Threads of Gold

June 2021: Working on other Skills

For a couple of years now I wanted to try embroidering my photographs - combining art forms. I have inserted little yarn pom poms before to add some texture and dimensionality to a print, so figured why not.

Considering embroidery a skill worthy of being preserved, I bought a book to learn the art, as mentioned in an earlier post.  I thought embroidery might create some interest if stitches were strategically placed within a photographic print. I did a bit of embroidering last summer on a jacket I made, but kind of neglected it after that to work on something else … forgot to put it on my project list, oops.

Not liking to add a lot of colour to my black and white prints, if any colour at all, I decided on gold threads. I love anything metallic, which may be due to the fact that my dad was a goldsmith and I spent most of my childhood in his goldust speckled workshop in Guyana. It also may be the reason I now remember to tackle this project seeing that it will be my father's birthday in July.

Having amended prints (and clothing) before with metallic gold paint, I had an idea of how the final image might look by the addition of a shiny element. OK, the embroidered print. For the image in this post I chose the "cretan" stitch since it complements instead of competing with the image, while adding dimensionality to the photograph. The stitch was varied a bit to mimic veins of a leaf which were placed within the negative spaces of the metal wheel.

The thread used was unravelling too much, maybe because I had it for a few years. A different type of metallic thread or even gold wire will be used on the final print (one in the series that doesn't want to be completed); perhaps using, what is known in the jewelry industry, a filigree technique. I have some faux gemstones that fell off a piece of clothing, maybe I'll stick those too on my photographs /(   -_•)

Anyway, this should satisfy my need for a creative activity for the next few weeks.

thankful for my childhood,

❤ Christina