The Work

Art born of love and grief.

When Prince died tragically of an overdose of Fentanyl in April 2016, it affected both me and my husband very profoundly, but also very differently. Grief is a very lonely thing.

My husband was a lover of all Prince music before he became my lover. Then I became enamoured of Prince too — but in a different way. Pierre not only knows all the music, he can tell you which song is on which album, how many versions there are of it and the date of its release. I can never remember any of those things. I just love to dance and the music grooved me and the lyrics spoke to me.

The first Prince video I ever saw was “Cream”, and I was mesmerized by the joy in the music and all that amazing dancing. That quirky smile and head tilt of Prince’s while playing seemed such an expression of fun and devil-may-care that struck a chord with me. I fell in love with Prince and Pierre at the same time, and the three of us became inseparable.

We were very lucky to have met Prince at Paisley Park. My husband created a Prince news website in the early days and it was noticed. He ended up doing some work on Prince’s own website and some writing for him. We were invited to Paisley Park for his birthday bash celebration with seven nights of concerts in 2002.

When I think of it now, it was really quite an incredible experience. We ended up, on our second day visiting Paisley Park, being whisked in, just the two of us, to the back of the concert venue while Prince and his band were rehearsing for the concert that night. Just the two of us listening to Prince and the band. Exceptional. Then Prince came over to thank Pierre for his work. I shook his hand. I remember him being so tiny. I have no recollection of what I even said. Or what Prince said. Star struck, perhaps.

How do you mourn the loss of someone whose music has been such a part of your life and marriage but who, as a person, has not been a part of your life at all? How do you express the depth of how you feel — even to each other? How do you tell friends and family about that sadness and strange love? As I said, grief is lonely. Putting those feelings into art was a way forward for me.

I love the Prince symbol. The simple elegance of it. The melding of the male and female signs with a horn for music. Brilliant. As a fibre artist, I decided I would “stitch” the symbol in some way. Big, bold, sparkly, blingy and, of course, purple.

I would hook, embroider and bead my love, grief and loss for Prince’s music into that symbol.

“Hooked on Prince” is also an expression of my love for Pierre who came so unexpectedly into my life and brought Prince with him. What a ride.

What follows is an illustrated explanation about how this piece was created.

NOTE: If you would like to see higher quality versions of the pictures below in a slideshow format, just click on one of them and the slideshow will open in a separate window or tab. To go back to the text, just close the separate window or tab.

I. The Ground Fabric

“Hooked on Prince” is worked on a piece of rugwarp. Rugwarp is an even-weave cotton fabric that is used in some types of hooking. Traditional and primitive rug hooking with wool strips is often done on burlap, but not exclusively. I hook with tapestry wool, not wool strips, and I find the rugwarp threads are a good size for hooking with this type of fibre.

II. The Stand

I use a hands-free hooking stand, locally made by Eric Ripley, equipped with gripper strips to hold the rugwarp. Gripper strips are metal strips loaded with hundreds of tiny and very sharp metal pins that point backwards to hold your fabric taut. The pins will tear the skin right off your fingers if you are not careful but they will hold your fabric nice and tight. Despite the danger, I prefer this stand with these strips to a hoop.

III. The Design

I did not want to just hook a purple symbol. The design had to have movement and lots of colour and it had to have some paisley motifs in the overall look. My friend and graphic designer Julia Archer, of Grey Owl Graphics, found the perfect inspirational image on Shutterstock (470038721, Jackie74), which I purchased. We played around with the position of the symbol over the image till I was satisfied there were enough swirls and paisley to make it fun to do.

Julia printed it out on several 8,5 x 11 inch sheets of T-shirt transfer paper and it was iron transferred onto the rugwarp.

IV. Colour choices for fibre/fibres used

I have a huge stash of tapestry wool for needlepoint. It was time to play with colours. I used the printed background as inspiration but did not stick to it all the time in my choice of colours. I gave myself freedom with the motif shapes too, incorporating beads everywhere I could. The background would remain purple and I used a 100% wool knitting fibre for that.

