09 March 2008

Self-indulgent weekend

I've been settling back in and catching up. And sewing, with Radio 4 on all day.

Which meant there was time to do another project on the "art for quilters" course. This one started with thinking of a pleasurable or unpleasurable sensation and the colour (and shape) associated with it. I thought of putting your hands in nice warm soapy water to do the washing up, and associated a buttery - no, creamy - yellow with it. As it's relaxing for me, the shape I chose was circles. But while pulling fabric I found a strip of zingy orange, which might represent the washing-up bowl, or maybe something else; at least the diagonal line adds a little dynamism. Here's the first layout.It all had to be moved to cut and sew the fabric, so the circles got rearranged. Seeing it as a photo, I decided to change the proportions of the background:Hmm, has this "taught" me anything? Not so much about rationalising my colour choices, or being deliberate about choosing colour; is this an "adjacent" colour scheme - orange, yellow, green? Again, the piece is a bit too fussy and busy (less is more!) -- but I was able to resist adding the small circle that was subsequently found lying on the floor! The circles are straight-stitched around and then satin stitched over that - it would have been easier to use bondaweb for them all. The quilting in the top part is shadow quilting, started by going straight across the piece about 2/3 of the way up, then travelling around anything that got in the way, and adding parallel lines up to the top; the next section was done the same way, 1/3 of the way up. Mainly, I'm not sure the colour conveys the sensation. But this "Dishwater" piece was fun - and it would be fun to do another with horizontal lines of stitching holding the circles on ... sometime ...

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