Category Archives: Kantha

The Kantha Revolution

Posted on by under hand stitching, journals, Kantha, level 2 stitch class, Sketching

I spent most of the morning cleaning up my studio. I forgot to take any photos until half way through the process as it was quite a mess.

Messy StudioHere it is after cleaning half of it up.

Cleaner StudioAnd after getting it mostly straightened out. My color notebooks are waiting to be sent off for review and the box holds all the pieces that will be hung at the Waterlilies exhibition next week. I’m excited to see my class mates again. They will be here next week for the opening of the show on Thursday. If you are in the Whitefish area, stop by The Purple Pomegranate on Thursday from 6-9 pm. I’ll post photos here next week to show you the exhibition.

Kantha Revolution

Here is “The Kantha Revolution”. I got all three pieces matted today. You can barely see the matte as it is only 1/4″ bigger than the pieces.

Kantha Revolution - Many Circles

I think they look good as a triptych so I will probably donate all three pieces for the auction.

Kantha Revolution - Green Wheel

The background was done a long time ago when we played with soy was with my local surface design group.

Kantha Revolution - Yellow Spiral

I have gradually added the Kantha stitching over the last couple of years. This is the only one that has satin stitch added as well. Which one is your favorite?

Sketch Book
I also added a sketch of a seed head to one of my previously painted pages in my sketch book. The photo that I used to sketch from showed the seed head in green, but I liked it in brown on this background. Thanks for stopping by and if you’re in the US, I hope you have a good Labor Day weekend.

Color Homework Finished

Posted on by under hand stitching, journals, Kantha

I worked most of the day competing my homework for Level 1 Color Studies. And it is finally finished.

MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERAAll of the pages just barely fit back together. The first comment from Dennis was “This book is heavy.”

MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERAI was going to use this as the cover but decided to use the original one instead. I put this one in front of the section on color wheels.

MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERAThis is the page on painting neutrals to match a photo. This was really difficult to do and get colors that are similar.

MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERAThis section is about finding paint chips to match an object. I had a hard time with this exercise as well because nothing really seemed to match.

MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERAThe other problem with this exercise is that when I printed the photo of the object, the color wasn’t even close. I fiddled with the first photo to get it to match the real color. I left the purple vase photo as it printed out so it looks nothing like the paint chips.

MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERAI enjoyed this exercise. I mixed and painted a variety of colors that I thought worked. Then I put them into a color scheme. I also found some fabric and threads that worked.

MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERAThen I made two more color schemes. One with more blue violet and one with more green. I like the one on the right best.

MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERAAfter I finished the color notebook, I cut up a large Kantha piece into three squares. I am going to lace these and then they will be in an auction to raise money for a new exhibit space at the Gail Harker Center for Creative Arts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Busy, busy, busy

Posted on by under hand stitching, Kantha

 I have been a busy, busy girl. First we made a trip to Washington DC and on to Philadelphia for the Buyers Market of American Craft to buy for the store. I wrote a post about it over on the Felting and Fiber Studio site. We got home from Philly and then two days later drove over to La Conner, Washington to go to my stitch course with Gail Harker. When we got back after a week, I had my local surface design group at the house, a Brewfest fundraiser on Big Mountain and now we have company coming to visit. Never a dull moment. The photo above is a sari from the collection of Penny Peters who has traveled to India several times. She assists with our stitch class and since we were studying Kantha embroidery during the session, she showed us some wonderful examples. These are all done with running stitch. Who knew that the lowly running stitch could form so many patterns?

 This pattern really caught my eye. I love the geometric look of the center section. We studied the stitch, working in our sketchbooks. I’ll have to show sketchbook photos later.

 This one was really cool as well. The filling in the elephants and birds is done with all running stitch. This is another sari in Penny’s collection.

We then stitched samples of a variety of patterns using running stitch. It’s amazing how long this takes. For these 6 small samples which are each about 1″ x 2″, it took me 4-5 hours to stitch. This one was done on only one layer of muslin as Kantha stitching is usually done on very thin layers. I have more examples to show you but they aren’t quite finished yet. Plus I have two Kantha projects to work on before our next session in May. We got loads of homework!

 For those of you who were asking about my Round Robin piece, I finally got it back. This isn’t a very good photo of it. I’ll have to get a better one. Louise added a variety of paper and paint and Bunny added copper metallic mesh and beads. It really turned out to be a beautiful piece.

For our play session at my house, we did paper mache, mainly because Carole had never done it before. I made little bitty cups of paper thinking I would use them for light covers on a string of Christmas type lights. However, as you can see from the photo, I only managed to complete four of them. As that would make for a very short string of lights, I’m not sure what I’m going to do with them.

I have finally gotten the book pages from the publisher to review. I’m sending those back soon and the book is still going to be out in August. I have another hat felting class scheduled at Camas Creek Yarn on March 23rd. I hope to get an advanced hat class worked out for some time this summer and perhaps a nuno felted jacket class. And then there’s the yurt. I think that I will only be able to get the designing portion of the yurt done this year. I had hoped to be able to start felting it this summer but with everything else on my plate, I don’t think I want to rush it. I am trying to stay focused as per my word for the year and I think I need to keep my focus on my stitch class. So yurt making will definitely be a two year project!

Don’t miss my upcoming post as it will be a celebration of my 400th post and I’ll be having a giveaway.