Pairs...

...are interesting, as they give you the opportunity to explore, to see what would happen if, to interpret differently.  These pieces aren't exactly a pair: they're monoprints (yes, again), and as such, one is fainter than the other, and as a result, the pieces have a different feel to them.  That, in turn, invites a different approach.  So...

The overall structure of them suggests an island, to me at least, with a reflection of sorts in swirling water.  In both pieces, I've tried to suit the stitch to the marks of the paint.  The original print, on the left, has significantly more marks then the ghost print, and, as a result, I've added only enough stitch to support the directional movement of the paint.  The exception to that is the island, which is stitched using random marks.  I haven't stitched the 'sky' at all in this variant; there didn't seem to be a need.

There's a lot more happening, stitch wise, in the ghost print, because of that lack of definition.  It reminded me, somehow, of the Impressionist approach.  There's a lot of light in the second piece, more so than the first.  I wanted to support the idea of movement, but I also wanted to stitch the whole piece.  The 'island' section is stitched in a random way, but with larger stitches than the first piece, while the 'reflection' is stitched in the same way, using even larger stitches.  The rest of the piece is stitched using a sort of exploded herringbone stitch, creating a patterning of sorts, but without the crossover that characterises herringbone.  I'm sure there's a proper name for that, but I'm equally sure I don't know what it is. I wanted something to suggest movement, but without too much structure. 

Two pieces, same structure, completely different approaches and feels to them.  Interestingly, I find I like them both.  Which do you prefer?

Going With Your Gut...

...is, I think, the only thing to do.  In life, as in art, come to think of it.  I got half way through stitching this, the first of the green  monoprints I made recently, and thought... it would be so much easier to machine stitch.

And there are several more in this series... it would be quick, easy... but, my gut said, it wouldn't be right.  And my gut, as usual, is correct.  Dammit.  Why?

There are a number of reasons.  Monoprints are the most painterly of prints.  They're very direct, as is hand stitch, each mark a deliberate choice.  Machine stitch is by no means as direct : the machine is between me and the work.  The machine controls the stitch, even when free machine embroidering.  That's not what is needed here.  In addition, the direct contact with the piece is needed: it means I can see and contemplate, moment by moment, what I do next, where to put the needle, what size to make the stitch, which stitch to use.  Machine stitch doesn't afford the same luxury, the same choices.  Machine stitch also creates a far flatter, straighter line, no spaces, less easy to control...one unintended nudge or shake of your hand will knock it off course... you get my drift.  No pun intended.

Going with my gut is usually inconvenient, frequently challenging...but always right.  Now to get on with the work.  Possibly with a little muttering under my breath about how unfair it all is...

Done.

So...the piece I showed you last time is finished, and here it is.

It's on top of more of the same orange coloured lutradur, to strengthen the background colour.  I think it's fairly effective.  The cardboard disc is a yellower colour than it shows here, and I like the way the stitch has worked out.  I had intended to add more stitch to the background, but I've decided against it; I think it would distract from the piece, rather than add to it.   I've trimmed it down, to give it some balance, and it'll sit happily in a mount. 

I've been drawing today, faces, probably the only thing I don't often share on the blog.  Of all my work, it's the most personal, though, given some of the work I've shown over the years, that may surprise you.  It has been a long time since I drew a person, and I'm reminded how important it is to keep practicing.  It's not bad, you understand...but...  Some other time, perhaps. 

Now I need to cut some batting, before I can start stitching the monoprints, and a couple of the larger pieces I've been working on recently.  I've been too tired to paint, the last couple of days, but I think I can muster the energy to do that...if not today, then certainly tomorrow.

Too Tired...

...to paint, so I thought I'd look at the monoprints.  First, some time spent on hunting up threads to go on a group of monoprints...so far so good...

That pale yellow looks odd in the ball, and might not be used on the top print, but it works nicely at a single strand on some of the paler versions.  So then on to stitching the lutradur monoprint...

