Donkey work and doodle cloths

Slogging away at my latest piece "Midnight Snowfall". Yeah, we're into snow again--and I don't care! It's mine and --so far--I love it. I have large-ish piece of fabric I found in my stash, that had been painted a rich, darker blue (Ultramarine I think, with a few very subtle overtones of some sort of scarlet). I've sketched some whirling curves of wind on it, and am densely FMQ'g these with a Sulky Blendable in shades of blue with a bit of yellow ochre. Those small areas around the edge, and in the middle, where there are no curves of wind, are machine stippled with a much darker Blendable. This will make a subtle patterned background on which I want to put snowflakes. Today's problem is that where the curves come against each other and the lines are moving in the same direction, the outline of the curves disappears. This may not be important in the whole image, but is bothering me, so must be fixed. I tried overstitching one with a medium value periwinkle coloured thread, but no good.

So the next step is the "dreaded" doodle cloth. In my little pea brain, I know that these are wonderful and essential for most fibre arts-- but-- they slow me down. Of, course when I measure the time it takes to make and use a doodle cloth against the time it takes to completely rip out hours of stitching, or the loss when a whole project is ruined because a technique wasn't tested out, then they don't slow me down at all. When I was stitching, a doodle cloth was just a scrap of fabric, similar to the one used in the main piece, on which to test colours and sttiches, before adding them to the project. In my type of fabric art, I put together a fabric sandwich using the same weight of fabrics and batting used in the main project. I also have to anticipate how large I need to make it, to allow me enough room to test all of the techniques and stitching I hope to use. Some times I'm able to just use the edges of a project--the ones that will be cut off when I square it up. But in this case, I know that I'm going to be trying quite a few techniques for making the snowflakes, so I'm going to need a fairly large (12 by 12 or bigger) doodle cloth.

When the project is finished, the cloth goes into my sketch book along with any preliminary sketches I might have done. While this gives me a permanent record of how projects were put together , it can also prove, to a certain extent, that I made it.