My Baggage (?)
Artist: Sarah Shinkewski
Wet Felt Embroidered with Gold Floss
For my “Who Am I” project, I decided to embellish a felt bag my dad gave me a decade ago. I chose to include a gift from my dad because he has had a large impact on my life. My dad built, from the ground up, a successful interior design firm. He had to work extremely long hours (as many small business proprietors must) in order to grow his company and provide livelihoods for his staff. I am so proud of his success in business and the beauty of his company’s design work.
On the cover of my bag, I wanted to include a nod to my favourite artistic pursuit, painting. I always loved to draw but in recent years I have begun painting on canvas with oils. I love the way that oil paints layer, float and glide. I like the feeling of richness and depth that I get with this slow-drying medium. When I started to get back into painting a few years ago, I wanted to begin by studying those things that I loved the best: my west coast mountains, forests and oceans. I am very grateful to have been born into such beauty and I want to be able to express my delight in our stunning surroundings by painting them the way that they make me feel. When I look out at the place where I live, my heart is filled with appreciation, joy and peace.
I decided to choose wet felting to represent both my interest in painting as well as my love of my surroundings. It seemed like a good fit. I had looked at many examples of wet felted pieces online and loved its “painterly” effect. I chose to recreate one of my oil paintings in felt.
As I was working to make the wet-felted image, I soon became frustrated. As always, my skills in a new area did not match the vision of what I’d like to create. At times, it seemed as if my felt would never stick together and and parts of it were thin and weak. I had to remind myself not to give up. I practiced breathing deeply and I tried to remind myself that it is only reasonable for things to be hard the first time you try. I had to patiently remind myself that other artist create beauty only after countless hours spent honing their skills. In the end, I was happy with my felt creation. It had the feeling of my painting, reminding me of the sea, mists, and mountains.
I trimmed my wet-felted image to fit the bag and figured out a method of mounting the image with felt trim so that it appeared framed and finsished-looking. Next, I put my new-found embroidery skills onto play by embroidering gold “cracks”, in the style of Japanese mended pottery, Kintsukuroi. In the Kintsukuroi tradition, broken pottery is mended by gold to make it even stronger, more functional and more attractive.
I used gold embroidery floss and satin stitches to create my desired effect. I wanted to include these embroidered lines to pay respect to the hard times that I’ve had in my life. When I was younger, I mistakenly thought that a good life was one that was easy; one that was free from conflict, flaws, and hard times. Now I know that the rough times have made me stronger, more compassionate, and more understanding. My family, my career, my life is more beautiful not because it has been easy to achieve, but because I have persevered. The tough times I have endured have taught me so many valuable lessons and for those lessons, I am grateful.
