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. 

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.