You know, my best beloveds, I realio trulio thought I was done with mermaids for a bit.

After–finally–finishing off some nagging details on Pearls of Wisdom this week, I was so pleased and I’m really ready to see the back of the thing. To be honest, I’m a bit sick of the sight of it.

Which is just as well because in a few weeks it’ll be shipped off to Birmingham to the NEC to be shown in the Festival of Quilts.

“But, is it a quilt?” I hear you ask.

Well, technically, by their rather broad, published definition, it is. I’m sure the Quilt Police will disagree and shake their heads and tut tut about it, because they always do. But that’s okay. Self appointed experts are much worse than the acknowledged ones and I treat them with disdain. Disdain, I tell you! Pfftt to the Quilt Police!

But I digress. (Again. You should be used to this by now really.)

Anyway, after finally signing off Those Bloody Mermaids, as it is affectionately known in our house, I thought I’d be happily enveloped in a mass of Green Men by now. I’ve definitely been working with the image of the Green Man and with tree lore and foliage in my sketchbooks.

Alas, it appears I’m not done with mermaids yet.

Because the designs I’ve been drawing this weekend are most definitely watery and not leafy.

And in keeping with my declaration to tell the whole story, warts and all, I’m going to show you some work in progress, and some of the process of how I get to a finished work.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

I’m working on some designs for what I call treasure boxes – boxes that will be beautiful objects in which you will want to store your most loved treasures. (She said hopefully.)

I’ve made fabric covered boxes in the past, and while they are a lovely finished item, I find the process of making them fiddly and not satisfying. Too much donkey work and not enough creative fun bits.

I really wanted to find a way to incorporate more of the bits I love – the illustration, the free motion stitching and the painting – into a box. It’s only recently, as a result of explorations in 3d mixed media with Angie Hughes, that I’ve actually come up with a way to do that. It’s all very exciting, and a little bit fraught as I test out new ideas and techniques without entirely knowing what the result will be.

Before I get to the stitching and painting, though, I need some designs to work to.

For the round boxes, I’ll be working with a Green Man on the top.

But for the square boxes, I’d been struggling for a while to come up with an idea that seemed to work. Much frustration ensued. There may have been cursing.

Then, with that lovely bing! of epiphany that hits when most unexpected, it suddenly became clear: mermaids, again.

And not just mermaids, but mermaids with a touch of Art Nouveau about them. Art Nouveau because I love the swirling, illustrative lines and the decorative flourishes, which seem perfect for a decorative item like a treasure box.

So here we are, back with the mermaids.

Thumbnails through to worked drawings

At the top left, you can see where I usually start a design, with some thumbnails of layout and composition.

In this case, it was with the knowledge that the box lid was square so any design needed to fit that space. Since mermaids are generally sort of long and thin, I had to explore a few ideas of how I could fit one in. It was in playing with these that I realised she would fit nicely into an arch, which also tied in with the whole Art Nouveau influence.

So at the lower left, you can see where I’ve started to work an actual size drawing. I drew up the box lid size and added a border half an inch in from the lid’s edges. Then I fitted the arch into that, and started to work my seated mermaid into the arch.

I immediately ran into difficulty with her tail flukes. Since tails are really what mermaids are all about, I didn’t want to lose them or squash them up too much, which gave me a bit of dilemma. The layout I’d drawn just didn’t have room for one of them.

I solved this by tracing off the top half of the mermaid, and then retracing her bottom half, but moved to the left to create room for the tail. I also moved the problem fluke up and around to fit. You can see the traced and amended drawing at the top right, with some details for corner decoration below it.

Here’s that drawing up close:

A closer view of the adjusted drawing

As you can see, it’s a less naturalistic pose that the one I started with, but Art Nouveau was a very stylised form, and who’s to say that mermaids aren’t a good deal more flexible than you and me anyway?

I’ve kept it very linear because this will be transferred to fabric and then stitched, so I need the lines to be clear and not too cluttered. Texture will come from the stitch and surface materials to be added later.

The next stage is to combine the drawing above with its decorative corners on an inked final drawing that I can scan. I’m working on drawing the images for the sides of the box now, which again are a challenge as they have to fit into a very specific shape and size but still remain stitchable.

After that we get the sewing machine out. Hooray!

And that’s where I am today, beloveds. What about you? What have you been creating?

I continue to experiment with Start with the Art, although today there was some murmurings of mutiny coming from the Teeny Tiny Puritans. It was harder to ignore their admonishments today than it was last week.

I have told you about the Teeny Tiny Puritans, haven’t I?

Of course, once again I forgot the key information about the exhibition where Pearls of Wisdom is on show right now.

One of these days I’ll get the hang of this self-promotion thing.

