Liz Maidment - Everybody's New Obsession

Liz Maidment of France does the most amazing embroidery.  It is not merely embroidery, she has taken it to a new level.

Nearly everyone in our group just fell in love with her work.  The miniature landscapes overwhelmed us with their twists and surprises.

In the two photos below, I give you an idea of scale by putting my hand over the frame.  

Disclaimer:  My hand is not really that fat looking, I do have long slender fingers that could be piano playing fingers if my parents would have given me piano lessons.

The trees and flowers below are on the same scale as the field above.  Most of her pieces were pretty much this same size.

 

 This scape below was larger, more the size of a dish towel.  the aspect of minimal stitching really appealed to me.

The ochre colored piece was sort of in between the others sizes.  Liz uses the backgrounds as a major part of her pieces.  The embroidery is what makes the backgrounds come alive.

She uses tiny bits of fabric pieces to make the flowers and animals come alive against the stitching and the backgrounds.

I commented that in the whole exhibit, there was probably not a complete yard of fabric!

Now I need you to continue to look at the photos and I will show you my idea at the end of the post.  You will find it......uh...…...interesting.

 

 Ok....here you are at my attempt to recreate the background.

I sent off to Amazon Prime to get a Paint Atomizer.  It consists of two pipes set in an L angle.  the negative pressure of blowing though one pipe draws up paint through the other pipe and sprays the paint on the board.

There is a pretty steep learning curve with the equipment.

Yep, pretty steep.

I got everything set up to blow paint on the background fabric.  I tore newspaper for the masking material.  And dipped the pipette into the paint.

And blew.

Nothing.

Harder

Nothing.

I changed the angle on the paint atomizer, and blew.

Nothing.

Harder.

Nothing.

Changed the angle again.

Blew.

I nearly passed out from hyperventilation.  Really.  I had to sit there on the driveway with my head reeling while I recovered enough to continue living.

Nothing.

So I put my hand up in front of the pipette, and blew.

And blew a startling blast of green paint on the entirety of my bare palm.

So now I had the blowing part (partially) figured out, I had to get the control part figured out.

See that big blob of green?  That was my first blow, a bit of over doing it.  I worked out a system of blowing a few spirts and then recovering from hyperventilating, blowing a bit, hyperventilating a bit.

Right.  I realized at this point that I had purchased green, purple, black, white and yellow paint.

Not blue.

I guess I wasn't planning on any skies...…...right

That is OK, I need a lot more practice.  And better lung capacity.

But it already looks way cool as a new medium to use as a backgound.

Right?

Centers of Embroiderey and Lace in St Gallen Switzerland

Glad you liked Anna Williams quilts.  They are amazing, aren't they.  And her story is one that we all would love to have, someone important discovers that we have amazing quilts laying around at home and creates a genre of us.  Right?

Everyone is asking me how Frank is enjoying retirement.  I realized the other day that he spends as much time in his office as he did when he was creating his work reports and handling customers.  Although now he has found YouTube.  It is an addiction.

I have a few more things to show you from the Germany/France trip.  Click on the photos to make them enlarge.  You will see details more easily that way.

Today I want to share some museums we went through.  We had private tours in English in all of them.

In St Gallen Switzerland there was the Textilmuseum which held thousands of exhibits from the antique lace found in the Egyptian Coptic tombs to Michelle Obama expensive laces for her and her daughters dresses and Pippa Middleton's wedding dress.

There are also historical embroideries from the 14th Century.  This area was part of the Industrial Revolution taking place across Europe.  St. Gallen was the center for lacemaking and design work on textiles.  The Museum itself was founded in 1878 to collect and preserve the over 200,000 designs for textiles and laces.

If you go to www.sammlung.textilmuseum.ch you can see some of the incredibly preserved patterns in their collections.  Designers from across the world access their database and visit the museum to gather information for creating new and modern designs in their own work today.

The St. Gallen area was the center for embroidery as well as textile weaving design.  The School for Embroidery Designs was in existence as early as the 1300s for boys who could be trained to create the artistic designs that would become the intricate laces.  

Eleanor of Aquitaine (1137-1152) was famous for her embroidery which included strands of gold threads.  

From the Middle Ages heavily embroidered coats and dresses were worn by nobility.  One worker accidentally dropped an embroidered piece into a bucket of acetone.  While he watched the cotton cloth around the stitches dissolved.  Lace was discovered.








This is a lace making machine.  It is currently used by artists working on grants from the Museum working under the Artist in Residence.

I you look closely, there is a pattern on this machine with a series of umbrellas on the machine right now.


The machine is a Jacquard Punch that utilizes punch cards as loom directors.  I remember those punch cards from college computer courses, not fun!




As we moved into the fabric pattern design area we learned about MiraX

The main exhibit currently hosted is about a company called MiraX.  They designed furniture, fabrics and the future!  This company paved the way for IKEA to become a leading design corporation.

Verner Panton in one of the worlds most influential designers of furniture and interior designers.  He created the Panton Chair.  You've probably sat in one before.

There were rooms of textiles that documented the design progression as decades from the 70s to present day.   

 The first collection was so radical with its bright saturated colors and strong motifs.  The collection contained the total elements of interior design including carpets that matched the textiles.

 

 Each room of the building brought us into another decade, another incredible design concept.

The movement evolved into creations using Illusionism as their focus.  These are 2 dimensional fabrics that look very dimensional, don't they?  

The designs utilized the concept of Trompe l'oeil.  As quilters we use Trompe l'oeil to create embroidery designs with a look of a realistic flower cut from a piece of material and embroidered on the piece.  

And we all remember the Op Art of the 70's.

And the 80's and 90's brought a more organic feel.  We all thought the brown piece looked similar to the Shroud of Turin!


More tomorrow...…...