I make 3-dimensional fabric relief pictures that are photographed and used to illustrate children’s books. I sew together different materials to create fanciful scenes in relief, much like a miniature stage set, with figures imposed on an embellished fabric background. My work is decorative and detailed, full of patterns from nature and found objects, all sewn together by hand with a needle and thread.
I can still remember how much fun it was to make The Pink House back in 1995. I had finished the 2 year project of making illustrations for Mary Had a Little Lamb and was ready to burst out with something bold and unplanned. I sorted through boxes of objects that I’d been collecting, selecting parts to use.
The hair pins and costume jewelry were from grandmother’s things. The key and New York subway token were found in her desk drawer. I try to find things that can be sewn. Even the shells used for the breasts were earrings with convenient holes already drilled, making it easier to sew them down. I prefer to sew things in place and not use glue, which is messy and unpredictable. With stitches, if somethings doesn’t work, you can always rip it out and try again.
hair pins
Some of the objects include a miniature silver lock, man and dog buttons, a girl with umbrella charm and a Bakelite flower button. The woman’s headdress is a pin made of a cluster of shells.
sketch for “The Pink House”
The Pink House was one of the first pieces I made with wool felt. The red felt is from an old maternity top my late mother had from the 50’s. The woman is holding a doll house sized plastic frying pan from my childhood. Queen With Duster is another piece I made with my grandmother’s found objects during the same period. You can see it here.
I’m so glad that my mother saved some of my artwork. I don’t remember this childhood drawing, which I just found when I was cleaning my parents’ house. I can’t help notice some similarities between this drawing and The Pink House. They both have a bold central figure in a dress, with arms raised, gesturing hands, a head-piece and circle cheeks.
drawing by Salley at age 7
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This selection of hearts begins with a sleeping cat on a heart covered bed spread from my book In the Heart. Then there is a felt balsam pillow and a heart pin covered in french knots, both projects from my how-to book, Felt Wee Folk. The last two are a chain stitched heart that’s part of the endpapers and a heart tart from “The Queen of Hearts” nursery rhyme (see in this post) from my upcoming book, Pocketful of Posies (Sept. 2010). The original illustrations will be shown in a traveling exhibition which you can find out about here.
detail from “In the Heart” 2001
balsam pillow from “Felt Wee Folk” 2003
pin from “Felt Wee Folk”
detail from “Pocketful of Posies” 2010
detail from “Pocketful of Posies” 2010
Note: See other posts in the Close-ups series archive here.
I had the pleasure of judging the Felt Smack Down 2010 “Challenge Alert”, which was organized by Patty from My life under the bus. You can see all the projects entered in the contest on her blog here. The premise of the challenge was to make something based on my Felt Wee Folk book. Here are the results! It was very rewarding to see such a variety of entries to the contest. Everyone’s felt project showed imagination and oozed enthusiasm, so it was fun to look at all the submissions, knowing that there was a lot of thought and labor invested in each one.
I looked for what I thought was the best character development, color choices, workmanship and presentation. I also was interested in how the projects from my book could inspire someone to come up with their own ideas and interpretations.
Prizes are for the following projects:
1st prize- Alison of Acorn Cottage for her Little Bo Peep. See her blog here.
First Prize, Little Bo Peep made by Alison
Little Bo Peep with sheep made by Alison
2nd prize- Caroline for her handsome fellow
Second Prize, Handsome Fellow made by Caroline
3rd prize- Loralynn’s Cottage
Third Prize, Loralynn's Cottage
Thank you to Patty for organizing this contest and to all the folks who committed themselves and worked on projects over the last few weeks. That’s a lot of blanket stitches!
This alphabet book by the prince of nonsense verse, Edward Lear (1812-1888), seems timely, considering my broken arm, which is much improved, by the way. This 1944 edition was on a book shelf in my parents’ house. Here’s the title page and some pages from the book, which was illustrated by G. S. Sherwood. Note the unsentimental ending, with the zinc-lined coffin! This was a different age of children’s literature. Read more about Lear here.
I’ve recently (written in 2010) finished making a new crowd of boy and girl wee folk named Bud and Ivy. Here they are coming down the mountain through the snow. Directions for how to make these dolls are in my how-to book, Felt Wee Folk.
