Early Morning Club, Week Fifteen

Whew! Sick cats (poor Max has irritable bowel syndrome and food allergies), power outages (that, among other things, kept me from watching Liverpool beat Chelsea...grrr), company visits (thanks for visiting Mom and Nana!), all-day workshops (mucho fun but also mucho work), and birthday celebrations (Happy Birthday to me!) have made my life a bit crazy. So here are my pieces from the past week...belatedly.

Monday, October 20th

I wanted a folk art look for this piece, so I cut simple shapes from solid fabrics and applied them to a piece of raw muslin. I added some stems through embroidery. Simple and sweet.

Tuesday, October 21st
I don't know what I expected from this piece when I started. I wanted to use embroidery to echo to motifs in the center pot. It's a sketchy start. I realized as I was working on it that I really need to learn more embroidery stitches so that I have a greater selection to choose from. I do very much like how the gold stitches at the top are consistently inconsistent--it's like my own stitch handwriting.

Wednesday, October 22nd
I have a cording foot for my sewing machine that I have never used and thought that it would be fun to couch a self-striping yarn. So I cut a piece of background and fused it to a piece of Timtex for stability. I threaded my machine with invisible thread and loaded Noro Kureyon yarn through the hole in the cording foot. I then stitch back and forth, roughly covering the background with thread. You can see the suble transition of color from green to purple. I then trimmed the piece up and couched more Kureyon around the outside edges.

As I finished the couching and looked at the piece, I had a vision of a cattail, so I added one. I like how to sway of the cattail matches the lines of the couched thread.

Thursday, October 23rd
Another couched yarn background, this time using Ella Rae's Palermo. When finished, I thought it was a good background for a lotus-like flower. I like how the background appears to glow just behind the lotus.

Friday, October 24th

In addition to my cording foot, I also have a free-motion couching foot that I have never used. This piece is just an experiment to see how it works.

Saturday, October 25th

Not a lot of time today because of company and the workshop, so I quickly sketched this sunflower in plaid out. It is inspired by a sunflower flag hanging in someone's garden that I pass each day on the drive to work. It's cozy and homespun and would make a great applique for a larger snuggle quilt.

Sunday, October 26th
Sometimes I just need to finish something and call it a piece. Today was one of those days. Leftover strip piece. Quick cut leaf. Applique 'em down and call it done.

General Thoughts

The pieces for this week feel scattered to me--without a theme or thread to connect them. And the pieces I have started for Week Sixteen have headed in another direction, albeit one that I have explored before. I am beginning to find this project frustrating in that I come up with ideas that I want to explore in a thoughtful and more considered way, but the conveyor belt of morning after morning keeps moving and I often move with it--away from the pieces I want to explore further.

I want to take some time over the next few weeks and really think about this project and my goals. I feel like I've come up with enough ideas to last me quite a while. I don't want my work to only be about quick morning sketches. I want to be able to work on larger pieces that require more thought and design.