Tonight, fewer words and more pictures

A piece that's nearing completion

I don't know if I have a good picture of an earlier stage of this piece, but it's a bit of printed cloth I brought back from Peters Valley. When I started working on it again the yellow and green areas were printed. I did some hand stitching with black embroidery thread to add a little detail in a few areas, but that wasn't giving me what I wanted. So, I used a free-motion couching foot on my sewing machine to add the back yarn outlines. You can probably see that better in the detailed picture below, or by clicking on this one to enlarge it. The black lines helped a lot, but then I was troubled by the white background, so I scribbled in some color with a few caran d'ache water soluble crayons then blended with diluted ProFab extender and a bit of brown paint. Very fun and a good effect.

In this shot you can see circles of couched yarn that I used to fill in some of the open circles. I started out as a kind of weak green--nothing that I little dye wasn't able to fix. I think I might be dying some more cotton yarn soon. A this point I just need to do the final trimming and binding. Right now I'm letting it rest for a while to see if in needs anything else.

Other pieces in work

Here's somethings else that came from Peters Valley. I like the big red square, and there's something good, but perhaps a bit weak going on with the other colors. The small red squares are a awful. This is the before shot. Since then I've screen blocks of brown over the whole thing and now I think I'm ready to start discharging. I've very hopeful.

This one's a batik from a few weeks ago that I pleated, clamped, and over-dyed with turquise to reduce the contrast. I'm tempted to cut it up, but I really like the overall linear pattern and think that I can make something out of it as the background for whole composition. There needs to be more dye and I'm thinking that some applique might be in this one's future.