Houses appear so frequently in my artwork that I’ve divided them up into categories to show you in this Close-ups series. When you think about it, the shape is just a square with a triangle on top that can be depicted in any color and style to bring mood and stability. And houses are strong symbols of security that I seem to want in my pictures. This collection of winter houses starts with the winter section of a 4 seasons drawing I made at age 7. Then there’s a detail from a fabric relief piece called “Skating”. The next three are from the books, You and Me: Poems of Friendship, The Hollyhock Wall and Pocketful of Posies, which will be published in Sept., 2010.
by Salley at age 7
detail from “Skating” 1986
from “You and Me: Poems of Friendship” 1997
detail from “The Hollyhock Wall” 1999
from “Pocketful of Posies” 2010
Note: See other posts in the Close-ups series archive here.
Linda Lanese, who writes the Felting Crafts column for Craft Gossip, is offering a giveaway of my book, Felt Wee Folk: Enchanting Projects. To enter, just go to the Craft Gossip blog and leave a comment, by Feb. 12th.
In an effort to meet people and to make more for my labor, I became a member of the Christmas Store, a seasonal cooperative in Cambridge and commuted from the Cape to do my work shifts. For a display, I built a fruit and vegetable stand with crates made out of popsicle sticks. Later, I made patterns and wrote directions on how to make the pins for the 1982 Holiday Crafts issue of Better Homes and Gardens magazine.
After about 5 years of mass producing the pins, I moved on to other things, including motherhood. Since then, I’ve had several business ventures, which inevitably reach a point when I’ve had to make a decision to grow or stop all together. I’ve always chosen freedom, never wanting to spend all of my time running a business, even though I see the promotional part as an important element of a creative project. And it’s not as if I walked away from a gold mine. At the wholesale price, I was making so little for my time. Being an artist means coming up with new ideas and making the same thing over and over has therapeutic, although limited appeal. Even the idea of hiring others to do the work made me nervous. I knew that I would be a miserable boss, having to hold others to a high standard of workmanship at low pay. And, I realized that I am happiest while making things myself! I have no exact record of how many pins I made, but it must have been well over a thousand. Throughout, the peapod was a best-seller, which was ironic because it was the simplest and fastest to make of all.
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I started adding new designs and soon had 20 different pins. It was time to be more serious about marketing and I decided that a catalog was needed to reach more people. A former classmate from RISD, Niki Bonnett, volunteered to develop some promotional materials for my business.
Pin catalog designed by Niki Bonnett, 1980
Niki devised a poster that could be cut up in strips and glued together in such a way as to make an accordion-fold catalog. She made drawings, with descriptive hand written notes identifying materials and features of each pin. For the sake of economy, the poster was printed in black and white, and I hand colored the pin illustrations with markers. I constructed a cover for each catalog out of cloth-covered cardboard. Then I glued the beginning and end of the accordion folded pages to the inside of the front and back covers, along with ribbon ties. The finished catalog size was 4″ x 3″.
pin poster designed by Niki Bonnett,1980
In a recent conversation from her home in Ashville, NC, Niki remembers this about the project: “When I did your job, I was working at Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos (HHCC), a well-known ad agency in Boston. I was doing freelance work at night to build my portfolio and I loved your pins. For your project, I designed a poster with all the art and type as white on a black background. Once printed, it could be cut up into horizontal strips that were then hand colored, accordion folded, taped together and hand-bound into a fabric wrapped cover (also handmade) that tied shut with a bit of ribbon. Obviously, back then I didn’t think about my time as part of the cost of doing the project, and I had plenty of it back then too! All it cost was the printing of some black and white posters! Those posters looked great on their own, and it was lots of fun making those books; they were little gems.
In addition to the design and production of the piece, I also did all the illustrations of the pins, the calligraphy naming each pin style. I got one of the typesetter reps who visited HHCC every day to give me an entire alphabet of uppercase, metal letters (“slugs”? I forget the terminology for those bits of lead type). The letters were tiny, maybe 12 point. I used a brayer to roll black acrylic paint out on a piece of glass and then hand printed each tiny letter on rough newsprint until I got the “perfect” letter. Once I chose the letters for the entire alphabet, I blew them up to four times the original size on the Photostat machine (Good thing I had a key to that ad agency! Can you imagine being able to sneak back into a large office now to work on your own stuff from 8 to midnight?). That became my typeface from which I made all the “typeset” words. Needless to say, there was A WHOLE LOT of cutting and pasting goin’ on!
