I love this screen on a window looking out from the women’s quarters in Topkapi Palace and wondered how I might incorporate it into the piece. I decided that, rather than stitch onto the piece itself, I would stitch onto soluble fabric and wash away. The photo mockup had potential, but was maybe a bit complex. Then, when I experimented with this, I couldn’t avoid the spider’s web effect rather than a solid round shape. Experimenting with vanishing muslin wasn’t much better, so in the end I decided a simple grid pattern would look better – it gives the effect of looking out into the outside world of mosques, but is not so intricate that the eye is taken by the pattern rather than looking through.
Assessment piece – further work
I’ve done a lot more playing around with the tiles. I’ve moved the tiles down by removing the third tile on the far right, which gives a much better positioning. this means the missing moulding paste tiles are no longer correctly placed but I can see where these will go and I will also put a little paste between each tile. I thought a stenciled tile (probably a little fainter than shown here) would work well in the missing spaces and make sense of the middle tile of stem and leaves. I’ve also reduced the size of the top and bottom red tiles. I moved the two border tiles on the left into the exterior border. I then added some torn strips of tile print into the arched shapes at the bottom (second image below) to re-enforce the tile theme. I haven’t yet decided the final placing of the strips – whether to have them in all three arches or not. And because I will have a couple of strips extending into the border, I moved the two left hand tiles back to their original placings. The painted bondaweb will extend throughout the whole arch which I hope gives depth to the idea of looking through the arch and I thought to extend scraps of bondaweb into the lower border. I will shorten the arches slightly so only the right hand border tile protrudes into it. The other tiles will be just above the top of the arches.