Other fibres used include Anchor tapestry wool, DMC rayon thread and DMC perle cotton.

V. Beads, buttons and bling

And there had to be bling, of course! I have a stash of that too! The piece needed to sparkle. I used new and antique glass beads of different sizes and shapes as well as silver and gold metal beads, round shells, gold and silver sequins and acrylic cabochons. I just kept playing around a motif with different types of beads and colours till the combination made me happy and away I went.

I can assure you there was no overall master plan (just inspiration from the transferred image) and working that way was part of the joy of creating the piece.

VI. Tools used

I like to work with a curved handle hook. This one was locally made by Jim Lovett. Also used were a pair of special scissors for the sculpting, embroidery scissors, beading needles and a large eye tapestry needle.

VII. Techniques

1) Hooking

Hooking is a wonderful, relatively fast way of filling in a background. You pull up your thread from the back and make loops. You can work in any direction. Using tapestry wool makes small, fluffy loops.

2) Sculpting

Sculpting is a needlepoint technique adapted to hooking. You simply make your loops much longer and then cut them back sculpting your shape into a tight meld of fibre. It allows you to add height and depth to a form.

3) Beading

I used Nymo beading thread in various colours for all the beads attached to the piece. For the guitar pick and the cabochons, which are bezelled not glued, the beads hold them in place. A first line of an equal number of beads is stitched around the object and then a second line of beads threaded into only every other bead is added and then you work smaller and smaller rows with smaller and smaller beads to create a net that holds your object.

I also beaded in rows and swirls.

4) Embroidery

Apart from all the hooking of loops, there are only two embroidery stitches used in this piece and those stitches were put in with a large tapestry needle.

This is chain stitch in a pink DMC rayon floss:

And this is stem stitch done in tapestry wool (pink) and in green perle cotton around the shells.

VIII. Special additions

1) Prince guitar pick

My brother Adam works as a stagehand for IATSE LOCAL 58. He was working a Prince concert late in the 90s and picked up a couple of guitar picks that Prince had discarded, and sent them to me. Prince may have actually touched the guitar pick which I beaded into my piece front and centre!

2) Symbol earring

I bought a pair of silver Prince symbol earrings while at Paisley Park in 2002. Of course, I ended up losing one so it seemed logical to incorporate the second one into this piece. It is attached with Nymo beading thread and you can see it on the bottom left.

3) Signing the piece

I always sign and date my pieces if possible. For “Hooked on Prince”, I did it in beads on the curve of the horn.

IX. Challenges

1) Gripper strips

As mentioned above, the gripper strips can be quite dangerous. But also, with a large piece of hooking that needs to be moved around the frame, there is a risk that the strips will pull out some of the work you have already done! Yes, this happened to me and it took me an afternoon of work once the whole piece was finished to re-hook several “grippered” out sections.

2) Alignment

Transferring an image to a flexible fabric poses challenges of alignment. For the cross bar, I had to make sure my lines were even. To help out, I ran guide threads across to even everything up before doing the hooking.

3) Rounded end

This rounded end of the “horn” of the symbol was not a challenge to hook but a challenge for the finishing. I knew the framer would not be able to cut it out. There would not be enough fabric to wrap to the back of the plywood, so it had to stay unhooked. It would have to be dealt with at the very end.

X. Finishing

1) Corrections

When all was hooked and beaded, there was the time-consuming work of making sure all the pulled out loops (from the gripper strips) were re-hooked as well as making sure the circle top was even all the way around. In hindsight, I should have “fenced” the piece. Fencing means outlining the form. I didn’t think I needed to do this as I had the image ironed on the rugwarp. I was wrong. Hooking is flexible, things get out of line. I had to add rows of loops here and there to make sure the circle was (mostly) properly round.

