Older Faces

Older faces have so much to say.



This Indonesian woman, Paini Vert, was forced to be a "comfort woman" for the Japanese during WWII.  She is 82 now.

The aging of our faces is largely affected by genetics but they are also a road map for how we've chosen to cope with our lives.

Some cope better than others.  Look at the pictures of some of the other women who were forced to be "comfort women" and you'll see what I mean.

The face of Mrs. Rose is pretty important.  Up until now, I've only stitched faces of the young such as Your Majesty or Audrey.  But Mrs. Rose's face was full of crinkles, laugh lines and character.  How to translate that into a face profile that is only 1" tall?

Since I am unsure, I do some research and turn to artists who have mastered the art of capturing the older face.

The dolls below are by artist Annie Wahl and I have always loved their charm and her ability to express joy within the exaggerated features of an older face...



Yet her medium is wax (these are resin replicas) not fabric, so I move on...

I turned to another artist whose work I have always admired, Deidre Scherer.



Deidre is a master of textile portraiture, often exploring the fragility of life.   With fabric and thread, she has the gift of translating the miracle of all life, even life that is waning.  I have had the good fortune of seeing her exhibition, The Last Year, where she chronicled the last year of a woman's life.  It's soulful and moving...and for anyone who has traveled with a loved one through this last phase of life on earth, you will recognize the stages.  Surrounded by Family is another one of her series that is so beautiful that it hurts.  (If you do go visit, remember to click to enlarge to see the detail of her work.)

I leave my study of Deidre's work understanding the importance of shadow, contrast, and value changes in the older face and move to another master whose work is three-dimensional rather than two.

Lisa Lichtenfels is a soft-sculpture artist whose ability to capture the human form using needle and thread is beyond compare.



Her work is so good that her images are often mistaken for photographs of real people.  She uses nylon and batting to sculpt her faces, having first built an armature of wire for bones covered by "muscles" made from batting.

Have a look through the photo galleries of her work...here, here and here.  Amazing.

Though her work is life-size, I am still inspired by her to re-create some realism in my little 1" face and think that layered nylons is likely to allow for more detail in such a small space rather than fabric.

In translating to a smaller scale, I have already learned that fewer stitches are better.  Our minds recognize facial features so well that we will often fill in feature details when they are suggested rather than stitched.

Lastly, I turned to this book hoping to find a few ideas:  Embroidered Portraits: Ideas, Inspiration and Techniques.  I had seen on it Mary Corbet's Needle 'n Thread blog, you can read her review of the book here.



Though Mary had expected more strictly embroidered portraits like the title and cover suggests, I was actually delighted that there were so many ideas for softly sculpted and appliqued faces.



And a whole two pages on heads in profile!  Just what I needed.

Now I'm off to buy some Mrs. Rose-colored nylons and start stitching, keeping in mind the advice given to me by Allie Aller when I feared the stitching of the queen's face on Your Majesty...

She recommended that I plan to make many faces.  So I did.  I prepped for four or five faces and chose the best of the lot...What a brilliant idea.  It completely takes the pressure off of making just one and then you get a number of different "expressions" to choose from.  It is kind of funny though, when I open up a drawer and see the rejected faces of the wanna-be queens...I mean, I can't just throw them away...that seems kind of cruel.  And so they remain, ladies in waiting.

Bottom line...plan on making multiples...this has been some of the best advice I've ever had.  Thank you Allie.

I'm off to put my best face forward sans botox.  Happy day to you.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall...

Finally, I'm back at the frame and tackling the challenge of finishing the wall.

Our German student has gone and we are returning to some sense of normalcy after packing in as many American experiences as was possible in 10 days.

As for the wall, the printed organza blocks seems to have worked in bringing the wall forward a bit.



And the adhesive used to fuse the organza to the paper that goes through the printer was just enough to prevent the organza from fraying as I cut them into blocks.

Next up is Mrs. Rose.  I have a lot of figuring to do for her since I haven't yet decided how to create her.

Until next time, have a great day.

Overcoming Stitcher's Block

Hallo en alle.  Wie gehts?

I find I am immersed in all things German this week.  In addition to having a German exchange student, Dominik, here this week (he helped me re-name my blog header for today), Jim's company has also been bought by a German company and he will be traveling there for a week the day after Dominik leaves.

It's been very busy since Dominik arrived last Wednesday.  We've had many adventures and spent a day in Baltimore, New York and Washington D.C.  Phew!  Today Dominik is going with another family to the Washington Wizards NBA game so I have a day off and can catch up on a few things, like writing this blog post.

Here's a picture of Jack (far right) and his friend (far left) with 3 German students in the middle at the Top of the Rock overlooking New York City.  Dominik is on the middle left.

We're having a great time even though it's been a bit of whirlwind.  Dominik is soaking in lots of language, culture, American food and he's even been hanging out with some of the nieces.  He's an internet DJ in Germany so he knows a lot about music that is popular in Europe and the US.  I am also happy to report that he likes Cozies for warming up his bed so I am sending him back home with one.   Let Cozy Love spread to Germany!

This morning, I did find some time to work on my wall for Mrs. Rose.

Remember I wanted to find a way of bringing the wall to the foreground so the seams would drop to the background?   I considered a number of different methods such as stitching, stippling or painting the blocks...but rejected them all.  Then I thought I might use organza cut into "blocks" to stitch onto the background but I didn't have a range of gray silk organza to work with...and it still looked too flat.

That's when I got the idea to print out a concrete block wall onto organza fabric.

First, I found a concrete block picture I liked on the internet...

Then I measured the size of the rectangle blocks on my piece and re-sized the bricks on my picture in Photoshop so that they would be the same size.  I then copied and repeated my re-sized wall section until it filled an entire 8.5"x11" sheet.  I printed a test sheet on paper to make sure that the size of the blocks would fit on the piece (middle sheet below).

Next, I used this ExtravOrganza product by Jacquard to print out my blocks.  You can see that the organza is pretty transparent...



But I'm hoping that when I stitch them randomly over the wall, that I can vary the shading by which blocks I choose for each space.



I'll be back to let you know if it works.

Dominik leaves on Friday so we're trying to squeeze in everything before then.

I'll post again if I can.

Auf Wiedersehen!