset 1

A personal abstraction turned into an embroidery

Jo Morris, Patricia Toulouse, Felice Tapia, Rita Curry-Pittman, Carolyn Bivens, and myself are the current active members. I can only congratulate all of us for coming to the edge and with a little encouragement jumping out and over in an effort to broaden our horizons.

Tumbling Deltas

I wasn't able to get into my studio much for the last couple of days--I was busy preparing for vacation. I really miss the time spent there. In my very first post to this blog I spoke of the casita and of my just moving in to inhabit the place. That was the summer. Now we are well into another season and the situation in the casita has changed a bit.

I get more natural light this time of year. The sun is lower in the south and so my two south windows are bright most all of the day. But it is colder in there. The floors are all tile and painted cement and there is no central heat. I have no doubt that in deepest winter it will take at least half an hour to heat up the air to where I want to sit, take my mittens off, and work. But that is do-able.

In the main room I have tall steel shelves along the north wall bracing the north window. Taking up much of the center of the room are two large tables--my work top. I also have a beading desk and a small stand handy near where I normally sit that holds my cassette/CD player. The walls are hung with some unsold art. I am surrounded by my threads, papers, books, paint brushes, paints, dyes. I am very happy with that room.

A Fall Progression

I took this photo in November of 2004 outside the local library.

I have brought in the indoor plants and three of them sit on a small desk under one of the south windows. They should be plenty warm through all of winter unless we have a terrible cold snap. The plants which are in the second room give the place a nice homey feel and brighten up the white walls and floor. Also in the second room which is actually the dining room / kitchen of the casita, I have my sewing machine and ironing board out where I can reach then at all times. Very cool.

This is after several iterations or changes I made on the computer.

The red leaf on the left is essential to the design.

But speaking of the casita, I saw Viviano Herrera the other day. He was up from his son Juan's home in la ciudad de Chihuahua. Viviano is the man who moved into the casita in 2004 and transformed it from a half-garage into a whole little house. It still had a garage door on the north side, an industrial heater in the roof, and an oil smell deep in the floor. Viviano moved in and redid the garage door into a wall and window, he fixed the roof, he removed the car grease from the floor, and he painted the walls. Already there were the kitchen and bathroom in working order. Viviano lived in the casita until March of this year, exactly four years, before illness overtook him and he had to be cared for by his family. But when I saw him on Monday of this week, he was hale and well. He had come up to visit his friends here in ABQ and then to go up to Colorado to visit two more of his sons, Carlos and Indio. It was good to see him.

This is one of the final designs.

It looks like little fishes to me and diatoms in the sea.

Because of Viviano, I was able to realize my dream of a studio--a place of my own. And I am forever grateful. The studio means so much to me. I think it is a prize that I have finally won after years of service and study. It is a space deep inside me that I can go to when I tell my stories of life and dream. When I am working in the studio I lose track of time. Hours can pass so quickly that I can barely remember them. I go into another zone, another type of time. Is it the fugue of creativity? Meditation with Delta Waves tumbling around me?

This is Bouquet Salpicon from the same iteration.

The threads exactly match the red leaf.

This is a type of very modern blackwork.

I am on vacation for the next week. I will have my computer along and so will post when I can. I will also have along all my drawing stuff--pencils, paper, colored pencils, pens,--and I will draw. Drawing is another thing that puts me into my other zone. Don't bother wishing me a good time--I know I will have one.

Blackwork: A Master Class in Intense Pattern

Study in Scarlet

All the ways of achieving shading in blackwork

I am happy to announce that this morning I signed a contract with EGA in their Extended Study Program. An ESP is a course that goes beyond the scope of most classes and can be a deep study of one particular aspect of a subject. In this case we will be exploring patterning theory. Patterning theory is how patterns are developed, how they build up repetition. How to vary them.

I have broken the study down into four parts from basic construction to the most complex construction. But since we will be studying this one step at a time, it will be an easy progression from the basic to the advanced.

