The Panel is finally finished

Many moons ago I embarked on making a panel for the City and Guilds Embroidery course. It was the final piece I had to make for the colour module. The idea started from a photo that I took on the Creative Computing summer school last year. The photo was of a cow parsley flower silhouetted against the sky. A bit of Photoshopping transformed the colours and the design. After further design work I came up with the idea of inserting a panel into the shade of an IKEA floor lamp. The panel was to be made from transparent fabrics such as voiles, organzas etc, but one of the design pieces was made from tissue paper and following my Art Holiday in France where we used tissue for batik, I decided to use laminated tissue paper for the background.



The above photos show the various stages of laminating the tissue paper:

Top: Gluing strips of tissue onto a sheet of tissue. A sheet of tissue was then glued on top
Middle: When the glue was dry hot wax was printed onto the tissue with various implements, such as a flattened toilet roll, sponges and brushes.
Bottom: Blobs and swirls of wax can be seen in this photo.

The wax was ironed off and the tissue torn into strips, re-assembled and glued back together. Some sections were highlighted with zig-zag stitch using metallic thread.

This shows the panel before it has been stitched. I have printed the cow parsley design onto acetate so that I could get an idea of how the finished piece would look and where to position them on the tissue paper.


















I then had to make the cow parsley flower heads and stalks. Various techniques were tried: free-machining onto the acetate prints, free-machining onto water soluble film; free-machining onto scrim and, the one that I chose, free-machining onto dress net.





















This photo shows a finished cow parsley attached to its stem (the stems were made separately) and some extra vegetation that was made to go at the bottom of the panel.





















As I wanted to the flowers to be as dark as possible so that they would stand out against the tissue background, I painted them using a very dark aubergine purple acrylic colour.

Everything was now in place, but somehow actually inserting the panel seemed rather daunting as I had to cut an aperture in a tissue paper lamp shade and then glue my panel in place. Several weeks went by and eventually I had a go. Luckily everything went smoothly. I first glued lengths of dowel into the four corners of the shade to give it support. The edges of the shade that would be cut had already been PVAd to give strength. I cut the panel to size and then glued the flowers on. The aperture was cut out and then the panel was glued in place. It was quite difficult pressing the panel onto the inside of the aperture but a metre long metal ruler pressed inside helped.





























These photos show the aperture cut out of the lamp shade and the panel cut to size with the flowers and vegetation glued on.



















Here are some photos of the finished piece: