Oh, Wow!

It was just a plain brown envelope.  And then I opened it, and look what was inside...

Threads from Stef Francis...thank you, Stef, they're wonderful.  I really did look at them and say, 'oh wow'.  I bought them really to go with one of the pieces I showed you earlier, Borderlines, the piece with the textured paper.  That wasn't to hand, but these were.  Firstly, the piece I showed you yesterday:

The brown is really strong against that print, and I'll use it on the marks.  The orange, not so much...but it is a gorgeous thread.  And then there's this, which I wrote about here:

Now, I wasn't intending to put much in the way of stitch on here, but looking at the way that thread sits on this piece, I'm now not so sure... perhaps a stitched border round the very edges of the piece...perhaps more... I don't know, but I'll be having a good think about it.  I rather wish I had more of that coloured evolon; it would be interesting to make a pieced top from repetitions of this 'block'.  Life isn't like that, of course, but I may well follow through on this idea once the workroom has settled down a bit. 

And talking of the workroom...the shelves are now where they're meant to be, though I'm still working out what to keep, where.  I promised you a sneaky peek, and here we are...

Thread and fabric mostly along the long wall; paint, drawing materials, feathers and other embellishments tucked away in the corner.  The painting will go up in front of my sewing machine; it's a calming image called 'Goddess'.  My rulers will go up on the walls, too, and doubtless a couple of framed textiles, eventually.  What I don't have, is a design wall.  I had one in Norfolk, and rarely used it.  I did contemplate a blind on the front of one of the bookcases, but the boxes stick out too far.  Besides which, most of the work I'm likely to be doing in the future will be small scale, not much bigger than a napkin.  So I'll be doing what I advise my students to do:  stick it on the floor, and stand up...if you're careful, stand on a chair...just don't fall off.  Or, more likely, I'll take a photograph, and contemplate that.  Works every time: it's the distance that's important.

Things are coming together, finally, both with the work and the room.  If only I could find a new body...

Minor Adjustments...

...can make a big difference.  I love working with transparency, but sometimes it just feels a wee bit wishy washy...   I'm still working through those scraps, and came across this lino cut on bandage muslin, which had been rust dyed before I printed it.  I've frayed the edges a little, to add a bit of texture and visual interest, though it's not obvious in the image.

It fits a small piece of evolon like a dream...even if I have positioned it the wrong way round, sigh.  But you get the drift.  There's a piece of yarn running across the top and bottom of the piece, which I'll couch on with some hand dyed thread I found yesterday, while tidying up (handy, huh?).  But... I want to beef up the rust colour just a bit... so...I'm going to double up the muslin... clearly didn't print on all of it, fortunately. 

Not sure that it's showing up well in the image, but again, you probably get my drift.  It's a good way of working with lutradur and other patterned fabrics; the combinations can be really interesting.  Meanwhile, I need to think about stitching this...but that will have to wait until the arrival of the brown hand dyed perle I've ordered on line.  I'm just not set up for dyeing at present, unsurprisingly, though work on the studio is progressing; might show you that tomorrow.  The shelves are full, all except the one set that needs to be repositioned.  I've moved the cutting table to its proper place...just need to remove the empty boxes, shift and fill the shelves and move the work table.  Then I can get the machines out and we'll be pretty much good to go...hurrah!

Going To Pieces.

So...what do you do when you're too physically tired to do anything, much, but your mind is turning cartwheels?  Well... there's drawing, of course, and hand stitch...but I really like a jigsaw.  With two cats, however, that's really not advisable; they bat the pieces all over the floor, attempt to eat them... you get the picture (or rather, you don't, because at least one piece gets lost as a result).  Reader, I discovered online jigsaws, and I am hooked.  I've had a wonderful time on Jigsaw Planet reconstructing other peoples' paintings and photographs.  And then I thought.... maybe I could do this with my photographs... so I did.... and that was great fun, too.