Here, then, for those who live in reach of Northamptonshire in the next two weeks, are the details:

Flying Free promotional postcard (front)

Flying Free promotional postcard (back)

(Postcard design by yours truly. Just call me multi-tasking.)

It’s been a long time coming.

And I’ll be honest. There were times – lots of them – when I wasn’t sure if it would ever be finished. And I wasn’t sure if I even cared.

This, my biggest and most ambitious piece of textile art ever, has been a constant companion for more than two years, since I first conceived it in response to a competition theme of “pearls of wisdom”. Initially planned as a quilt, over that time, it’s morphed into an embroidered and embellished textile stretched on a wooden frame. Yet the basic design hasn’t wavered from the image I first saw in my head in response to the phrase.

From concept to completion, I’ve been excited by it, worried about it, frustrated by it, discouraged and fed up with it, stressed over it, angry at it and finally, now it’s done, reasonably satisfied with it.

So, at last, here for your delectation and delight, my best beloveds, I present the first photos of the finished (at last! yay!) Pearls of Wisdom:

In situ at the exhibition

Pearls of Wisdom finally finished

A grandmother mermaid shares her gifts with a granddaughter

Miss Surprised notices us watching and swims over for a better look

A tompot blenny hiding in the main mermaid's hair

This blenny is a little bolder

A velvet swimming crab and jewel anemones

The exhibition opened today and to be honest, that’s about all I’ve got the energy to write about it at the moment – the last six weeks have been a blur of stitch, paint and construction punctuated with dog emergencies of the accidental poisoning kind.

(Don’t worry, both the Two Bad Dogs are quite well again now, thanks. I’m not sure they didn’t do it on purpose to get some attention off me instead of this thing!)

But I do plan to share a lot more about this piece in the next little while, including more detail photos, what I wanted to achieve and how I went about it. Let me know if that sounds interesting, won’t you?

The Great Studio Clear-Out of 2010 continues apace.

I’ve added another 58 magazines to my thrown-out tally and have found at least three missing books I thought I’d lost.

Still haven’t got to the fabrics yet. I’m hoping that by the time I get through the easy stuff and on to the hard stuff, my throwing-out muscle will be positively bulging like a body-builder’s bicep.  You’ll see me casually toss the fabrics that seemed so great ten years ago and effortlessly let go the patterns I bought when I first found out that making quilts no longer meant just cutting out squares from old clothes with a pair of scissors.

That’s the theory anyhow. Wish me luck for putting it into practice.

Meantime, since I can’t actually work in the studio, I’ve not been able to do much actual creating, although the ideas continue to plague me. I’ve had to start a special notebook just to jot down creative ideas that I’m not yet ready to explore in a sketchbook. So I don’t forget them. A notebook to list the sketchbooks yet to be created. It’s true. I’m weird.

Since my work is usually comprehensively planned out, I’ve been feeling lately that I needed to give myself permission to just play around more and see what happens. To not worry about the finished result. To try things a little differently, maybe do a little sampling. (Sampling is Our Friend. But one I don’t hang out with very often, I’m afraid.)

So it was wonderful (as always) to get to my monthly machine embroidery workshop with Angie last week and just have a chance to play around in front of my machine. And this is the result:

"Rastafairyan": organza, 'angel wing' & cotton threads on hand-dyed cotton

I’m calling her “Rastafairyan” because she looks like she has dreadlocks. She’s also a bit punky, I think, and definitely with a bit of ‘tude. I didn’t plan for her to be like that; here’s the quick sketch I did before I started stitching:

Quick initial sketch

So, yeah, she was a bit of a Barbie doll before I started. (Do they make Barbies with dreads? Now that’s something I’d love to see.) But I do love her hair. I’ve used corded whipstitch for hair before, in the mermaids on Pearls of Wisdom, but the difference in scale give a completely different effect:

Corded whipstitch mermaid hair

I’m going to do a little more playing with Rastafairyan, I think, and add a bit of context around her. And maybe make her a few friends to hang out with. I like the idea of teenage rebellious faeries hanging out on corners complaining that there’s nothing to do in the Wild Wood.

Anyone got any ideas for the rest of her crew?

… work in progress, Pearls of Wisdom.

After my post yesterday, I had a couple of people ask where the exhibition was, and I realised that, stupidly, I never posted the details. (This is how distracted I was by my ultimately unsuccessful dash for the finish line.)

So, to rectify that, here are the details:

The exhibition is at The Bramble Patch near Northampton and runs from now until Saturday, 10 April 2010. It’s open 10 til 5 daily, except Sundays and Easter Monday. Entry is £2 with proceeds to Macmillan Cancer Care. There are refreshments available, and a place to sit and relax.

You can also get travel details from The Bramble Patch, which is one of the UK’s best quilt shops with a huge range of fabrics, accessories, books, and a full schedule of courses and workshops.

I know they’d love to have you visit.