05 May 2010

Use of time

It's strange to have whole long days at home - and the only urgent deadline still weeks away. It feels like there's something missing!

Having the whole day stretching ahead isn't ideal for me. Yes it's lovely to have all those beckoning possibilities, but all too often it comes to 7pm (time to listen to The Archers) and nothing has been "achieved". Not that achievement is the end-all and be-all, but you do like to feel the day hasn't been wasted.

Because of this known danger, the 9am-1pm studio time is working well. Knowing I've spent 4 hours, more or less, focused on Making Work counts as "achievement". Sometimes things move forward; sometimes I tear them up. At the end of the session I clear things away - holding the mess at bay. It's getting easier to throw things out, and to know what needs throwing out.

Enough thinking - let's have some pictures.

After printing some of the TravelWriting onto fabric, I took it further. Here are some unexpected things happening on the back -unexpected in that they just sort of happened, somehow - thanks to a quick rummage in the scrapbox for inspiration -The front -
and the back, with all the rows of stitching in place. Usually I tie and bury the threads as I go along, so they don't get tangled into the subsequent stitching. The bits of gold organza were fused onto the black fabric. I used various bobbin threads, and need to pay more attention to adjusting the tension -
Finished -
The idea is that the back interacts with the front - both the red markers for starting and stopping (if that's how you want to read it) and the gold "bumps" - perhaps they are the proverbial "leaves on the line" -
Ideas for further development - cut the printed area lengthwise and the back at a slant, to show the inner layer; use two colours of inner layer; little puffs of coloured fabric coming out of the back; hand stitching on the back before machining; some stitch marks on the front before machining; areas on the front like "geographic features" eg a lake.

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