So what's that got to do with the price of cheese?  Well... I've talked about it elsewhere on this blog, quite recently (not that I'm obsessed).  It gets more interesting when it's your own image, though.  I realised a number of things.... firstly, that I don't really think about my photography as being an end in itself.  I tend to take pictures either for reference, or to stitch into (see an example of my stitched work here, one of my personal favourites).  So it's useful to look at these images  as potential jigsaws, look at their construction, decide if they're interesting enough to use in this way. 

Secondly, I already knew that I'm mostly interested in detail, so most of my photos are macro.  I try to find details that might otherwise be missed.  The image at the top of the post is a Norfolk flint wall (I think, if I remember rightly, it was a church in Wymondham),  It makes a truly evil jigsaw; all those little stones... you have to observe carefully to fit the pieces together.  The jigsaw format helps you to look at each piece separately, to consider how it fits into the whole, to see even more of those tiny details that make up what I hope is a good image, at least for reference purposes...it might want cropping if I were to print it out for stitch.  Flaubert said that 'God is in the detail' (or the devil, depending on which of these similar sayings you ascribe to).  Looking at an image this way seems to take me past detail, and into nuance, which usually would be picked up by my unconscious mind, but I don't think it does me any harm to contemplate them in a more overt fashion.  Most of the nuances here are about texture and light; the direction of light, the way it hits a particular section of the flint, the way that flint responds.

Thirdly, I hadn't noticed until I made a couple of jigsaws that my colour palette in my photographs is very narrow, almost monochromatic.  The same cannot be said for most of my work, although the ME piece I wrote about here is moving in that direction; I now have a small bag of fabric in these subdued tones and colours to make more pieces in what I suspect will be a series.  I hadn't realised, though, that my photographs were leading me in that direction, probably long before I consciously chose to explore it.

Finally, the act of jigsaw assembly is not unlike the creative process.  Artists and writers both talk about the blank page... jigsaws, at least, give you a jumping off point, encourage you to look for the edge pieces and assemble them to create a framework.  I think we all need that in some way; my equivalent of edge pieces, in textile, is usually the creation of a small piece using whatever I have to hand (usually, up until now, from the bits lying on the floor).  In paint, it comes from the process of selecting colours for my palette, which I do intuitively.  I think that creating a starting ritual, and using it consistently,  is comforting, but it's also a springboard into creativity.

And then there's the point where you've got the edges more or less assembled (there's always one or two that I don't find til the end, but I don't let that get in the way of assembling the rest of the image).  And then I'm face to face with my own doubts; this is hard.  How will I ever manage?  Well... partly through intuition... that piece looks as if it should fit there... no... but it does fit two pieces along... and on I plod.  Emphasis on the plod; building jigsaws seem to go in fits and starts, depending on how easy it is to group colours together, to assemble little, but obvious, details so that they can then be fitted into the whole.  And there's something about perseverance, too, just keeping going, pushing through the problems (most of which are in my head) to create the image. 

Yes, it's harder for artists; they don't always have a clear idea of what the end goal is, making deciding what the end product actually is, quite challenging.  Fortunately, we don't have to limit ourselves to Just One Ending or Just One Process; that's what working in series is about.

If you'd like to do the stone jigsaw, here's the link; if that doesn't work, look for artmixter...I only have three images up, this one and a couple of floral ones.  There are a surprising number of quilt images available as jigsaws, but I'm not sure that my work would lend itself to that kind of treatment.  Above all, in jigsaws as in art, have fun.,,that's a significant part of the process.

Overturning Those Decisions.

You might remember this post, where I talked about using a wee bit of linen that I'd found in the scrap.  Well...I sat down to work with it this morning, while waiting for the mannie to arrive to service my mobility scooter (he's still not here, so much for 'late morning'; it's 12.30pm and not a peep out of him...

