Monday, May 24, 2010

NEW WORK

PTA's 2010 Challenge is the theme Sunrise or Sunset. (PTA is a small fiber group of which I'm a member.) The rules are minimal.....the finished size must be 32" x 42" (either horizontal or vertical placement) and contain some black. Our original finish date was our July meeting but because I've got a super busy teaching schedule in June, my personal goal was June 1st. I finished it yesterday!


I wanted to explore a landscape design, featuring pine trees on a mountain ridge at dawn. Since I have yet to conquer free motion machine stitching, it seemed sensible to do some experimenting. I learned this particular motif choice was terrible...... the design didn't work, plus even with stabilizing, there would be too much distortion, given how many more 'needles' I wanted to stitch on each branch.


Instead, I decided to use fabric 'branches' and some samples from sketches I made on freezer paper secured to black fabric.


Next I got out some fabrics and began playing with the background on my design wall.....


I'll save you the trouble of viewing all the different fabric placements I tried.......eventually I realized I didn't have enough gradations to visually move from color to color....


So, I tried one color family instead.....still trying to maintain a horizontal landscape background. (But you can see.....I'm beginning to play with squares instead.)


And, that's the direction I went instead by deciding to utilize a patchwork background. The decision again was mainly due to the lack of appropriate fabric for my earlier vision.

More tomorrow......

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