From the Magpie’s Nest

My medium of choice is textiles. I piece and embroider and embellish with beads and charms in the various works I create. As I perused the sketchbook when it arrived here in the Pacific Northwest (USA), two 4” x 6” bits of intuitive piecing I’d done some time ago came to mind.  Without forethought, I’d created images of houses out of tiny scraps. One seemed to be a night time scene, the other a beach house at the water’s edge. They were going to be postcards – or so I thought – but I was never able to finish them. Inspiration just vanished after the piecing was done. When I saw that the pieced rectangles would fit nicely on the sketchbook pages I suddenly knew what to do with them! I used embroidery, trims, sequins, and charms to flesh out the landscapes after lining the piecing with flannel to stabilize them and provide a place to hide knots. As it turned out, both houses were at the edge of a body of water. That made me think about how the sketchbook had traveled from one continent to another. 🙂 At the end, I machine stitched the completed scenes to the two pages in the sketchbook.

I started with seed stitches to give texture to the sunny scene (which I think of as Australia). I used a fluffy yarn and beads to create the water’s edge and then rick rack to indicate deeper waters.

Here’s the owl in the tree I created based on the print in that patch. (This landscape made me think of the US or Europe.)

And the underwater scene at the bottom of that page:

This was a truly fun project to work on and will be a treasure indeed when it’s done!