Embroidered Box
This box was developed from a drawing of an embroidered cloth from India.
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The piece of cloth that inspired this box is quite dark but has a lot of colourful stitching on it. I made a drawing of it using a fine liner pen. This meant that I could impose a different palette of colour. The other influence that fed into the mix of ideas at the early stages was the work of Claire Johnson Knight that I have seen in Diana Springall’s book, ‘Inspired to Stitch’. I love her drawing style and the decorative quality of them and the way she translates the imagery into stitched work. I saw some of her work at the Knit & Stitch show at Alexandra Palace when the book was first published and it generated a lot of creative thought about how I could develop my drawings.
I went on to do more drawings of the cloth and coloured them using first pastels and then watercolours. I worked on top with coloured pencils to add stitch marks. At this stage I had not considered making a box. I was just enjoying the decorative quality of the patterns, colour and texture. I decided to transfer the pattern to cloth so that I had some stitching to do whilst I was away on a walking holiday. The stitching became addictive and I worked on it every day for some time.
Eventually, I began to wonder what I could do with this piece of dense stitching. Because I nearly always make dimensional pieces, it seemed an obvious choice to make some kind of container. It was not a very large piece of cloth and I could not cut into it as the stitching was done by hand so the shape had to be very simple. I constructed a card box and wrapped the fabric around it. Tops and bottoms of boxes are important visually and I decided that the box needed to be raised up onto a plinth and to balance this I made a drop on lid.
Making this box has generated further thinking around other possibilities and I have lots more ideas to try out when time permits.