The cats helped a bit…

2) “Framing”

Once I decided I was absolutely finished with the hooking and embellishment of the piece, it had to be prepared for hanging. I wanted the symbol to be a free-hanging piece – with no background rugwarp showing and certainly not mounted in a frame. I did, however, take it to my framer Coral Fuller, of Frames on James, in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. She has framed many of my needlework pieces in the past decade or so and understood exactly what I wanted.

This is the piece when brought to Coral:

This is an explanation of what she did in her own words:

To begin I slightly stretched the needlework on my work table, securing with pins. This enabled me to trace the true size and shape I would need to make the template.

As the symbol has 2 “arms” extended I needed to use something sturdy enough to hold straight and not warp after I mounted the work on it. I decided on the highest quality 5/8” plywood I could find with a smooth finish.

I traced the template I had made on to the plywood, then my husband cut it out with a skill saw. I sanded the edges and painted the whole piece with a stain-preventing paint (I used BIN). After it had dried I wrapped the whole piece in natural linen.

Next came fitting the needlework over the template. Because of the curves and corners this had to be done slowly and carefully, so I began at the top and worked my way down. I had to trim much of the fabric away as I progressed, but leave enough to wrap to the back of the template and staple. The corners and curves had to be clipped and cut for a good fit. As the fabric used was a very loose weave and ravelled easily, I had to use fabric glue on several of the clipped corners.

Once the piece was wrapped and excess edges trimmed I chose a wide cotton edging to finish the sides of the mounted symbol. I matched the colour to the rugwarp, which was also the colour of the linen. I sewed the edging to the top edge of the sides of the symbol. Tiny stitches strong enough to hold the force I would be exerting to wrap the cotton edging to the back of the symbol. When wrapped to the back I stapled it to the plywood template, leaving a clean edge from the front.

To complete the project I cut out the shape of the piece from the linen and stapled that over all unfinished edges to leave a clean finish. I added 4 hanging hoops on the back to hang the piece by.

3) Painting and finishing

I was really pleased with how much time and effort Coral had taken with my piece. And now I had to paint the wide cotton edging. I found a paint colour called, appropriately, “Purple Haze” and painted several coats on the edging filling in spaces between some hooking and the edge to unify the colouring.

Then I had to deal with the place near the round of the horn where the unhooked rugwarp still showed.

I decided to paint it with the same colour as the wall on which the piece was to hang. But once I had painted it, I still was not happy. The holes of the rugwarp showed through and it wasn’t good enough.

I found a tapestry wool in my stash that matched the wall colour and, since I could no longer stitch through the mounted fabric, I glued the tapestry wool down in rows to fill the space.

Then all that was left to do was some trimming around the edges and some trimming of the sculpted shapes.

XI. Hooked on Prince

This piece of art born of love and grief for Prince was a work of joy. The grief, already two years old in 2018 when I began this project, subtly retreated in the happiness of creating something vibrant and positive.

One of the great gifts of working with fibre is that it is an unrushed process. You must allow yourself to sit quietly and reflect while slowly watching something take shape of your own making. It’s quite fulfilling.

From start to finish with summer interruptions, “Hooked on Prince” took about 14 months to complete.

Its dimensions are: 91 cm x 74 cm (36 x 29 inches).

It now hangs in Pierre’s home office.

XII. Acknowledgements

I’m grateful

• to stitching friends Julia, Rachael, Ann Marie and Lorrie for their encouragement and advice
• to mentors Ray and Lorraine who taught me how to hook all those years ago
• to my friend Sam Norgard, beader extraordinaire, who taught me how to bead
• to my fellow hookers at the Rustic Crafters and my fellow fibre friends at SOFAAR (Society of Fibre Artists of the Annapolis River) for all their enthusiasm
• to Coral Fuller of Frames on James for understanding the importance of this piece.

And all my love always for Pierre and the music he has brought into my life.

Disclaimer

Hooked on Prince is an original creation by Christine Igot inspired by the Prince symbol. This artistic creation is in no way affiliated with Paisley Park or the Prince Estate. It was created for personal use only with no intention of copyright infringement.