Hydrangea thoughts

After working nearly 6 hours a day on the construction (it took roughly 3 hours to do one floweret on average), I have now got to the stage of choosing a background. I asked my online group. One of the good things about asking other people is that if they give you the 'wrong' answer, you by default know what the 'right' answer is. I am going with a pink blotchy look, which is very close to the colour of the top floweret, but gives a kind of glow. I am going to add maybe 3 leaves near the bottom, to weight it, and also stop it looking quite so much like a floating space station!

I struggled for a while with not wanting it to be rectangular, but I think I will have to admit it is the best option. If I was going for a freeform look, I would have had to design that into the original. I am all for logic, so am always asking myself if the look is believable. Not the most playful approach, perhaps.

Zoo visit

Last week I went to Orana Park, our local ranch style zoo, on a photography course. I was the only one of twelve who didn't have a telephoto lens, which was a real disadvantage. I did get a few nice shots of the tiger, and some birds. Then I borrowed a lens from someone with the same camera as me, and took a peacock that was displaying and carrying on. I had the opposite problem there which was I couldn't get far enough back to take the whole tail. Later, when I edited them in PSE, I did a crop of a full on face shot and have printed it on fabric for the FFF challenge which is the animal kingdom.


What I had really wanted to do was make a black and white chenille to represent zebra stripes, but three people have already done zebras, so I went off that idea. I did look at vultures, but it's amazing when you trawl through 500 photos, and only 3 of them have a clearly identified individual. I thought most of the photos were pretty crappy.

I am still fired up with my hydrangea piece. I'm on the last floweret, but I know I have to redo at least two of the earlier ones. I have found that tinting the fabrics in the light range gives me the colours I can't find in my stash. I think I will end up using about 2 metres of steam a seam light, but it is so much easier than turning the edges, and looks much neater than raw edge.

I have so much fabric left from the purples lilacs and blues that I might do a slightly more abstract version.

Hope to get something to publish here soon.