I decided that the brown bit was altogether too brown... so I added some frothy white plastic netting, and some stitch to hold it down;

And then more stitch to hold it on the Lutradur XL:

And then, it all went to hell in a handcart.  Putting the lutradur in front of it Just Didn't work.  So I tried other bits of lutradur; worse.  Then I took the long vertical stitches out, removed the brown bit, put the coloured lutradur underneath... nope.  And just as I was about to give up, I tried this:

Yes.  I thought.  Right balance, right texture (it's evolon, coloured with Brusho); could do with being a bit bigger, but hey...  So I tried it against some white evolon:

So what I want to find now, is a piece of textured linen to mount this piece on.  I know I don't have such a thing, so I may settle for cotton, but it does need to be a woven fabric, just to add a bit more texture.  Natural coloured, rather than white, might be better, but it'll all depend on what I find.  Come to think of it, I need to trim the blue; those lines aren't straight, or parallel, for that matter...but it has the distinct feeling of a well conceived piece.  Finally. 

PS The scooter mannie says my scooter is immaculate... so I must be doing something right... or maybe it's just that I don't go out much...sigh.

The Road To Hell...

...is supposedly paved with good intentions; in my case, and maybe yours, too, it's also littered with random materials that we hoarded, thinking, 'I could do something with that'...and then never actually getting round to doing anything at all.  Most of that sort of material got given away during The Great Purge; it is truly interesting to see what I kept.  Working my way through the odds and sods I've been talking about over the past week or so, I came across some hand made paper.  I vaguely remember buying it in Norfolk, quite early on in our residence there, which makes it about ten years old, anyway... good grief...   It's highly textured; I have no idea what it is made from, but it feels fairly fragile.  It appealed, yesterday, so I took it as a starting point...

It's teamed, here, with a piece of transfer dyed lutradur 30, secured with large stitches using hand dyed perle.  It feels like a field, to me... I combined it with another piece of paper, this time a scrunched-up piece of brown paper.  I started working with brown paper (or rather, thinking about working with brown paper) when we were in the Highlands, but it took a workshop in Norfolk, roughly twelve or thirteen years later, to get me to Actually Do It. 

Again, these are stitched together using the same perle thread, in random stitches that reflect the construction of the light-coloured paper.  So far, so good.  It feels like a strong motif; but what to do with it?  Well... I have the habit of buying vintage napkins whenever I see them in charity shops; they tend to be very reasonably priced, and are an ideal size for me to work with.  So, I went for a rake about in my box and found several, but only one that was large enough to work with these bits. 

Hmm.  Needs an iron.  But it has potential...needs something else...

No, not Merlin's tail...but the circle, also from crunched up brown paper, seems to be the right way to go.  Now, where's that iron... ?

And here it is, ready for stitch.  I've pinned the napkin to some white felt, to stabilise it, and give the stitch a bit of depth when I eventually work out what to do with it.  I don't often use pins, preferring to work with fusible, but ironing is exhausting, while pinning requires minimal effort.  ME has forced me to adapt my practice to work round my lack of energy.  Things will be easier, I hope, when my studio is properly set up, but I haven't been well enough to do anything with it yet, other than put a couple of boxes on the new shelves.  Sofa sewing is all I can manage at the moment.

I'm going to let this piece sit for a while, to see what it needs in the way of stitch.  I'd like to add some machine stitch to that circle, nice clear dark line.  Well, ok, curves. There again, more of that random stitch by hand, in a darker colour, might well be better.  We'll see.  Meantime...I found a couple of small, identical napkins while looking for something suitable; wonder if there's anything in the paper stash that would work on them...or the rust stash...or both...   hmmm.  Yes, I did purge dramatically, but I still have choices, albeit on a much smaller scale than before...and that's proving to be A Good Thing.

Oops, I Did It Again....