Long stitches, reflecting the movement of the paint.  The problem with stitch at this size is that it has a tendency to pull the fabric, no matter how careful you are, so I'll probably fuse this piece to a backing, for preference something with colour in it, which will reinforce the gold colours in the background due to the semitransparent nature of the lutradur.    Again, so far, so good.  Except that I didn't seem to have found quite the right shade of green (most of what's reading as blue in this image is closer to green), so I went through to the studio to see if I could find anything suitable( (so much for sitting still)/  And there was the thought that I could perhaps find something to put in that upper left hand section, a piece of fabric perhaps, in a ring shape.

I don't often use embellishments, which is rich from someone with a substantial bead collection... but I did want to find something to use here, to break up the movement of all that green, mostly, as it seemed very dominant.  And I found a white box, but I couldn't remember what was in it... Jackpot!  Not only did it have thread, it had some embellishments, too, which I could vaguely remember intending to use on a different piece, some time ago (don't ask me which: clearly it never happened). 

One of those embellishments was this button :

Right size, lovely texture but wrong colour, though I did love the striations running through it.  A bit more hunting found me this...

Odd, isn't it?  It's a cardboard circle which I suspect came out of the lid of a jar of something.  It has a blue mark that refers quite nicely to the background, and it's the right shape.  Reader, I glued it on.  I intend to stitch over it with more large scale stitches, a bit like shisha gone mad.  I may not use the  suitable green thread after all... the thread I used on the right hand side will be perfect. 

And that's the state of play so far.  It's not the best thing I've ever made, but it's not bad, either.  And it does go to show that I do keep some very strange things in my boxes.  Strange, but useful. 

Continuing...

...with the quilts made from the original inspiration of  Scully's paintings.  I rarely ever mark a stitch line, but I made an exception for this piece.

You can just see the marks, here, made using a Conte pencil that happened to be the right colour.  I wanted flowing, unstilted lines, and felt that drawing them, first, would make them easier to stitch.  I was right, as it happened.  Plus, any kind of drawing is good for one. So, I stitched.

And yes, it was fine, but it didn't feel right.  I didn't really want to add more stitch, though I did contemplate whipping the existing running stitch, to get a harder line.  Somehow, though, that didn't seem right.  I liked the feeling of space that the relatively limited stitch was giving, but I couldn't see a story, a meaning behind the piece.  Until I turned it over.

And somehow, it made more sense.  That seemed to suggest a real flow, from the top of the quilt, down to the bottom.  It felt like a white river, somehow.  Positioning it in this way felt somewhat counter intuitive.  It is constructed the way you would expect a landscape would be; top level, one third, bottom level, two thirds, giving a 'horizon line'. Turning it over reverses that ratio, and it feels a bit odd.  I think, though, that the flow of movement through the quilt stops the viewer seeing the piece as a landscape, and I think in part it was that line, that construction, that was getting in the way of seeing the meaning.  So this is how it will stay... it's called 'Outpouring'.

Changing My Mind...

...happens all the time, but it doesn't often happen when I've finished a piece, and twice in the same series is... interesting...  The piece I showed you here just didn't seem quite right, and a chat with my online creativity group buddies confirmed it, and helped to clarify what the problem was.  Here's the adjusted piece, with a smaller circle on the right, which somehow improved the balance and flow over the whole piece. 

This second piece also comes from the Scully series, and when I finished it I thought... no...(the blue isn't part of the quilt, it just happened to be lying on a piece of blue when I took the image). 

Oddly enough, the issue was balance, again.  I was worried about the size of the stitch in the bottom section, and whether the whole piece wasn't just overly fussy, to boot.  So I did what I tell everyone else to do in this situation : I slept on it.  No, it wasn't any better overnight.  Which was unfortunate: there's a lot of stitch in there, and unripping was the only thing I could possibly do.  Turns out I was wrong.  I'm going to leave it as it is.  Why?  I hear you ask... well, because I had laid it out on the sofa, and happened to look at it across the room...and from a distance, it looks fine.  In fact, that's something else I tell everyone else to do... usually by putting the piece on the floor and standing up to look at it.  I really should take my own advice, now and again. 

Note the circle in the bottom right: yes, you guessed it, it's the trimmed off circle from the piece at the top of the page.  Waste not, want not, and all that. 

