Barton in the Beans Stitchscape

 

In desperation I have turned to Googling interesting place names in England to find new and exciting names for my Stitchscapes. They are harder to come up with than the ideas for the pieces themselves - not that they especially need names but it's nice to be able to call them something when you want to refer to a specific piece. 

Today the name that stood out to me was Barton in the Beans, which is apparently a hamlet in the parish of Shackerstone in Leicestershire. According to Wikipedia (font of all knowledge) it has no shops or a pub (gasp!) but does have a church and a post box. So that's ok then. 

The reason Barton in the Beans stood out to me was because the petal beads I have used at the bottom of the piece do look a little bit baked bean-like when viewed from afar. They are really interesting beads from a newly discovered shop called Old Bicycle Shop who seem to specialise in slightly unusual ones in all sorts of odd shapes. The ones I've used here are called tulip petal beads and have the hole at the bottom, with a slight curve upwards like a petal. There are different types and shapes of petal bead which you can see in magnificent detail on the Old Bicycle Shop website - it's a dangerous place to look if you wish to keep your bank balance intact.  

I liked these ones because they almost looked like little marbles on the inside, with some areas clear and others milky. The curve makes the beads sort of fall and cower over but they perk up if you poke them with your finger so that's good fun. 

I have surrounded the petal beads with drizzle stitches to add height, and stacks of little green/petrol coloured matte seed beads to help add more texture. Any visible blotches from the batik fabric below have been filled in with satin stitch to give padded areas and the whole section is just a mish-mash of different things going on in a sort of haphazard way which I love. 

This piece was initially put together following a workshop as it was a leftover pack, and you can read more about the origins of the fabrics and the beads too, on a previous post of mine, here. 

It has quite a few layers but actually only four fabrics in, but with two fabrics put on as layers using both the front and back of the fabrics to see what the difference is. 

As all of the layers have been treated differently, I'm not sure now you would be easily able to tell that they were the same fabrics but it's an interesting exercise to try. Sometimes the back is more what you are looking for than the front is. 

Edging my bottom layer with the mad textures is a corded fancy trimming, which has caused some comments on a Facebook post I made saying that it reminded them of barbed wire fencing - not exactly the look I was going for. Personally I think of those woven living hedgerows made using willow branches or similar, and someone else commented saying that it looked like little decorative scalloped wire border fences that their grandparents had in the garden to separate the flowerbeds from the lawn. 

Everyone can always see something so different in these pieces and that's what art is about. It doesn't matter what I say it is, art is personal to everyone and you'll all look at it differently. Are you in the barbed wire fence, scalloped decorative border or woven living hedge camp? Or are you in a different camp entirely?

I've kept the fabric above quite simple and just used the lines that were already in the pattern, going around each of them with a single strand back stitch. To edge the fabric I've used a lovely hand dyed yarn from Lamington Lass, which appears in quite a few of my pieces at the moment, the colours just really speak to me and different bits of it work with different projects. 

The little snippet of fabric above that to the left is the same fabric but turned over. It's a much paler version as the print was only one sided on the fabric, but the tone kind of sits nicely with the other paler fabrics and mirrors more the paleness of the sky. To this I've blurred any remaining pattern lines with seed stitch and edged with french knots. 

My first big mountain took ages to do. I'm not sure why I fancied so many little seed beads on there, I was obviously having a blingy moment but I do really like it. The beads actually went on first, before any other stitches in this layer and I've tried not to be too uniform with it but to give a fairly evenish cover. Once the beads were on I've used a two different green colours to roughly fill in patches of the batik with satin stitch, concentrating on the larger splotches otherwise it would be too much thread and endless hours trying to cover every little pinprick. I like the effect that using two colours has - especially as it has coincided with a lightening of the fabric colour as well. It's like the sun has just peeped through the clouds on that one spot and lit it up. 

I've used two different colours of embroidery thread, split up and put back together to couch down on the edge of the fabric to finish the layer off. 

Batik fabrics are just so lovely. I have a real addiction to them and their colours and uniqueness. There are off course the slightly more twee versions which depict butterflies or elephants in slightly startling colour combinations but I favour the ones that are just different types of mark making and texture with more muted and relevant colours. The top mountain fabric I've used is very different to the lower one, it's less busy which makes it excellent to depict a mountain further away in this instance where you wouldn't see so much detail anyway. 

I have simply gone around the blotches with a single strand back stitch, and evened out the line by going over it again with a single strand whip stitch in the same colour. That's all this layer needed really, a step back from the mayhem going on in lower layers. 

To keep a clean edging I have again couched down embroidery thread, but this time using the same colour throughout and the same colour as the stitches within the layer. 

For my white sky I have used a single strand seed stitch on the lower level, edged with bullion knots (using two strands), and single strand running stitch on the upper level, edged with french knots (again two strands). Although the fabric is the same the front and back were slightly different colours so I have matched this with my threads as well - not that I'm entirely sure you would notice unless in good lighting. 

So there we are! My little Barton in the Beans Stitchscape. If you live in Barton in the Beans, I would love to know if there are any places around you that would resemble this little landscape scene or if it is just complete fantasy. 

My stitch run down for this one is; french knots, running stitch, bullion knots, couching, seed stitch, whipped back stitch, back stitch, beading, satin stitch and drizzle stitch.