I jumped to a conclusion, too quickly.  Or rather, I was lazy.  I thought there was something not quite right about the spear/tree piece, but I ignored myself.  And then my friend, writer and fellow textile peep Ann Rawson piped up on FB... 'not so sure about the bottom leaf shape, she said.  Damn.  So...
being lazy, again, I didn't want to detach the leaf, because I'd never get that stitching again...but I did want to have some sort of extra space in that shape...so, reader, I cut into the leaf.  And not happy with just that, I cut into the rectangle, too...

On reflection, should have left that rectangle alone....but the leaf is right.  And it's finished now.
Unless I stitch into that rectangle, where I cut it... but I might not.  And no, I'm not doing *another* blog post if I do... so you may never know.  Ann's a crime writer; I'm sure she'll appreciate the suspense.  And thank you, Ann, for the gentle nudge.  I needed it today.

Changing My Mind, or Stitch Changes Everything.

So... remember that red velvet piece?  Yes, this one...

Remember I said that this was it?  Reader, I was wrong.  And why was that?  Well... it was stitch.  Stitch changes everything.  I started to assemble the piece, as you do, with that top left lutradur element.  It said, I want irregular stitches....and that's what it got...

And what's more, I liked it.  Most of the other elements, however, Just Didn't Fit.  Sigh.  So... I came up with this. 

I'm still using some of the elements from the last version, but somewhat adjusted, with that leaf or blade type motif added at the top of the long vertical, one of the shorter verticals removed, and a second, larger blade or leaf on the bottom left.  It now has a completely different feel.  And then I added stitch, which was the point at which I contemplated giving up...

...more random stitch, including a couple of renegade French Knots.  I always struggle with them, and whilst I think they add something, I'm not sure why I bothered, given the fuss and the time it took to do what really ought to be a totally simple stitch.  I'm contemplating some beads in that upper section, but that may continue to be a contemplation...not sure if I know where my beads actually are at present...sigh.

This looks better in real life, I have to say, but I'm still not convinced that it's anything more than a sketch.  Not a bad sketch, you understand; I feel that the tree/spear thing (I'm pretty sure it's a tree, in my head, but there is a definite reference to spears going on in there somewhere) is worth developing further.  I've always had a thing about trees...but that's another conversation entirely. 

So...what do you think?  Was it worth the effort? 

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? 

Settling In.

My mother-in-law asked, a couple of weekends ago, if we had settled in properly.  Not really, I said, my studio is still a mess, and there are no paintings up.  Over the last couple of days, though, we've put shelves in the studio, as you know, and today, Robin put up a good percentage of the paintings, too.  And I got something of a surprise.  Here's a couple of images of my living room, complete with Mollie, and the cushion that looks remarkably like Advo.

Both of these images, the first a painting, the second, a textile.  Both of them sat very comfortably in our living room in Norfolk, with its exposed terracotta brickwork and dark blue suite.  As you can see, the colours and light in this room are completely different; lilac suite, gentle colours....   And yet... I think they sit very comfortably in this space, with these colours.  I think the difference is that the dark colours pulled out the reds, blues and greens in both images, while the lilacs pull out  pinks, lilacs and pale blues.  With the drawing of Advo on the wall, comfortable cushions everywhere, and tranquil colours, suddenly, I feel more at home. 

Which just goes to show, assumptions are not always correct, and taking risks pays off sometimes.

Overdoing Things...

...has a whole different meaning when you have ME.  Usually it condemns you to several days in bed; this time, two days on the sofa, and counting.  Having gone out on Friday night with my son and husband, to see Jethro Tull, I then compounded it all by going out on Sunday for a coffee.  We did a little essential shopping, and then had a chat with our neighbours.  And now it's Tuesday, and I won't be doing anything about this little lot...