As well as the Scully influence, I think this piece has echoes of some of the work of the Glasgow Girls, notably the shapes in the upper section, and the stitch that supports it.  This series seems to be taking me to surprising places...I'm not a huge fan of Art Nouveau, though as I get older, my taste seems to get broader.  Maybe I'm just less judgemental...who knows.  I wouldn't have expected it to appear in my work, though, which is perhaps foolish.  Everything appears in the work eventually.

Finishing Touches...

...are often easier and less than we think.  Here's the finished piece, the development of which I showed you here.  I said it needed stitch...

...and now it has it.  Much less of it than I'd thought.  I originally set out to stitch all the way round the piece.  I found a variegated hand dyed perle which had all the colours in the piece in it, including the tannin stains in the background.  The lovely curving line was complete chance, but when I looked at it, I decided there really wasn't any need for any more.  I did contemplate adding three more at the bottom, but thought it would be gilding the lily.

Knowing when to stop is essential, and often very difficult, particularly when you have more ideas.   That usually means that there's a need to explore more within a series format, rather than that you need to add more to the particular piece you're working on.  Ultimately, it's all about intention, as I've already said elsewhere, in a conversation about a piece of work made by someone else.  Part of my intention when I work is to keep things as simple as possible, while expressing whatever it is that I'm trying to say. 

I'm happy with this, now.  Yes, I could melt the lutradur a bit more, but it's a risk: if I melt too much, it'll just look silly, and as it's not distracting from anything, it's a risk I'm not prepared to take.  Perfection, as I've said before, is the best you can do on the day, and that is constantly changing as you learn more, and become more confident.  Sometimes discretion truly is the better part of valour.

Changing Direction...

...is always a possibility, given the way I work, but sometimes it's inevitable.

I spoke here about being inspired by the work of Sean Scully.  This is the second of those pieces, which would have been three pieces of fabric set together, had I had three suitable pieces... however, these two seem to sit fairly well together, so here we are.  Nothing like the work of Mr Scully, but entirely like mine...nobody can ever accuse me of not being flexible in my approach.  The fabric itself was two pieces which were donated by a couple of kind friends, when I bemoaned my lack of scrap fabric (I'm still bemoaning my lack of hand dyes, but that's another story).  The pinky brown fabric on the right has been reversed, to tone down the patterning, while scraps of the fabric on the left have been used to create a vertical and a couple of horizontal lines, to develop the relationship between the two cloths.  Finally, there's a lutradur circle, with a shell inside it, at the top.  And it's ready to stitch. 

Which is my problem.   I spent a fruitless ten minutes looking for thread with which to hand stitch this piece.  I don't have the money to buy any, and I don't have any dye, either, so I can't make my own.  And I can't see myself hand stitching with machine thread, because it doesn't have the impact that perle and other thicker threads have.   I do have choices, though.

First off, I could just not stitch it at all.  And that's really tempting.  This piece feels like a painting, and were it a painting, it would be finished.  Fact is, though, that it isn't a painting, and it feels like it does need some stitch, albeit perhaps not as much as I might usually do.  So it looks like machine stitch is the only option.  Given the amount of machine threads I have, there's bound to be something suitable.  And if there isn't a variegated thread, I'll combine two plain threads.  I think I'll be stitching, not for pattern, but for texture, which will hopefully make those elements stand out a bit more, as well as connecting them.  For the meantime, though, I'm going to put it aside, and see how I feel after a couple of months.  Building time into design decisions is A Good Thing.  I don't think this will lead to a shift back to machine stitching in general, though, partly because it's too tiring, and partly because I've come to enjoy both the process and the result.

Finding A Rhythm.

I  recently watched a documentary on the work of Sean Scully.  I didn't particularly like his work...or so I thought... but I found his process fascinating, and not unlike my own.  He works with stripes or blocks of colour, and I found myself thinking, I need to do that.  Let the fabric speak for itself. Needed to be hand dyes, I thought, needed to be in some way related to each other.  Minimal stitch, I thought, and went through my really very limited selection of hand dyes (ironic, given that most of my stash was my own hand dyes...), and put together three tops.  I thought I would machine quilt them, but when I ran out of hand work, I thought...maybe...   So I fished one out.  This one, to be precise.

