"Slipping" into the New Year

The start of 2013 seemed a good time to be rethinking the 'slip' - what new ways could I devise to re-invent the appliqued slip?  An awful lot it appeared and the jumbled mass of notes began, an outpouring of unconnected thoughts and bad schematic drawings! I had planned a sort of mind map of logical ideas but I ended up with a bad essay of wordy repetitive descriptions - ideas that I would never want to read again let alone create from - not very productive.

So I decided to combine the note creation exercise and sample making by creating little 2D models of my ideas using the decorated paper shapes directly into pages of my A5 sketchbook.  Most of the handwritten notes on the pages should be legible in the photos but if not, the models are hopefully self explanatory.

In 4.1, the first 2 diagrams on the left look at embroidery decoration -  ideas of couched / cabled thick fibres/cords and traditional embroidery stitches. In the bottom left the slip shape is made up of mosaic sections.  On the RHS page are ideas of attaching the positive and negative images.

4.1

In 4.2, slip ideas involve wrapping (LHS page) of solid shape, silhouette trapping 'bits' and creating new solid fabrics using weaving (RHS page) or knitting, alone or in combination. The melted slip at bottom right is presented on a background of bleached magnolia image, similarly 'disintegrated'.

4.2

In 4.3, new slips are created by laminating trapped fragments of paper, fibre, fabric, wool, plastic etc.

In the bottom right the blended colour is achieved using an encaustic melted effect, trapping oil pastel shavings.

4.3

 Although I used a black background, the transparent slips are difficult to photograph so the pages are photographed below in 4.4 and 4.5 at a different angle to get some reflection.

4.4

4.5

In 4.6, are ideas using water soluble backgrounds to give lacy, translucent slips.  The slips on RHS page show the potential of intertwining slips as in previous strapwork module and exploiting overlapping shadows.

4.6

In 4.7, are further ideas of new slip fabrics (LHS) eg, drawn thread, felted, silk paper, manipulated material and on RHS ideas for attaching and edging slips.

4.7

Without the use of a computerised embroidery machine I was unable to explore my own slip shape in this way, but decided to concentrate on cutting slips from free stitching surfaces, then applying them to other background surfaces (in next post).