The black shelves  were originally bought to use as larder shelves, as we have a large walk in cupboard in our (badly designed) kitchen.  Turns out they're too wide (thanks to the skirting boards; I ask you, who puts skirting boards in a cupboard?), so I have inherited them.  My fabric will sit on the pine shelves; my CD player (yes, it's old fashioned, no, I don't care) on the black ones, somewhere in the middle, surrounded by hat paraphernalia, such as feathers and hat blocks.  The tiny rattan drawers hold lace and other bits and pieces for hat making, too, such as combs and headbands. The smaller pine shelves won't stay in that corner, but will move to the other side of the room, and will likely hold paints and the like, though I hope to build a summer house for painting.  Given that we're in dispute with the builder about the garden, though, I'll be lucky to get that this year, I suspect.  Dammit. 

The real challenge is where to keep the rolls of sinamay and other fabrics.  Some of them will lie on the top of the shelves, as they're not terribly wide, things like printouts from Bertha.  The rest, I'm not so sure.  Probably in a box, where the short pine shelves are at present.  Things are coming together, slowly, but I doubt there'll be any progress this week, as I recover from the excesses (hah) of the weekend.  Rest and more rest.  And a lot of muttering under my breath.

Moving Along.

Well, I don't know about you, but when I start fiddling around with bits of fabric, I'm not happy until I have something that works... and I think this might be it. 

The fundamental structure is pretty much as it was, but with additions on one side.  I did cut that piece of evolon smaller, but it still didn't feel right, so it has been replaced with lutradur 120; much heavier than the rest of the lutradur, but with a similar texture.  And it has been tilted to one side, while the orange lutradur at the top has been trimmed down to remove the white edge.  That gave a bit more room on the surface, making it possible to add a few more pieces of that heavier lutradur.  Is it finished?  I don't know; those additions are perhaps a bit much... I like simple.  It has the feel of a sketch, as it is, and not a finished piece.  Were it larger, it would work, and I might well think of doing a larger piece based on this design.  As it is, though, I don't think it's ideal... it needs more space between the elements.  So, I can either trim them down, or remove them.  Come to think of it, I could replace them with beads, perhaps, significantly smaller, and a different texture...but I don't think I will...the whole point of the addition was to repeat the heavier lutradur...so, smaller, or nothing.  We'll see.

And there's movement in the studio, too.  More shelves, to take the boxes with fabric and other bits and pieces.  I didn't appreciate just how many bits and pieces I still have... most of them to do with hats.  Come to think of it, I haven't found all the hat blocks, yet, which means they must be somewhere in the garage, along with who knows what... I'm arguing with myself currently, contemplating giving up painting altogether, mostly because I don't really have the space for it.  I haven't painted for several years, the whole ME thing meant that I couldn't get down to the Little Green Shed with any frequency.  I've certainly given up oils...too long a drying time, despite loving the effects they produce.  I guess I'll put away the fabric 'stuff', and see where we are after that.  I've given up a lot; painting on a large scale would just be yet another on a pretty long list.  

Odds And Sods.

So...despite saying I wouldn't work on this stuff, yesterday, I did, nonetheless, splitting it up into groups that looked as if they would work together.  All in all, I got roughly half a dozen different things to work on, with quite a lot left over to play with.  This is the first piece, and it has two different options.  The base is a piece of hand dyed red cotton velvet. 

The first option, as you can see, takes a small piece of brown hand dyed linen, slightly frayed round the edges, and a piece of yarn.  It looks to me like a kite, flying in a red sky, but it feels a bit clunky.  The brown is somehow too solid... I could cut a square out in the centre, which would lighten it somewhat, or put something semi transparent on top of it, probably lutradur, but even with stitch, I still think it's not quite right.

So, moving swiftly on...here's option two.

