Do other artists make rules for themselves?
I do it all the time… I can only use this pile of fabric… I can only do running stitch… I can’t use brown (this is more of a phobia than a rule).
The piece of work in progress at the moment is a case in point… but I think I have started cheating…
For a start, I began with a ready made pair of baby trousers – cheat!… and I want to “armour plate” them with loads of layers of extra fabric on the bottom and knees. Ideally, I would like them to stand up on their own. I could sneakily use milliners’ wire to help, but that is another cheat.
But the biggest one is, I am hand stitching, and now up to about 5 layers over the knees, I have made a hole in the end of my finger. It has now become physically impossible to stitch by hand without my trusty, but cheaty, leather thimble. The trouble is, I can’t build up enough layers using my bare fingers, to allow the stand alone thing to happen.
So what I have to do then, is decide which cheat I can live with, and which is a step too far.
I think I can live with the thimble being used, as then at least the final piece of work will have that structural integrity (if it works). Milliners’ wire is not allowed, because I could use that now and they would stand up. Also, there will be less blood stains on the work. Last night I had to sponge a stain out. Now some of my work has previously used stains… and some has definitely been blood… but the blood of some anonymous historical fabric user, not me in the making of the work. That would be a different work completely.
I’m taking this work with me to America, but by the sound of things won’t have time to sit down long enough to do any!
Hope to blog through my experiences over there, as I go, and tweet and facebook etc… but you know what? I might just save it all up and splurge it all out while recovering from the jet lag and waiting for the adrenalin rush to subside!