In order to do well in this class which runs in mid-July 2010 in Louisville, KY, a student has to have had at least some experience with blackwork. It is not the function of the class to teach basic blackwork to neophytes. But even a couple of beginning classes with a couple of projects under your belt and an vivid interest in blackwork should put you in good form to take this class. Of course the more experience you bring to the class the more you will get out of it.

Leaf pattern from Heartwood

I have been doing blackwork from the very beginning of my time doing embroidery. My first attempt at it was a kit I bout in Denver in 1976. It was of the three wise men and was fairly large about 14"X 18", done in rayon threads. There must be twenty patterns in that thing. It was wonderful. I was head over heels for it. And I didn't even know what type of embroidery it was. It was just labeled counted work. I joined the EGA a year or so later and found out what it was--blackwork.

A tessellated pattern from The Crazed Sampler

Since then I have studied and stitched my way up to designing and offering my blackwork pieces for sale in galleries and on-line. Check them out at http://embroideredfablesart.weebly.com/. And watch this space for more information on the class and my progress in putting it together.

Four Patterns from a polychrome work.

Notice the shading through use of color.

Turquoise, Cyan, and Blue

In some previous posts I have talked about writing a national correspondence course for EGA on color along with my co-author Carole Rinard. We are about finished with Lesson 1 of six lessons. Lesson 1 deals with color systems, color wheels, and color attributes. Okay, that sounds more complex than it is. Color systems are just different ways of explaining the phenomenon of color. People as far back as Aristotle have been curious about color, how it manifests, and what it is. We talk about three color systems, but basically use only one, the simplest, for the lessons.

The three systems are the Prang, the Ives, and the Munsell. The Munsell is the most complex. In the Munsell there are five primary colors, Yellow, Blue, Red, Green and Purple. With five primaries, the color wheel is ten part with the secondaries between each of the primaries. These are all numbered in the three dimensions of color: hue--what color it is; saturation--how much pigment is present in the color, for instance, a grayed lavender has less pigment than a purple; and value--the darks and lights of a color, for instance red on the color wheel is its middle value, while maroon is a darker value of red and pink is a lighter value. With all of these steps numbered, in the Munsell System any of hyndreds of color can be identified by numbers and be recognized as the same color by anyone in the world. Very tidy.

In the Ives System, the primaries are Cyan (or Turquoise Blue), Yellow, and Magenta. This sytem is used mostly in the printing industry with dots of ink, but it is also popular with some quilters, with dyers of fabrics, and with photographers. I am looking at a nifty little gadget right now called the 3-in 1 Color Tool by Joen Wolfrom that has about 750 numberd color dabs for matching fabrics and threads.

The third system we talk about in the color correspondence course is the Prang System or the 12 Part Color Wheel. This is the color wheel that Carole and I are using in the course. It is by far the simplest and easiest to use. This is the one that I as an artist have used for many years. The primaries are Red, Yellow, and Blue. The secondaries--colors that can be directly mixed in paints from RYB--are Orange, Green, and Violet. The intermediaties come in between the primaries and secondaries and are colors like Yellow-Green, and Blue-Violet. Using this system, the colors relate easily across the color wheel in logical ways.

Each of these color systems have their strengths and weaknesses I know people who swear by Munsell and will use no other--possibly because of the huge amount of numbered colors. I am not fond of it because it is complex and not easy to use in a quick way when I am creating. I know some quilters who like the Ives System. Those colors tend to be bright and transparent, ideal for silk dyes and paints, ideal for photography. I like the Prang. In the first place, it is what I learned from childhood and it is what I have been teaching for many years. I think it is the simplest and it shows me all I need it to show when I work. Also the Prang system has Color-Aid paper in all its brilliance to help artists. Color-Aid paper is a set of color swatches for the 12 Part.

As stitchers or scrapbookers or photographers, choose which system that fits your needs and learn it, get comfortable with it. But color is so important to an artist and a craftsman, that it bears studying. Don't be lazy about your passion.