Reader, I didn't like it.  (For those of us who like to know these things, a piece of rust dyed muslin on the top, hand dyed muslin (of a different, slightly heavier weight), in the middle and a piece of commercial fabric on the bottom, the only piece of fabric I could find to go with the other two).  The problem?  Firstly, I didn't like the shape, and felt the strips were too wide.  Secondly, I couldn't work out how to stitch them.  Third, I couldn't see a way to make them hang together in a cohesive whole. 

I turned them round.

That felt a bit better, but still, the problem of the width of the bands of colour, and the shape.  The thought of dismantling the whole thing, changing the width of the bands and sewing it all back together, just didn't appeal.  There was, however,  distinct problem with getting all three fabrics to relate together.  Each way I looked at it, I felt as if tow of the three bands sat together well but all three, didn't.  I needed to find a solution, to pull the whole thing together.  Oh, and did I say?  It didn't feel like mine....which is perhaps not surprising, given that usually, my ideas come from my own personal landscape, where this one had come from considering someone else's.  So, reader, this is what I did.

The fabric is all a bit darker than in this image...but... The wool is couched onto the top, reflecting the swirls in all three fabrics, but taking their own path, not following anything already existing in the cloth.  I would have preferred to have hand felted the wool down, but that's not really an option now, so I used an apricot coloured thread that matches some of the apricot colours in the fabric to the right.  I then found some brown variegated thread to quilt the rust dyed section, with colours from all three pieces of cloth, and then thought...now what?  My original intention was to stitch with a darker thread, but that didn't seem right.  And there needed to be something else in that upper right hand area, to make it more interesting.  So I cut a circle from a piece of Lutradur that had been dyed orange, and stitched it on.  I then found a very pale variegated thread to stitch round the resulting curves, on a much larger scale than the earlier stitch.

I have to say, this was not at all what I intended, but I think it resolves all the problems I identified with the piece.  What's more, it relates nicely to many of the drawings in my sketchbook over the years, and some of the work I've done in the past.  There's a tiny example here .  I'm pleased, even if it wasn't what I intended.  And it's a bit cluttered, perhaps.  It is, however, definitely mine: I don't think Sean Scully, were he ever to see it, would recognise his influence.  And that's how it should be.  Now for the other two.

Oh, and as a ps...it's called Rhythms. 

The Last...

...of the recent batch of monoprints.  Well, not the absolute last: rather, the last of the monoprints I can hand stitch.  Those that remain, have too much paint on them to make hand stitch comfortable, so will be machine stitched.   

I think this is my favourite of this current batch.  More colour variances, and varied texture and marks.  The stitch is pared back to allow those things to show through.  The blanket stitch is perhaps a bit heavy handed...though it looks better in real life. 

Coming to the end of a cycle of work is always problematic...what to do next?  I've started a small creativity group on Facebook, based around a monthly prompt.  I have a few ideas around that, so at least that's something.  However, they're mostly around paint, and I need to have some bits and pieces to do by hand on days when I'm sofa bound...so that needs to be thought about.  I've got a few bits and pieces tacked up and ready to go, so perhaps one of them.  They need a bit more thought, though.

Meanwhile, given I'm set up for paint... I wanted to experiment with Lutradur XL and paint, so, while I was monoprinting, I used some of the excess paint to put a wash on a piece that had been part of a larger book, but cut away when I changed my mind about it.  I then added some machine stitch.

 It's effectively the same colour, both  sides, but with different thread, plain on one side, variegated on the other.  Yup, more landscape... one of my defaults.  I think what this one wants, is to explore the idea of weather, and the changes in light, and therefore colour, that there are when there is a change in the weather.   Which doesn't exactly fit the bill for hand work...but hey... you do the work you have in front of you.

Unintentional

...well, it was.  I was working on a completely different piece, when I was left with a long bit of red/orange thread, too long to discard.  So I went to work on a second piece, and found myself finishing it almost before I knew what I was doing. 

Yes, it's another monoprint, much looser than the work I've been showing you.  It didn't originally have the red circle, but it needed something, and that seemed to be what it needed.  The stitch is a lot looser, too, mostly straight stitch but with some cross stitch at top and bottom.  Once again, I've stitched in order to support the brush strokes of the paint, for the most part.  And I've only used one colour of thread....couldn't be simpler.

