With this piece I wanted to show my own personal struggle with depression. As previously mentioned when in a state of depression i tend to struggle to get out of bed. I chose to use one of my actual bedsheets for the piece. i got my mam to draw around my body in a somewhat foetal position to mimic the dress piece. the bedsheets was put inside out and we used a marker pen to give me a basic outline to follow.
Due to the bedsheets being stronger fabric than the dress i was really struggling to do the technique as it was hard to get the fabric pulled tight enough. i tried using wood clips to hold it in place however this didn’t get in tight enough so the process was too hard.
next i tried to do thin strips of hessian that i could then stitch along the outline of me once i had done the proggy technique on it. However after doing only a couple of rows on the hessian started to pull apart.
Finally i got the idea to use an embroidery stretcher to pull the fabric tight. This worked a lot better, i continued to use the wood clips to keep the rest of the fabric with some tension. it wasn’t as easy as the dress but it was still doable.
The way i did it was to poke a hole using the large embroidery needle. Then using a knitting needle i made the hole a bit bigger and pushed the fabric through the hole. i repeated this for the entire outline.
Here is the backside of the bedsheets showing the working of the technique
And here is the correct side of the bedsheets. I left it as just an outline to show the feeling of emptiness that accompanies depression.
Maeve Dawson Art 