Canvas in progress

It's Easter and as I live in Roma in Queensland, Australia, that means that it is Easter in the Country. This is our town's annual festival and the town sees an influx of thousands of people for the weekend. Some events include a street parade, cabarets, antiques and collectible fair, night rodeo, open gardens, gospel concert, speedway, mud derby and most important of all, the Easter Art Exhibition. Last year I was Convenor for the Art Exhibition and it was therefore my role to invite Guest Artists. I invited five of Australia's leading Textile Artists to display some of their works. We displayed 19 quilts of a wide variety of styles and interpretations shown with the 320 paintings in the Exhibition. It was a great opportunity for our community and also the visitors to the town to see and learn to appreciate fabric work as Art and it was my wish to move the idea of textiles being part of the mainstream art world forward a little. We had some interesting comments and many people for whom it was a whole new world.

Now it is a year on and I am delighted to say that there has been a visible impact. In the Open Section of the competition, Any Subject, Any Medium, we have had 7 entries of Textile Art. This includes four quilts and two pieces that involve a mixture of painting and stitching on fabric and canvas. It is great to see even this small impact and hopefully it will elicit even more entries next year and a further move in to the mainstream of Art in Roma (at the least).

And now back to my piece pictured above. Some time ago I began working on this canvas. I took the canvas off the frame and painted it with acrylic paint. I then collaged with fabric strips, overlocked thread strands and machine embroidered lace and more. Over that I began to embellish with machine stitching.

Being very inexperienced with this idea, I used monofilament thread in the bobbin as I didn't realise that I could cover it at the back. The result is that I found it very difficult to set just the right bobbin tension and consequently used only straight stitches when I would have loved to 'go to town' with some exciting zigzag, satin and decorative stitches. This was always meant to be a learning piece, to stretch my boundaries and experiment a little more and in that it has been successful. Next time........

As you can see above, it is pinned and at the beginning of some sort of composition - just beginning to place some stitches.