Too Many Choices & I Finally Made A Couple

   

So I don't create work quickly, now that's an understatement.  On July 24th I blogged about how I thought I'd been thrown to the "wolves", oh I'm sorry, I mean the "silkworms" by my darling daughter/partner and how I had too many choices.  No kidding it took another week just to narrow things down, then days to figure out how to make the "silk hankies" manageable to work with.

Here is a photo from that post on 7/24 of everything I had gathered that I thought might work.  Over the years I have learned that I work intuitively, gather and then work my way through everything until I like what I see.

Here is the piece that came from this beautiful "pile" of stuff.  Please look past the couple of pins, I have a few more beads to stitch on.  The first time I showed it to my darling daughter/partner she actually crinkled up her nose and yes I was offended.  Over time I have learned that this will always make me stop and view a piece with a more critical eye....lord I don't want to admit she was right, but "she" was right.  A simple addition of the rocky shore line with trees created a more pleasing composition.  Drat!

 Then I went after this pile of wonderful colors.  Like I said in the older post these are not the colors I normally work in, but I was so drawn to them I had to give it a try.

 The flowers just seemed to bloom all by themselves.  A few cocoon ends and silk fabric circles with french knots hand embroidered with one of our new hand-dyed perle cottons.....love it.  The close-up below shows them better and the color is truer.  Hopefully once we get back from Pennsylvania National Quilt Extravaganza we will get a video done of the two techniques I used to "tame" the "silk hankies" enough to work with them.

This last pile of stuff was the easiest to come together.  Has that ever happened to you?  Didn't take much thinking or planning, it just happened.  The fabric that is in the background, became the little quilt my embroidered burlap pieces are stitched to.  This fabric is a white-on-white that I over-dyed, the right side was to bold, for my piece, but as I've come to realize over the years each piece of fabric has 2 sides...the back was perfect.

 The first flower bud is a cut open cocoon, with a bit of a carrier rod as the stamen.  Center flower is several pieces of carrier rods layered together and the final flower is a bit of "fluff" off the silk hankie from previous piece....the stuff kept sticking to my fingers, I lost my patience so I pulled it off the hankie and twisted it up for a blossom here.  Patience is not always a virtue I possess.  The pins are no longer part of the piece, but technology and I are not getting along tonight, so no new photo.

If you are attending PNQE, September 13-16, stop by the booth or better yet my demos on silk, that way you can see these up close.