Two pieces of lutradur, over a narrow offcut of evolon.  Looking at it, my immediate feeling is that the evolon is too heavy, and needs to be narrowed down, or possibly replaced with a piece of darker yarn; come to think of it, it might be better to replace it with lutradur.  The lower piece of lutradur, though, is interesting, because it is actually two pieces, stitched together, as you can see here:

I wanted to see what happened when two semi transparent pieces were combined; this was the outcome.  My original thought was to use them for a brooch, but I think they work quite nicely here.  I think this second option is the basis of my first little piece of work from the odds and sods I showed you, though clearly the centre piece needs to be rethought.  It's not quite as white as it looks here, more of a creamy beige, but it is just a shade too heavy... no time to work on it now, though.  As well as changing that central column, I'll want to add quite a bit of hand stitch around the figure, but not on it; I'll fuse it down using bondaweb, I would think.  

More tomorrow.

It Was Just Lying Around...

...honest, Guv...  just bits and pieces found when going through bags and boxes of stuff... 

I've got very little of this kind of fabric, the odds and sods you gather when you make a lot of work, as I used to do.  A couple of pieces of hand dyed cotton velvet.  A bit of hand dyed linen, very frayed on one side.  Fragments of rust dyed silk.  A lacy doily, found in a charity shop, I think.  And then a collection of paper, with some woven plastic, which has been a net of some kind, vegetables, perhaps, I don't know, it was given to me a long time ago with no explanation.  So, given I don't have much of it, I've been collecting it together to put in one place.  Yesterday, though, while putting yet more stuff into boxes, I came across some Lutradur XL, already cut into small bits, mostly either postcard or Artist Trading Card (ATC) sizes, though there are some squares.  And I thought... I don't want to keep working on UFOs...I want to make something original.  Putting the two together seemed like a good idea, given that whatever I do is likely to be hand work.  Whilst you can actually see the floor in the studio, it's still not in a state that would let me set up the sewing machines, much as I'd like to (sigh). 

Sadly, I'm not able to work today; just having the idea is going to have to be enough.  I didn't sleep well last night, had a shower today in preparation for going out this evening, so I need to do as little as possible, to preserve the energy I have left (you'd be surprised how much energy it takes to have a shower). But that doesn't stop me thinking about how to approach this.  I enjoy working in series: it's a great way of exploring a small cache of materials like this, or a particular theme, and is also good if you feel stuck, and want to work your way out of so-called 'creative block'.  I've talked about series elsewhere on this blog, notably when I talk about the 'Meditation in Purple and Gold' series (one of the posts is here, if you're interested in that).  

In the meantime, though, I've just added a bit of lilac silk organza and some silk carrier rods to the mix...watch this space... did I say, I think it's going to be fun...

Carrying On Til The End.

Two posts in one day on the same subject; must be a record.  The thinking about what to do with it now, didn't take long.  I didn't even have to do anything.  All I did was to look at it, upside down.  

From this :

To this

So what?  I hear you ask.  Well, it's simple, really.  My eye kept getting stuck at the top of the first piece, and not travelling down to look at the rest of it.  Turn the piece upside down, and suddenly, that's not an issue any more.  Which is something of a relief, because hand stitching this was not going to be pleasant.  So, I'm going to declare it done, and leave it at that.  

I used to tell everyone in my classes to put things on the floor and walk round them; guess I should have done that before writing the blog post...sigh...  The next challenge is How To Hang This.  In an ideal world, I'd have it mounted and framed; in practice, I may just put some velcro on the back and hang it direct on the wall.  And I have an ideal spot in this house for it....so what's not to like...?

Carrying Further On...

...with the felted piece I showed you here.  Reader, I succumbed.  I did not wait to find the box of felting needles I know is somewhere around in the rest of the stuff...rather, I bought another box of felting needles.  Only three, admittedly.  I'm hopeful that this will be the only duplicate I have to buy...sigh. 

So, today, I did some further work on the piece. 

To me, it's a huge improvement on what it was.  I rather like it, though I don't think it's finished.  It reflects the kind of work that you might see in my sketchbooks, these constant curves.  I've been drawing like this since my teens, but up until now it has very rarely ever put in an appearance in my textile work.  I think that needs to change.  

