What do you do.....................

if you don't like the piece you made while you were out of your comfort zone?

You try a mount over it and see if looks any better.

 and if you still don't like it? Try a few more mounts. You can always cut it up and use the best bits!

Cranberry Juice, a bit of a mess!

I'm way out of my comfort zone with this. I work in a very figurative way, so for me this is a mess. Doesn't mean that I can't enjoy playing with it though!

I've added some more stitching and done some more needle felting, this time by hand.

 

 I got the plastic hoop a while ago. I use it to stretch fabric sometimes when I paint it. The paint washes off easily rather than soaking in to a wooden one. It's also useful for doing little bits of hand needle felting on fabric because it has these little legs:

 I made felt beads too, but I don't know if I will use them on this.

I saw the cranberry fields on a trip around New England once. I couldn't believe my eyes. The cranberries grow in water so the fields are more like shallow lakes and the time I was there the berries were ripe and floating like a bright blood-red raft on top of the water. Absolutely amazing!

There's cretan, herringbone and stem stitch on here with a few french knots.

Taking it a step further!

Yesterday I went to a workshop. The workshop was being held at Hastings Art Forum, a super little gallery right on the seafront at St. Leonards on Sea. I like it there, because they have a healthy respect for textile artists. In fact the workshop I attended, Textured Landscapes by Catherine Lawes, was being run as part of the annual textile exhibition, this year entitled Ebb and Flow.

There were upwards of a dozen of us. Catherine had provided us with all the materials and equipment we needed. We each had an identical "starter pack" of fabrics and there was a huge pile of threads to choose from. We were using a photograph of cranberry fields as inspiration and although there were many unfinished pieces it was clear that despite working from the same source and using identical fabrics they were all going to be completely different.

I'm not going to show the techniques as I learned them in the workshop because that would be a violation of copyright, but this is what I came home with:

Any one that knows me, knows that for me it's all about the STITCH! While I was doing this, I was already thinking about taking it further by mangling it through the embellisher and stitching on top. Maybe it was the cranberry colours. I was thinking about this piece I did a while ago:

Here's a close-up.

So, today I put my workshop piece through the embellisher.

Here it is, mangled and ready for another layer of stitching.

and here's the back.

I remembered the cranberries from the original source photograph, so I've just made some felt beads.

There should be some progress to post in a couple of days - when I've had some fun with it!

Here's the link to Hastings Art Forum
and this is where you can find Catherine Lawes