House Pin 1977
I was very proud of that project and I know I still have at least one of those books and some pins tucked away somewhere all these years later. I sure do miss the hands-on way design was done before computers; that’s what eventually caused me to quit my graphic design business in favor of making art quilts. I never made the kind of money I made in commercial art with my textile artwork, but it was so enjoyable… the creativity and the “making” of things!”
Salley arranging pins on top of poster, designed by Niki Bonnett, 1980
Mummy pin
Eggplant Pin 1977
My pins were included in Yankee’s Feb. 1981 issue, along with articles about a man who played music on a saw and someone who repaired oriental rugs. Laura Gross wrote, “Sparkling beads and soft velvet compliment her intricate hand-sewn and embroidered Egyptian mummies, palm trees, hearts, carrots, etc. Prices range from $4.00 to $12.00, and her custom work starts at $15.00. In the past, Salley has specially made banjos, cats, mermaids, New York town houses, corn-on-the-cob and a doctor’s bag, complete with gold initials.” I don’t recall making the doctor’s bag, but I do remember sewing on individual yellow seed beads for kernels of corn.
pin catalogs, 1980
People wrote in response to the article and I sent out free catalogs in manila envelopes. I can’t remember how many orders came in, but it was enough to keep me busy for a while.
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The peapods were the gateway to my life of stitching. I started making peapods and other pins in art school in the 1970s, as a totally separate project from my class assignments. Some of my friends knew about them, but my teachers hadn’t any idea.
One day during class, I was listening to a critique, sewing some peapods, when my teacher, Judy-Sue Goodwin-Sturges, noticed what I was doing. She looked more closely, asked me a few questions and said, “Why don’t you do this kind of thing for your illustrations? Try sewing them.”
Watermelon pin 1977
Bunch of Grapes Pin 1977
With that simple encouragement, I stopped trying so hard to translate the images in my head through a brush or pen. Given permission to work outside of traditional illustration mediums, I found that I was much happier and energized. I was no longer struggling to keep in step. With a needle and thread, I could dance. For some reason, I’d been under the impression that in art school, one does “serious” fine art and I’d kept my interest in sewing and handcrafts underground. Soon, I rediscovered the joy of creating and learned to trust my hands and gut feelings to help work out challenges.
After graduation, I added more designs and started mass producing pins and selling them on a wholesale basis to shops. I had to really push myself to call shops and and arrange in-person visits to businesses. I was more content sitting at home, covering little red beads with sheer lavender fabric to make bunches of grapes or sewing strings of green wooden beads inside a velvet ribbon peapod. Despite my shyness about pedaling my wares, I found the marketing part of the business to be a creative exercise. I’d spent my teenaged years working in my mother’s import shop in Woods Hole, From Far Corners, and the experience of dealing with customers and knowing the difference between wholesale and retail was helpful.
I started making custom pins of people’s cats, based on photographs they sent. I found that Siamese cat owners were particularly fussy about their breed and one time had to redo a blue point. The cat ears are made from a coiled wire bead, which I cut in half.
back of Cat pin
Some of the pins like the cat and the watermelon have a cardboard shape inside to give them stability. I’d sew a little pocket, turn it right side out and slip the cardboard in, put in some stuffing and sew up the pocket.
cardboard patterns for pins
I used my Singer Featherweight, the same machine on which I learned to sew, to do the machine part. There was always a lot of hand sewing to finish and attach the pin back. I had some labels printed with my name and sewed them under the pinback. They were the same kind of labels you get at fabric stores for sewing on children’s camp clothes.
In the studio 1979
This is the first of 3 parts. The story is continued in PINS (part 2).
To keep up with new posts, please subscribe to this blog. Your contact info will not be sold or shared. If you’d like to see more frequent photos tracking the projects in my studio, please follow me on Facebook and/or Instagram.
Some of the objects include a miniature silver lock, man and dog buttons, a girl with umbrella charm and a Bakelite flower button. The woman’s headdress is a pin made of a cluster of shells.
