Yesterday in the studio

Some of my studio time yesterday was taken up with a trip to the nearest large art shop - in search of fabric markers and permanent pens, and any other temptations that happened along - canvases of the right size for mounting the little quilties, perhaps? But that was not to be.In fact the entry in my SNB is very brief, noting progress in putting borders on the "journey" journal quilts, and fluffing about with the idea of mounting them on thick foamcore.
Having a notebook to gather all the "stuff" in - samples, ideas, notes on progress, even snippets heard on the radio - is really working for me. It's a way of not-losing things ... somewhere to put them so that you can either move on to something else, or develop one thing or another further.

Perhaps you noticed the entry for 19 May - today - in the SNB. Possibly because yesterday was fraught with so many other excitements, today has seen lots of thoughts and plans. The sticky note is the outside-the-studio to-do list - again, putting "stuff" onto paper so as to be able to move on to other things. It's so much effort to keep it all in your head, right?

Looming large among my plans are not one or two, but four "travelling blankets", to be 118cm x 84 cm (the same size as the huge photos Tony had done), to go in the windows of the gallery. The idea is to have the light shining through, so seams will be a big feature.
The morning has yielded this long strip, the third of a series that's under development. (It still needs binding.) Each one so far has its own novel feature. This time, perhaps because of the navigation map from the Marshall Islands seen recently (or perhaps because some snippets of fabric on the back were coming loose), I added lines of stitching to hold them down. Black thread on top, white in the bobbin -
You can hardly see the lines of stitching on either front or back - but once you do, it changes your perception of the piece -

Some of the shapes, too, are somewhat subliminal. Deliberately of course...

For binding I'll simply zigzag over a length of black perle cotton - perhaps leaving the ends of the cotton dangling. That could be a "technical" solution (or sheer laziness), or it could be taken further to add to the point of the piece in a specific way. The sort of post-hoc rationalisation that you figure out after the deed is done.