Doodling & Designing: Maniturgium Project

Behind all the scurry and hustle for Garden Swirl, I’m spending time designing (more like doodling – but it eventually will lead to a finished design) the maniturgium that I mentioned in this article last week.

I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, an “artist proper.” From conception to execution, I am just not one of those artists who manages, with seeming ease, to produce some beautiful and intricate work of art, in ideal proportions, using pencil, paint, pen…

Instead, I am a doodler, and I manage to pull my doodles together into some kind of design that will work for the embroidery project I’m imagining.

I don’t consider this a negative thing, and I’m not belittling myself. I’m just stating a fact. I have never developed skill for sketching or painting, for bringing an idea to fruition in the correct proportions and balance, to produce a real work of art in the way that an artist, with training (or with innate skill and talent), can do.

I’m pretty decent with stylized doodles, designs, elements, and text, and so that’s pretty much where my approach to design lies.

Within the two-inch wide strip of linen that I’m working with, I plan to embroider the text “duc in altum” – which comes from Luke 5:4 in the Latin vulgate.

It’s that part of St. Luke’s gospel where Christ has been preaching just off the shore, using Peter’s boat (at that time, Peter was still called Simeon). When Christ finished speaking, he told Peter to put out into the deep and cast his nets out so they could catch some fish. Peter responded that they’ve been working at that all night long and haven’t caught anything, but because Christ said to, of course he would do it. And lo and behold, big catch!

If you’re familiar with the Gospels, you likely know the story.

So the phrase “duc in altum” translates pretty much to “put out into the deep” or “cast into the deep” – basically, put your net into the deep waters to catch stuff.

And that’s what was requested, so that’s what I’m doing.

I tried to stick with a lettering style that is somewhat medieval-scripture-ish. And then my plan is to mirror the idea of “the deep” by shading the lettering from light to a very dark blue.

And for accents, besides perhaps a cross in the middle, there will be these very stylized fish.

I consulted design source books and images of medieval illuminations and Byzantine mosaics to get an idea of fish that look decorative (more or less) but are still recognizable as fish.

Eventually, I doodled up a flexing fish, because flexing fish fit better as accents at the end of the linen strip. Straight, stretched-out swimming fish – which I tried – looked dull and flat.

When I’m doing this kind of doodling, I usually work on tracing paper. This allows me to cut and position doodles where I want them on a design layout, to flip the doodles and still be able to see through to the image, and to easily trace basic outlines for positioning and so forth.

I can easily move my cut-out doodles around underneath the complete layout paper (which is also tissue paper), and see how things work out. If I like something, I can quickly trace in the basic outlines.

Once I make firm decisions, I can solidify all my edges using micron pens and erase most of the pencil mess. And then I can make a final, clean tracing of the whole design.

For the transfer process on this piece, I may use prick-and-pounce for the lettering and trace the other design elements. We’ll see.

I have a long strip of beautiful white Sotema linen that I’ll be using for this piece. It’s left over from a project from ages ago, and I’ve just never had a use for it. The strip is about 9″ wide, so I’ll have plenty of room for hooping up the linen for stitching.

Half of me wants to use silk for the embroidery. The other half wants to use DMC cotton, because I’ve already got a color scheme in DMC cotton that will work great. So my two halves are fighting on that issue right now. I’ll cross that bridge next week.

And a teeeeeeny tiny half of me wants to use perhaps a gold or silver (probably silver, if I do it) tambour thread to couch outlines. The maniturgium will not be laundered, so I can use a limited amount of metal threads (and tambour thread can be laundered, anyway). The piece has to be tie-able and fold-able, so I would not use anything extravagant in the metal thread or metallic thread department that would make it stiff, but if the thread is flexible – like tambour thread is – it would work pretty well. I’m toying with that idea. (You can read about gold tambour thread here – I used it to highlight a bird embroidered in tambour work.)

So that’s the planning stages so far on this project! More to come!

Coming Up

On Friday, we start stitching Garden Swirl. The first installment of the stitch-along – with design and materials – was published this past Monday, so feel free to catch up if you haven’t seen that yet.

We are working on more kits for Garden Swirl, and hope to have them available by the end of next week.

Hope your week is going well!