It strikes me that all these pieces are connected by this idea of simplicity, of paring everything down, not adding more than is absolutely necessary.  I initially intended to add stitch to that red circle, but decided that it simply didn't need it; it's a strong enough mark to stand as it is, without cluttering it up with stitch. 

The actual piece is a bit wider than I'm showing you here.  It was my intention to crop it, but I haven't yet cut anything.  Which is just as well, because I have the feeling that I need to include a bit more on that right side.  The bottom mark continues along into white space, with no stitch.  It gives the piece an airiness, a sense of space, that this image doesn't give.  So I've learned something today.  Less is only more when it works.

And now I need to go back to the first piece I was working on, but that will have to wait til tomorrow.

An (Almost) Matching Pair...

...of landscapes, made from a monoprint and a ghost print.  I talked about the ghost here.  This is the main print...

I'm popping the ghost print down here, for easy comparison. 

There's lots more texture in the main monoprint, much easier to see what's happening in the main body of the 'land',  It's clear that there are a lot of curving lines, so the stitch reflects that.  I like using blanket stitch, it encloses and defines areas of space in a much better way than a running or back stitch is able to.  I did use the same thread in these areas on both quilts, but the sky in this main piece reads as much darker than the ghost print, unsurprisingly, so I used a darker thread in the sky.  The treatment, though, is the same, seed stitches scattered around the blue areas.  I did consider adding linear stitch, but decided that it would distract from what was going on below it, and I didn't want to do that.

So, there you are...two nearly identical landscapes.  It's interesting how different the stitch makes them appear, though it's clear that they are related.  I've got a couple more monoprints in this palette to work on, and it will be interesting to see how they turn out in comparison with these.

Borderlines

This piece was finished a couple of weeks ago, but somehow I never got round to posting about it here.  It's one of the dwindling number of unworked pieces I have left that survived The Cull. 

The temptation was to smother it in stitch, but somehow, looking at it closely, that didn't seem like such a good idea.  What I wanted to do, was to use stitch to support the marks I'd made by dye painting.  For me, the piece is 'about' space: there's a small area nestling in the centre, cradled by the darker marks, that in my head, is a farm, surrounded by tall pine trees on two sides, with fields in front.  It's funny, the stories we tell ourselves about our work... but I digress.  I started with the area to the left, a sweeping section of orange moving to fuchsia.  I wanted to give it some scale, and to give some texture to the area without smothering it.  The uneven crosses are scaled, getting bigger in the foreground, to suggest distance.

I tackled the dark area next.  It dominates the piece, and I didn't particularly want to emphasise that any more, so stuck with dark colours.  Blanket stitch delineates the firm line as it curves down and round, and additional stitches reach out into the curve, taking their cue from the blanket stitch itself.  Most of that area, I've left clear to speak for itself.  That central area has lots of tiny crosses, a reflection of the larger crosses to the left, while at the top, there are seed stitches, and some large, dark stitches to delineate the dark marks at the top right, as if they were somehow silhouetted against the sky (more of that imaginary story).  

And that's where I left it.  I don't intend to add any more stitch.  I think there's a tendency to assume that when you hand stitch, you should leave no inch unstitched.  That's not my style.  I don't think that stitch should dominate a piece: rather, I think it should play its part, neither going unnoticed nor taking over.  If you can only see the stitch, then I've failed.  I want to create an integrated piece, where the different elements combine seamlessly (argh...no pun intended) to produce something with a story, with meaning.  I think this piece does that, though you may not agree.  

More Simplicity...

is sometimes the only option.  Take a look at this...

The eye reads it as a landscape...and the stitch supports it, small and narrow at the back, wider and larger at the front, to give a dimensional effect, and some random stitching in the 'sky'.  I had intended to add some applique, to suggest a standing stone, but actually...it's fine as it is.  I did try the applique, and that was fine, too, but different...and I prefer this version, so here it is.

And you may remember, I cut a piece of cloth in half, here, and created a landscape with it.  I struggled with the second half of the cloth...and in the end, added an orange circle, to give it a focal point....and struggled some more.  In the end, I took some blue thread, and stitched it randomly...

