Portable Pond

Intention

I really like Monet's lilies painted but bristle at their presentation – instead of calm the gallery is absolute chaos! I decided to combine the peace and chaos  by making a lily pond that can be placed anywhere.

Process

I had no idea what fabrics or colors to have the lilies be. Yes, they could be pink and purple and white, just like natural lilies, but I wanted something a little funkier. Something that conveyed the dual nature of the lily – the tranquility and the chaos of life, all in one small flower.

Thus, when the time came to do a skills investigation, I chose to investigate two skills: sewing, and felting, in the context of making garish lilies. Below is a sketch of the project:

I used very busy patterns with contrasting threads/felt innards to convey the chaos, and kept the lily pads as simplistic as possible to draw attention to the purported calm of the lily and the actuality of the lily’s existence, i.e. life is messy – why can’t it look busy? I did little to no research on skills outside of the class since I had a strong idea in my head of how to accomplish this project without additional direction/instruction needed since the lily was already fleshed out (thanks Robert for the dart pattern! A happy accident turned into a lily pond!!)

I ended up having 3 nested flowers so that the lily seemed “full,” with a flower-layer being 5, 4, and 3 inch squares with room for hemming on all sides. I used relatively thin fabrics with contrasting thread to convey the chaotic and simplistic nature of life in the lily. The darts on the fabric included a diamond in the center with 4 triangles starting at each point in the diamond – an image of that initial pattern is in the design sketch.

I relied on the darts I made previously for the muslin flower, as well as the machine sewing experience I had to sew the lily pads and the flowers. However, for the muslin flower, the edges were unfinished, so I hemmed all of the edges so they could be clean and relatively neat. Below are photos of the process for making one flower: 

The second part of the project was the inner part of the lily. I chose to use felt to convey the delicacy of the inner parts of the lily, since they are very slender and fragile in real life. The felted seeds/stems inside lilies for pollination matched the thread used for the edges and the darts of the overall flower. I chose to make a small but dense dot of wool with ethereal bits of wool floating out of the flower to make the inner filaments seem wispy and fragile. Below is a photo of the inner part of the lily pre-addition to the flower:

For sewing the lily pads, I used machine sewing to do the border and connect the lily pads on the previous border so that the lines would be as neat and simplistic as possible. For combining all of these pieces together, I hand-sewed the pieces because the flowers are large enough and delicate enough to require more dexterity and care than a sewing machine can provide, which resulted in the final product:  

Reflection

Overall I’m glad I chose to do a project with a mix of machine ad hand sewing – by the end of the lily pads, I feel like I was significantly better at machine sewing than when I started. One of the toughest parts of this project was the sheer amount of darts made – I sewed 45 total for the project. I could have hand-sewed some of the darts for the smaller flowers but chose not to because of the precision and speed of the sewing machine. The lily pad lines were also tough – I only had to do it twice but am very happy with how they turned out – going over the topmost curve was stressful, and they are the best testament to the strength of my machine-sewing. I also fell in love with felting and would love to experiment more with making more complex forms.

The applications of this seem pretty slim, but I really do like that this project is something I will use indefinitely use as a centerpiece. It’s a bright conversation starter that I am proud to have made. I think its best use is as a springboard – I may decide to add fish to this in order to make it a proper pond, or even a frog! It’s encouraging to have the power to create at your fingertips, and this project demonstrates that sewing isn’t as intimidating as it seems.  

Samples

Below are my samples. I forgot a lot initially about putting the foot down, hence the messy samples.  The sweater is also something I've worked on for a really long time, hence the length.