Date: February 2013
After 10 hours on The Ferry, I have made good progress through the water and now need to do some of the more complex stitching. The top half of the canvas is all impressionistic painterly splashes of highlighted water, mainly done in fine oblique slav and half continental. But as I've largely finished that, I am at the stage where I get to do some hats and some umbrellas and some faces. Eeek.
The pink umbrella in the photo below will be stitched with quite simple stitches but in Marlitt and Decora which is quite a slippery thread. I'm looking forward to adding a bit of colour other than water strokes.
In the photo below are the ostrich plumes of a large Edwardian hat. I will need to stitch them with long and short stitch. I might make a little sampler before I do that. There is quite a bit of movement and fluffiness conveyed in the painting. The hat is quite pretty and the lady in the blue striped dress is certainly the focal point of the painting. So, I would like to do a good and representative job on this part of the picture. No pressure.
In an effort to distract myself from the work at hand I've been googling images. Its clear that Edwardian ladies loved large hats and ostentatious plumes. I'm not sure how long this fashion lasted but when it ended no doubt it was a relief for the ostrich. Photo below copied from here.
Photo copied from here.
While the face below seems to have not much detail painted on the canvas, when you look at a print of E Phillips Fox's painting you'll notice lots of details, one of which is that while the young nanny does appear to be more swarthy than the other ladies, she is probably not from one of the French colonies in West Africa. In the painting, her face is in deep shade, cast from the umbrella she carries to protect the baby. Instead, it just looks like, unlike the bourgeois ladies, she didn't wear an enormous hat out while she hung the laundry out, or walked the children in the park, or did the gardening. Again, I think I'll do a little sample before I petit point her face.
And here's the tangle or organisation of water threads.
My companion is resting.
Previous posts
The Ferry: After the annual stitching weekend (October 2012)
The Ferry: Just before the annual stitching weekend (September 2012)
The Ferry (September 2012)
Back to the Ferry (May 2012)
The Ferry tapestry - progress after Tapestry Guild weekend (October, 2011)
The Ferry tapestry - the 2011 September Tapestry weekend (Sept 2011)
The Ferry - E.Phillips Fox - Baxtergraphix Tapestry (April 2011)