Decisions, Decisions...

Back to the bags of scrap; one bag, in particular, offering two options for elements I have paired.  Sadly, the images don't do this justice...but bear with me.

I've got a lovely rectangle of hand dyed linen, which is frayed on all four sides.  Firstly, I've paired it with a roughly postcard sized piece of Lutradur XL:

I love the texture of the frayed edges, but it looks pretty boring by itself.  What I wanted was something that made the eye travel across the piece, and I came across this piece of lutradur 30, which I think fits the bill...

I think it has been the last of several prints; I like the eye to the far right.  It doesn't show well, here, but there is also pale green in the mix.  Combining the two gives this...

This isn't working at all... I wanted to show you that positioning in this kind of work is everything.... if you move the print across, though, you get this :

This suggests that the dark brown of the cloth is travelling across via the lutradur.  I rather like it, but I do want to be sure.  So I tried it on a larger square of Evolon :

That changes the balance of the piece, but not my intentions; I still want that idea of brown travelling across to the other side of the piece, so that lutradur needs to come into play again.

This time, you see much more of the lutradur and that elusive eye print... and it's decision time.
For me, though, it's a no brainer; the first one wins.  Why?  Because of what I said my original intention was; to have the brown travel into the right hand side of the cloth.  Yes, it does do that in both pieces, but in the second piece, I feel that what ought to be a detail, a suggestion, is in fact dominating the piece. 

So, we're back to this :

I quite like this: it's a sketch, admittedly, not an important piece, but it will be interesting to see what happens when I add stitch to it.  Looking at the image again, I think that the very long bits of thread hanging from it are a distraction, so they will go.   Then a lot will depend on the choice of thread and the type of stitching.  I'm not going to stitch through the XL, however, as I'm likely to use hand stitch, rather than machine, and stitching through a heavy backing is tiring...so I'll use a lighter lutradur, and fuse it to the backing later.  Given that the stitching is likely to be intense, I'll probably make it a bit bigger than the backing, to allow for shrinkage. 

So...what would you have chosen?