Untitled (Last Iceberg series, #101325) copyright 2014/2023 Douglas Stockdale –
Necessity is the mother of invention, which recently for me meant learning another embroidery design trick that I can incorporate into my cyanotype prints; the back-stitch.
First came the concept that I was attempting to investigate. Up to now I have been using what I guess is called a “straight-stitch” for my Entanglement cyanotype series. Which worked really well as I had the barbs of the barbwire that I wanted to reveal within the spacing along my sewn red line. Then I started considering how I might incorporate embroidery into my other series, The Last Iceberg. I have had a growing concern that the mysterious icebergs in this series did not have enough visual impact, as lessons learned from my Critical Mass 2023 Finalist feedback.
The first thing that came to mind was since the icebergs were floating and in a state of distress, why not incorporate the basic Morse code for distress; SOS. A straight-stitch worked fine as again as I needed the internal spacing to spell out the SOS. (some things as a Boy Scout you don’t forget)
Cool! But what else? So I began to investigate other international naval distress signs and signals, usually flown as a flag from a vessel while at sea. Hmmmm, I think for that I needed solid lines, not dashed lines to look effective, thus the straight-stitch might not work as well. Nevertheless, I did sew one print as a prototype dummy: Nope, the results did not look or feel right. Having seen some others who appeared to have a constant line without spaces, I did a little bit of Google work and low and behold I found out about the embroidery “back-stitch” as a way to create a continuous line.
So again, I did a practice sewing of a print and it looked great! Btw, it’s a bit tricker to back-stitch something stiff like water-color rag versus a flexible material. Its an easy stitch to learn with a bunch of how-to’s on the internet, so no real need for me to get into that nuance here.
My first Last Iceberg print using the back-stitch is above, with some design variations. The actual International Distress signal flag is a solid orange flag with two black adjacent symbols, one square and one circle (ball) and the examples I found had the two variations on the sequencing of the two inner symbols. After hand-coloring in an undercoat of Prismacolor Indigo Blue inside the two symbols in anticipation of a Black top-layer, I realized that I liked the idea of the Indigo Blue color as related to the environmental distress. Nevertheless, I did hand-color the square Black to add contrast and perhaps appear more literal. As to the orange background, after back-stitching the orange outline, I felt that this by itself conveyed the essence of the Distress sign, while still revealing the underlying iceberg. Provides visual impact and still consistent with my underlying concept. Cool!
I also know, looking at the image above, that this web-image does not reveal very well that I have a back-stitch line around each of the inside symbols, which is more apparent when holding the actual sewn cyanotype print. One potential alternative is to use a slightly different color floss thread or Prismacolor art pencil. hmmmm.
I have also figured out an interesting way to incorporate this new stitch into one of my Entanglement cyanotype prints, so more on that at a later time. This Blu Dawg can definitely learn some new tricks!
Untitled (Last Iceberg series, #101325) copyright 2014/2023, hand-color and hand-sewn cyanotype image is 9 x 12″ on a 11 x 14″ sheet of Revere Platinum hot press cotton rag. Unique print.
Make every day an Earth Day
Doug
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Book development workshop:
Update: Developing a Creative Photo Book, on Zoom with SouthEast Center for Photography (SEC4P), January 20 & 21st and 27th, & 28th, 2024, from 10 AM – 1 PM, Eastern Standard Time (EST).
Artist book available again:
The Flow of Light Brushes the Shadow, an artist book from Singular Images Press, 2022, $60.00 (CA sales tax for those residing in the USA) plus shipping expenses. Message me douglas.stockdale.artist@gmail.com
Singular Images 