A week without art is a looong week!

Had the week from hell, workwise. Not only heaps of work, deputising for my boss, and dealing with the Ministry of Education gestapo, but I woke up two mornings at 4.30 and 3.30, thinking about work and fretting, and of course shattered at the end of the day.

Anyway, that is in the past, and this weekend I have been able to spend a few hours on my flowers and decay project. It is interesting how a photo from the pixmaniaque free textures in a smallish size, say 6 by 8, seems to have lots of detail and colour, but when I blow it up to life size it loses both. I did do a lifesize collage so that I could more easily work out the placement of the encrustations, but I am using the smaller one for colour and texture. The fabric I painted on was the Cindy Walter fabric backed with paper that I bought at LB. It is very stable and easy to paint on. However, it is a pig to hand stitch as the weave is so close. I wouldn't use it for a hand stitch project in future. It is fine for machine work. It is challenging me to use surface stitches when I want to use a thicker thread.

I decided not to over quilt (originally I was going to quilt every quarter inch), as there is so much surface work to go on. It is amazing how many French knots you need to even look like you have put 5! (About 3 times as many as you think you need).

I have used a thin pellon and thin open-weave cotton backing. Now I am thinking the pellon won't have enough rigidity to keep the piece from sagging when applied to canvas or framed. So I might have to bond it to some felt. Will worry about that later.

I am enjoying keeping to the original but changing the texture in some places to look more like flowers. I prefelted a few pieces of roving. I will embellish them in place, but then hand stitch.

Because this is a reproduce-the-texture piece, it doesn't have a strong composition. I would like to build on this in a second or third piece to develop the compositional side more. Maybe one entirely machine felted and the other more abstract shapes.

But first...finish this one!