I Did A Thing, Vol. 17

My embroidered portrait series continues … this week: Iris Apfel.

This was a no-brainer – I adore Iris’ joie de vivre, and her exuberant style offers a perfect opportunity to play with beading and other media. However, though Iris is the highlight of this post, she was not the project I tackled immediately after Elizabeth. My next piece was actually inspired by Marie Antoinette and the Rococo period.

I was excited by the prospect, primarily because I wanted to experiment with a new material for my subject’s hair, but the execution itself was a torturous experience. The hair didn’t quite turn out the way I had envisioned it, I had to re-work the dress bodice several times, the background needed some last-minute jazzing up … it was a bit of a mess. The final product wasn’t terrible, per se, but it didn’t delight me in the same way as Frida and Elizabeth:

I did learn some valuable lessons, though. One, I got a better sense of how to use the nubby wool yarn for creating hairdos. Two, I learned that, while some improvisation is fine, certain key elements of the design have to be well planned in advance, including in terms of the materials to be used. That last part, though … it’s a work in progress, let’s say. I don’t have the advantage of a good fabric store nearby, the thrifts are hit and miss, and I am impatient – all of which is to say: sometimes I start a project not as well-prepared as I should.

Onwards, now, to Iris.

Because of her hair, I knew that I had to go back to a darker background to ensure there would be sufficient contrast. Luckily, as with Elizabeth, the dress design was of the kind that’s easy to improvise on the run, so I didn’t have to worry too much about tracing a complicated drawing onto my muslin. Plus, I now have a light-table/light-box (cheapie version from Amazon) which helps immeasurably with that.

Again, I used a textured white wool yarn for the hair, tacking it down with (thin) white thread. The key was “styling” the hair afterwards, which I spent a not inconsiderable amount of time doing – cutting and shaping it to more or less resemble Iris’ real life ‘do.

Because of the glasses, I did not embroider the felt face before attaching it to the canvas. I was worried that it would be harder to embroider through 2 layers of material, but that wasn’t the case at all. For the aqua eyeshadow, I ended up using one of my kids’ Crayola pencils to shade the eyelids. (This was another thing I learned from doing the Rococo lady – I had ended up using actual blush for her cheeks, and the muslin took that well. In this case, I had no eyeshadow of the appropriate colour, but the pencil worked just fine on felt.)

I had tons of bits and bobs to use for Iris’ iconic jewelry – necklaces and bracelets, my favourite part of this piece – but I found myself stumped on the rest of her clothing. I didn’t have any fabric scraps that seemed suitable, so as a last resort I went downstairs into my “clothing swap” pile and began to look for options. Eventually, I pulled out an old Anthropology top which had an ikat-like print that looked promising. It wasn’t an expensive piece of clothing, nor one that I anticipated any of my friends being devastated to miss out on, so I went for it. [I only used a small patch of fabric, and am saving the rest for future projects.]

Putting everything together went smoothly, but at the end, I still felt like something was missing. I felt like the piece still needed more of a “wow” factor … and then I remembered my daughter’s dollar store craft supplies, which included a bag of cheap feathers. I had never worked with feathers before, but I did a quick mock-up, and saw that the idea had possibilities. A few tucks and stitches later, and I had my complete portrait:

Because of the feathers, it’s a bit more fragile a piece than my usual hoop portraits, but I love how it turned out.