These are pictures of a small piece I did for the February 2008 Fast Friday Fabric Challenge. The challenge was to use soemthing found in Internet Spam as ispiration for a piece. I have a very good spam blocker, but there was a list of words provided from those who don't, and the word I chose was "locomotory". This innediately gave me an image of wheels within wheels, but when I started to draft the pattern they became cog wheels, and then rusty cog wheels. I was able to use a piece of fabric I had rusted for the actual wheels. It has been hanging around for awhile waiting for me to figure out what I wanted to do with it. Then I found that my skills at satin stitch applique were not as good as I might have liked, but that just meant that I didn't have to worry about the piece being perfect, and I could experiment a little. I tried a couple of ways of making the flower stems, and wasn't really thrilled with any of them--more thought needed there. The flowers were either fused to the surface or I fused two pieces together, cut out the flower and then just free-motion stitched them in place. I think I'm in a rut with the shape of my flowers and the FM patterns I'm using, as I think I've seen this flower on other pieces. Ther real experimentation came when I chose a non-rectangular shape and then had to strengthen the shape with heavy duty interfacing, and then use a facing rather than a binding-something I've wanted to try for awhile. Anyway, the piece worked out rather well, and I'm please with it.