In the Saddle Again

The piece mentioned in my last post was a large, hand dyed mandala.  I ended up trimming the edge, and then cutting long pieces of all four sides, until I had the center square down to about 19" on each side.  There were four long narrow pieces that I played with a bit, until I had three of them joined, into a long narrow piece about 15" by 23".  These all sat for awhile, while I thought about it.

This morning, I leaf printed everything except the center square.  For that, I had bought some special thread to use with a programmed stitch to create a large spiral out from the center. I got it all sketched out on paper, and took a good look, said to myself "Crap!", and put the whole thing aside for future consideration.

Here are the edge pieces with their leaf prints.  I used white acrylic paint plus textile medium, for the main piece, and then orange and black Seta-Color on the smaller pieces.

This main piece was planned.  I will FMQ the leaves, and then put a wide machine satin stitch vertically to cover the joins.  I'm comfortable with that plan.  Sort of weird, but I like it at this point.

Now, with these pieces, I was more or less, just fooling around, but now I'm considering joining them together, somehow, to produce a larger, possibly marketable piece.  Considering that, I somewhat regret using the two different colours of paint for the leaves, but there will be nothing lost in trying it out.  Who knows?  I may end up with a bunch of "mug rugs", for which I have no use whatsoever.