It's a landscape too, I think: a very different type of landscape, much more abstract, no apparent horizon line...but nonetheless...  The dark marks are closer to a dark turquoise than you see them here, but this was the best I could manage, so... I'm still not sure about it, but the stitch has improved it, somewhat.  In this, the actions I've taken are simple, the piece itself, less so.  But I rather like it, nevertheless.  Who says simple has to be the same every time?

Somewhere...

...over the rainbow... well, okay, it's pink.  But somehow this naive-ish piece makes me think of rainbows.  You may not agree, of course, and that's fine.  I rather like it though. 

It started life as an exercise in mark making on a piece of pale green sheeting.

When I picked it up to add stitch, I decided to cut it in half, because, whilst each half is cohesive enough, there's not a great deal of cohesion across the whole thing.  I think it was a decent decision.  And, the human mind being what it is, it tried to make sense of it.  The first half doesn't actually make much in the way of sense: there's not a motif or shape to rest your eye on (which was really what I was going for in the first place).  The one above, though, does read as an abstract landscape, and I'm happy enough with that.

Now to tackle the other half.

One Thing...

...inevitably leads to another...or in this case...six others.  It seemed like a good idea at the time....it always does.  I was working on this monoprint from the small collection I was talking about yesterday.  As you can see, lots of stitch..  The piece is on a scrap of muslin I got from a friend.  I don't usually work on muslin, but it was to hand, and there was paint and... you get my drift. 

The sections that are reading as very pale blue at the top of the piece, were originally white: because there was such a lot of white in there, and because I don't much like white, I popped a small piece of lutradur behind it, which was blues and purples...it worked very nicely, and didn't add any bulk to the piece at all.  Sadly, it didn't do much for the bottom left hand corner, so I decided to add some more paint.  So I mixed some up, and, rather than paint it on, printed it on, instead.  And then I trimmed it a bit, because I felt it was just too dominant...and got this.

Which is altogether better.  And put it aside to dry.  And then I thought, better wash up the piece of glass I was using to monoprint from (no gelli plates here, I'm too mean, and am quite happy with the traditional method).  And realised that there was still a blob of paint on the glass...and I really don't like washing perfectly good paint down the sink.  You so know what's coming next, right?  Yes, more monoprints.

The one I've just shown you was very landscape-y, so I thought I'd continue in that vein.

Each print has a 'ghost' print, made from the remains of the paint on the glass: I often prefer the ghost prints for stitch, because the paint suggests, rather than dominates, leaving ample room for stitch.  But of course, the excess paint had been blue, and I'd scooshed out some Naples Yellow and there was too much...it's becoming a theme, this, isn't it?  So...

The blob at the bottom of the ghost is a bit unfortunate, but I'll trim that off before I start...otherwise, these are okay.  I suspect that there's a larger painting waiting to get out of this... it's part of the joy of monoprinting, that things for development are often suggested by this spontaneous way of working. By this time, I was on a roll, but was starting to feel tired, so I finished off with these, adding the paint straight onto the glass, so that there wasn't any left over.   I've been reading about Sean Scully's work, after watching a documentary on him on the Beeb...' this pair is a definite nod in his direction.And then, reader, I washed the glass.  And that gives me enough to play with until next Monday, when I may well paint again....mwahaha...

Spontaneity...

...often leads to interesting work.  I've been playing about with painting fabric, after the success of the Dance piece, and when I'd run out of steam, there was still some paint left.  When in doubt...monoprint... so I grabbed some scraps of fabric.  I got several interesting pieces, one of which I worked up yesterday.

This is how it started.  It made me think of rocks, mountainsides, hillsides... so its name is 'Red Rock'.  So, I popped a bit of batting on the back, and hand stitched...and this is what it has ended up as.

I started at the bottom, stitching with variegated thread to give a reference to landscape (I hope), and then back stitched the red curve in the centre. I didn't want to add vast amounts of stitch, so took my queue from the dots of red that cover that area, and made some small, irregular stitches, just enough to suggest the colour.   Then, blanket stitch in the dominant brown curve, shortening the stitches as I went along to suggest distance.  And finally, I added washes of pale blue and pink watercolour paint, to tone down the white areas that were dominating the piece. 

