Finishing Off.

It ain't finished 'til the fat lady sings?  Sometimes.  Other times, something feels as if it ought to be finished, but continues to niggle at you.  Over the years, I've come tor realise that the only thing to do is to put a piece like that aside, and let the unconscious work out what needs to be done.  It can take a while....or not...

You may remember this piece; I talk about it here. And it has been annoying me ever since.  Predominately because it's boring.

Not to mention that it somehow felt too wide.  Today, I worked out what to do with it.  I've been rereading 'Structure of the Visual Book' by Keith A Smith.  It was talking about folded books, and gave an image of an accordion book, not unlike the ones I've been making, except that the folds were very frequent.  So, when I glanced at the piece, I thought...I wonder if I could turn it into an accordion book... and started playing around with the necessary folds.  In reality, though, it was obvious that the section at the far end, with the starfish, really wouldn't be happy with that treatment.  The folds, though...they were interesting... soft folds, not pleats, folded so that the words are easy to see, closer together.  So I tacked them into place...and that wasn't easy; stitching through three folds of Evolon is heavy going, and involved forcing the needle through them.  And I ended up with this...

 So...not so wide... soft folds suggesting the waves at the beach... the paint treatment not so dominant...definitely better.  It's still by no means the best thing I've done, but I can live with it now.
I decided to leave the stitches in... by the time I'd got them there, I was pretty well exhausted.  The should really have been white, on reflection, and I might replace them at some point, though I did add some brown stitches at the bottom right, just to balance it out.

Is the fat lady singing?  Nah, she's going for a lie down...

Life's A Beach.

Well okay, these days, not so much.  But I decided to keep going with the piece from a couple of days ago, which made me think about the beach. A specific beach, in fact, the beach at Cramond.  When I was nine or ten, my mother was lent a flat right on the edge of the River Almond, and we spent the summer there.  My mother worked, so my sister and I were alone most of the week.  It was magical.  Actually, it was probably dangerous, my sister can only have been about six, and I had sole responsibility for her...but nothing untoward happened. 

Cramond is beautiful; I'm pretty sure that my love of beaches and the sea came from that summer.  So...this is a memory piece, and here's the memory :

endless summer

day on day the beach

sand between our toes

And here's the poem added to the piece, and some lutradur lace the colour of sand.

You know I don't like white... and this is just too stark.  Plus, I felt that the words were too dark, too stark a contrast against everything else. So, a little painting seemed to be in order.  First, I stamped some gold spirals into the centre of the 'sun', then dabbed three colours of metallic acrylic paint onto the background, giving this : 

Better?  Umm.  Different.  Possibly a bit cluttered, but it's too late to worry about it now.  And I'm still not happy.  So I stitched the words.  I'd been debating doing that ever since I added them, and finally succumbed.  It didn't take anything like as long as I thought it would, it adds a bit of texture and seems to somehow soften the overall effect of the writing, though the pen is still evident underneath. 

I've avoided writing on work for a very long time.  I started to learn calligraphy because I've been told so many times that my writing is abysmal.  It's a sort of cross between Russian and English handwriting, and not in a good way.  Finally, though, I decided that, like every other mark I make, it is authentic.  It's me.  And I do my best to be legible, on textile work at least.  Perfection is not required.  In fact, perfection is boring.  Hold that thought. 

And here's the finished piece.

The starfish was added for balance, and picks up some of the paler colours in the piece.  Am I happy now?  Meh.  It's not the best piece I've ever done, but I like the poem.  I'll put it away, now, and come back to it, see whether absence works its magic.  Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.  And if not, I'll throw it out...but I will keep the poem.