ORANGES and LEMONS

I have been drawn of late to the louder side of the colour spectrum and have found my hands reaching for some really bright colour combinations. This new fixation has spilled into my garden also, as for the first time I have grown bedding plants in colours to match my newly acquired colour palette. I have finished planting my side and front garden for the autumn and it is overflowing with shockingly bright oranges and yellows with some contrasting black. 

My previous piece was stitched using a hoop which was hard work not to mention quite frustrating; stitch, stop, move the hoop and wrestle with it, repeat all over again! Suffice to say the offending hoop is now in retirement at the back of a cupboard! This new sample was rather more enjoyable to work on and even though it is very densely stitched I am pleased to say I have no marks or puckers. I haven’t quite resolved the centre but I will give it some more thought.

Time I think for a larger project which will hopefully include a dyeing session as my fabric stash is somewhat depleted. I have been working with a new cotton which is quite densely woven but very light and thankfully doesn’t appear to have much of a fondness for fraying. I will dye a colour wheel of twelve related colours mixed from three primaries. I have used this technique many times and have always been delighted with the resulting colours; a somewhat clashing yet completely harmonious colour palette to play with.

STILL LEARNING!

I used water colour pens to paint directly onto the fabric in a very rough fashion. Free machine stitching was added to form the flower head and I thought I was heading in the right direction. 

Much later the table top was covered in a variety of fabrics but I knew immediately that a background fabric was not amongst them! I was keen to be stitching so a dyeing session was not on my agenda. Plan B was to quickly paint some pieces of cotton with my favourite Koh-I-Norr colours. I like to lightly spray the fabric with water which allows the colours to bleed and I also work with the fabric laid on soft plastic which also adds lines and movement whilst the paint dries. 

Before long I was happily stitching into the fabric and appliquéing various petal shapes to stitch into. The samples were quite pleasing although the dense stitching caused some puckering which was very unpleasing!!

For the finished flower head I used a hoop for the embroidery but it did leave a mark (hardly surprising considering the thickness of the layers and stitch). I also need to stock up on some new metallic threads as I feel the centre cone would have benefited from a little extra sparkle. Sometimes a project can become a learning curve and this certainly was one of them. I am happy to share my not so perfect work today but I will have to think of some alternatives for working in this fashion again.

I keep some old pieces of mountboard to play with before deciding on a final mount size and for this piece I ended up with three choices. When I look at older mounted pieces I often seem to be drawn to the off centre image rather than a central position but sometimes I find a different aspect to be quite refreshing.