Louise Smith

Did you know a bee’s heart is in its abdomen?  Or that its blood is yellowish? Can you tell I’ve been researching bee anatomy online?

The background is hand-painted (randomly poured on the paint, and chose an area that worked with my plans). The lavender flower head is ribbon work and the stem’s a length of flat cord.  I hand-painted the cord grey-green and the ribbons different shades of purple first.

The bee is hand-stitched.  His wings are done in silk fibres. My favourite part is at the end when I rough him up with my needle to make him fluffier, then give him a little trim.

Another view from the ferry between Vancouver Island and the mainland.  This one has hand-painted sky, distant islands, and boats on the horizon, on silk charmeuse again.  The foreground spit of land and all the water is hand-stitched in regular sewing thread (land), and Sulky and other brands of shiny thread, and some weft threads of regular non-charmeuse silk (water).

A couple of shows coming up this spring…I’ll update my Events page soon.

Sometimes a summery picture comes out of the depths of winter.  This composition is the flip of Lime Time and the picture created in the same way.

Fear not, this lemon was put to good use in my winter beverage of choice, a Lawrenceburg which involves bourbon, brown sugar, bitters, and citrus fruit.  Cheers!

Here’s the finished piece (3 x 4 inches) with hand-stitched water and nearby islands.  There are pinks, lilacs and greens amongst the blues, and in places where foam was breaking on the water I’ve stitched double thickness to add a bit of volume.

This is the background painting for a picture I’m going to call Afloat.  Note my workings-out on the sides! The finished pic will be 3 x 4 inches.

You’ll see this view of islands as the ferry pulls away from Swartz Bay, Vancouver Island, towards the mainland.  The water is only background painting for the sewing I’m going to do, which will hopefully bring out the way the sun was glinting on the water like crazy.

You might be able to tell by the stronger sheen that this is silk charmeuse.  It has a nice quality of spreading the paint along the direction of the weave, useful for depicting verticals like tall skinny trees and sunray effects around clouds.  Test out the direction of the weave before you begin though, or you might end up with short fat trees!

A lot of stitching went into this little half-lime.  It sits a few millimeters above the background.  That’s as flat as I could get it, and still have enough stitching for the look I wanted.  The “juice” is thanks to free motion machine embroidery with lots of Sulky Sliver clear thread.

First I stretched silk in a 5-inch hoop and painted a lime-green color background.  I used gutta to keep the color to the area of the lime.  Then I chose thread colors for pith, and machine-embroidered the middle part and the dividers between segments.   Here’s a poorly focused photo:





Once the segments were outlined, I machine-embroidered various shades of green and yellow, aiming for long loop shapes.  With the green background, you don’t need full thread coverage. When these green areas were finished I went over them with long machine stitches in the Sulky thread, leaving the central pith “dry.”

Then I changed threads to my pith colors again and sewed a big circle of that around the whole thing.  I also sewed some stitches in green, to reflect the way the pith becomes greener near the skin.  I believe it was at this point my always supportive husband called me a “pith artist.”





Then I cut the lime right out of the silk.  The stitching was so dense it held together well. The skin is a length of 3-mm wide ribbon, painted green.  It’s glued on around the edge, then tucked underneath and glued into place there as well.  I wanted to keep the illusion of the skin disappearing from view, just like the real thing.

The plate is silk painted a shade of light blue.  I have a trick for doing this but forgot to take photos.  What can I say, I get excited. Basically when I stretch my silk in my particular hoops (Morgan no-slip) and pour on the paint and let it run right out to the edges, and let it dry, when I take it out of the hoop I get a nice plate effect without trying.  The white plate “edge” is the part of the silk that disappeared inside the hoop.  I don’t understand why it doesn’t turn blue, but it doesn’t, and that’s great.

The shadow is painted.  And the checkered tablecloth is checkered tablecloth material – I used up all my fake on the lime.

More fruit to come in the new year!

This is the view on approaching Rathtrevor Beach, Parksville.  The split log fences in the distance line walking trails.

The sky, mountains, and distant trees are painted.  The fences are hand stitched and everything else is free motion machine embroidery, with occasional hand stitching wherever I “missed a bit.”  For the field in the distance, I machine-sewed, then roughed it up with an emery board.  This makes some threads stick up, which I then trim, and that helps give the whole field a more blurred, far-away look.

You never know what you’ll get by way of feedback on your work.  Somewhere around ten hours of labor in, my husband commented he liked my “split-ends tree”!

You know what, I’ll take it.  That tree does have a case of split ends.

P.S. Can you find my signature? I tried to blend it in with the scenery.

This is a different, sunnier-weather version of a picture I did called Aloha, made in the same way.  This one is minus the boat and plus some stitches in transparent thread on the left, representing the water shimmering on the sand.

In other Hawaii-related news, slack key guitarist Makana is coming to Vancouver, BC  in Feb 2013!  Here’s where. Wrap up warm Makana!

Update: Thanks Elena and all at Fiber Arts/Mixed Media, for featuring Wave Hello on your Facebook page!

I’ll have eight pieces in this show.  More info on my Events page and a link to a map.  I’m excited to meet showgoers and other artists!

Which island?   There are three.   I know, always with the hidden meanings.

In the foreground is Galiano and in the distance Mayne.   Unseen is Vancouver Island, the destination I was “sailing to” on the ferry, gathering compositions like this and Crumb Cottage on the way.   But you can imagine you’re sailing to whichever rugged, fir-treed island you fancy.

The sky and distant island are painted, and there was a lot of background painting of the nearer island and water before I ever picked up a needle.  Then I used some good old half-crazed, needle-snapping free motion machine embroidery for the rocks and trees.   I let some unpainted silk show through for the bare rock.

The glints on the water are a combination of long and short stitches depending on the distance away, done by hand in shiny thread and sometimes in silk threads I stole from the frayed edge of the piece.