Staffordshire Hoard project

I have worked off and on stitching the parts for my piece based on the Staffordshire Hoard. This is the project the EquilARTeral group has been working on. We will all have our pieces mounted on gallery stretched canvas which has been painted with the same colour and texture. This will unify the 3 works of art.

I have not worked with a canvas like this before, but somehow for this, I think rather than making a whole piece and mounting it, I felt drawn to depict how it must have been to keep discovering more and more treasure in the earth. So, I feel I need to do small pieces that are incorporated into the canvas in some way. I am quite drawn to the pieces with the garnets mounted in filligree gold work.

So, today I started laying the parts out to get an idea of how they might look. I think it is getting buttons, and several of the pieces are having layers of wadding behind them to make them stand out. Here is a photo of the beginning of the composition part of it. I think I may be using brown felt around some of the pieces to make them seem to come out of the ground. It is not easy to get a photo, as the light bounces off the paint.

Although there are images of the Staffordshire Hoard online, it is not easy to flip back and forth between them. I discovered that a booklet has been put out about the hoard and what they know so far. So, my son bought it for me for Christmas. That has been a big help...especially a photo of one of the gold and garnet pieces laying in the ground in the field with bits of grass, etc. Not sure if I will work the grass in, but I might do large long straight stitches around the edges of these stitched pieces as a method of attaching them to the canvas and implying the grassy bits.

I hope to get a lot more done on this in the next couple days.