And that's it.  I did contemplate more stitch in those paler sections, which almost make a V shape in the left hand side of the piece.  Finally, though, I decided that the texture of the paint itself did enough to suggest movement, and let it be, though I did add a few pencil marks to the edges of the diagonal section, just to emphasise it slightly.  And that's it.  I'm quite pleased, all in all, not bad for using up excess paint.

Slowly, Slowly...

...because that's all I'm fit for at present.  Rumours of relative normality were a bit of an exaggeration, and I've had several weeks of no activity at all.  Mostly, that's been an energy thing, but the depression thing didn't want to be left out, so between them, I stopped working altogether.  In an attempt to shake the depression at least, I fished out a piece of green nuno felt which, frankly, looked somewhat unprepossessing, to the point of making me wonder why I hadn't just tossed it out.  A bit of stitch, using silk threads I got from Dale Rollerson at The Thread Studio in Australia, and had struggled to find a use for for some reason, made me change my mind somewhat.

I'd intended it to be a scarf, hence the shape and size, though in truth, it's not really long enough for that.  Those threads were perfect for what I wanted to do, picking up the areas of darker green, and adding a bit more colour.  Because this was a scarf, in intention at least, the shapes the dark green make are completely random, though one or two made me thing of Celtic motifs.  Here's a closer look at a couple of them...

Not enough stitch, though...and things had ground to a halt over the weekend, as I couldn't find any threads that would be appropriate for the body of the scarf.  Today, however, I found some cotton thread that, whilst not ideal, would have served.  And then, I realised that there was a couple more silk threads which, whilst not identical in type, had been dyed with the same dyes... so I thought... that's better...

So...that's the plan for the rest of the week.  Much as I'd like to blog more regularly, I'm afraid it's just not possible at present, until my energy levels improve.  I will let you see the finished piece, though.

Next...

came the pink fascinator...here's what it looked like pinned to the block.

Not terribly prepossessing...and it doesn't look all that much better trimmed up and ready to wire...

Once that was done, and the binding was on...

...I thought...now what.  Note the fading on the sinamay; nothing wrong with the fabric, just faded colour, so whatever I chose to do, had to cover that section, at least.  I really didn't know what to do...and then, raking about in a box, found the daffodils I made a while ago, just to see if I could.  Three of them made from lutradur, the trumpets heavily stitched.  They went nicely with the pink tone of the hat, so I stitched them together...

...and then added them to the base...

...and now we're talking... this works really well.  But just as I was putting things away, I came across a pale green piece of florist wrapping, very similar to lutradur, and thought it might be interesting to use it round the edge of the hat...

 
Looks better in real life... so I stuck it on my head, no mirror (too tired to get up and fiddle around...), and here's a rough idea of what it looks like...

The green edging has only been tacked on, but I think it gives you an idea of what it will look like once it's properly sewn on.  I'm quite pleased with this; really must play with more lutradur flowers...and with lutradur in hat making in general... hmm..

Decoration...

...is the real art of the fascinator.  Here's what it looks like now.

That's a silk organza rose, made from my hand dyed cloth, cut on the bias (yes, the b word again...seems to crop up frequently in millinery, doesn't it?).  Hand stitched, and then hand stitched onto the base.  Five feathers, a similar colour to the base (champagne, it's called), glued and stitched on.  I've tried adding some hand stitched feathers to that base, but it seems rather cluttered when I do, so I suspect it'll stay as it is.  Now that it has some decoration on it, it doesn't seem quite so large; the proof of that will be when it's actually worn, of course. 

There are three options for wearing it.  I could put a comb on it, so that it sits on the head that way.  I think it's too large for that, and besides, I don't like combs in general, except as a basis for tiny little headpieces.  I could also put it on a headband, which I would cover with bias, like this...

There is a remarkable amount of hand stitch involved in millinery, and this is no different.  But it doesn't really suit the way I envisage it sitting on the head, so it'll need to be the third option, a  very narrow elastic band that hides under the hair, and holds the piece in place.  Now all I have to do is work out where the one or two bands I have left are hiding, and attach them.  It'll not be today, though.... but I promise to show you how it ends up.