The curves are partly designed to reflect the curves in the felted wool, but also reflect the machine stitching already in the piece.  Here are a couple of close ups, as the general views don't really show you the stitch, in light and dark metallic threads.  

Looking at these, the stitching also reflects my drawings.  I've said for years that stitch to me is about drawing, about mark making, rather than about creating pattern.  And yet, there's pattern here.  Something to think about; but first, I need to think about how I'm going to develop this piece further.  

Sketchy Patterns

So...I said yesterday that this was calling my name... 

By lunchtime, it was a dull roar...so I thought I'd do some sketching.  What's interesting me are the curves in the central part of the image, so I thought I'd play about with those today.  What they suggested to me was a repeating pattern...it could be for fabric, or even for a patchwork block, were I to be so inclined (let's face it, I've not been so inclined for about thirty years, but hey, you never know...).  These days, repeating patterns are doubtless created using computers, but when I learned, it was still a pencil and paper job, so until I teach myself how to do this on the computer, I'll be playing with my sketchbook.  Besides, how often do you get to look at bad drawing... 

The really interesting thing about a repeating pattern is not so much the centre of the pattern, but rather the edges; how does the pattern integrate when you repeat it?  A repeating pattern succeeds or fails on that basis....so... here's the first draft.

You should be able to see quite clearly how the shapes on the initial photograph have translated into the sketch.  From the centre, where I've changed the anther into a heart shape, looking upwards, you can see the main shapes from the photograph, and those are mirrored on the way down.  I've then repeated the curving shape from top and bottom, on the sides, and filled in the space in the sides by repeating that same curving shape, and added some leaf shapes.  And...it doesn't work.  Too long and thin, making the whole thing feel unbalanced.  So, next came this... 

This time, I've actually measured the page size, and used a ruler (yes, shock horror...but you know I can't draw a straight line, even with a ruler, sigh...), so that I can have some sort of idea as to the balance.  I've taken the areas I'm sure about, but this time, I've echoed the entire structure of the top and bottom, to the sides.  This confirms my earlier suspicion, that I really want this pattern to be a square, not a rectangle, but I've got enough imagination to allow myself to continue as it is, for now.  The four dots in the centre, however, probably want to turn into smaller, floating leaves, but that's a minor detail.  I've also varied the size of the dots on the areas that, come to think of it, look like vases, just to give a bit more visual interest.  I'm a lot happier with that, and now start wondering what to do with the remaining corner areas...those circles I've lightly drawn in aren't doing anything for it, so I need to come up with something else.  

This is better.  Not hugely, admittedly, but it has potential.  The leaf shapes have turned into semi abstract flower shapes, reminiscent of magnolias, or tulips at a pinch.  They need to have more detail, certainly, but this is much closer to what I had in mind.  Now, I need to rake out a few larger pieces of paper, and I also need to reflect on the centre, now, which is diminished by the rest of it.  That may take a while, given the state of my workroom...but at least the idea has some flesh to it now.  

Tulip Temptation

I've always had a thing about tulips.  I wrote here about taking photographs of tulips in a graveyard, the trigger for all the macro photography I've done (and there has been quite a lot of it).  Robin's mother came to visit last weekend, clutching these beauties, a glorious mixture of colours.

There is something incredibly elegant about tulips, I've always thought.  Daffodils are frilly, snowdrops delicate, but tulips, to me at least, mark the cusp of spring and summer by the depth of their colour.  Admittedly, sitting here waiting for snow, thinking of summer seems overly optimistic, but a girl can dream...

And then, there's the interior of tulips, a fascinating contrast of colours and shapes, and the area on which I've tended to concentrate when taking photographs.

I like all of these images, but the one that really appeals is the last one, the yellow.  It's got it all; texture, intriguing shapes, variations in colour and form.  If I was looking for inspiration (and when am I not?), this would be The One.  And probably will be the basis for at least some drawings.  The others are ideal for printing and stitching, and each has its own distinct mood, but the yellow gives me more...so watch this space...