Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Wheww--it's been awhile

Still working on Lucifer's Tears.  The thread work, that I had planned, turned out to need about twice as much stitching, which meant that the background quilting needed to be twice as intense, to balance.  I'm pleased with what is happening so far, but I've come to realize that the design is not the wonderful thing I thought it would be.  However this is turning out to be a fantastic learning experience.

I've also been doing a little more discharging and now have a very interesting piece.  I had planned to discharge flame shapes to see if I could produce flames, as I'm doing in Lucifer's Tears, but with more discharging and less thread work.  The process worked beautifully, but the shapes produced would take an awful lot of imagination for anyone to see flames in them.  Actually, they make me think of bamboo bushes. (How's that again!)  So I thought of getting some fabric to match the discharged areas and cutting circles, that I could applique onto a piece of the orginal background fabric  and then applique over the discharged areas to tone down the discharging and create more of a focal point.  (Okay, I'm a little stressed and crazy here.)   Then I figured that I could match the colour of the discharged areas by discharging more fabric, and if I discharged in circles, it would eliminate one set of applique.

Well, the background is navy and the discharged areas a very pale yellow, so when the circles were discharged I had moons!!  So instead of another piece in my Hellfire series, I think I may have the start of the  Temple of the Moon piece that has been floating around in the back of my mind for over a year.  Could this be my subconscious at work.  Now I'm excited, and starting to think/work in an entirely new direction. And isn't that what taking a year of sabbatical is all about?

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