Wednesday, December 18, 2013

anatomy of a piece

Happily snowed in today, I spent some time stitching away.  I have challenged myself to work with the dreaded color pink and believe me, it is not easy.

Anyway, with the luxury of time to play tonight I have sewn and sewn, adding to the strips I showed you the other night. Remember these?
But enough!  I am up late throwing strips at the wall. This is what I call Ad Hoc Design. Once I put up that bunch you see above, I realized that the light purple wasn't working for me and needed to be removed. So I spent some time (a lot) with my seam ripper, taking out that strip and went back to throwing them at the wall. (At home, "the wall" is a bulletin board with batting on it, leaning against a pile of STuFF.)

Of course, I always take pictures as I go along and I strongly recommend you do the same when you work.  Here is version #1 - thrown at the wall ad hoc.  I like it but of course, I had to see what other possibilities there were.  That takes me into the Slow Design phase.


Here is version #2, which I decided was not working at all.
So it was back to the drawing board, so to speak.  There were myriad "what ifs," during which I moved things around, sewed, added, deleted, and otherwise potchked * for quite a while.
* Yiddish for to fuss, or mess around.


I will spare you all the other versions (mostly because they weren't worth photographing) till I got to #3.

It took me several hours to see that #1 and #3 have possibilities (see what I mean about slow design?  It's  s-l-o-w but oh, so worth it) which have to be followed up - but not tonight.
The forecast is for sun tomorrow so I'll be in the studio working on some other things.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I can't see the photos. Is it just me or blogger?

Rayna said...

Blogger. ARGH.

Sue Marrazzo Fine Art said...

Great Work...I can't wait to see more!

Cate Rose said...

Potchked = one of my fave words. Have a lovely holiday dear friend! xoxo

Eva said...

I found that pink can be a fresh surprise if used sparingly. In a surrounding of dark and subdued colors, it flashes up like a neon light. I use it sparingly, but like an unusual spice, like cinnamon in a gulyas or similar. I think it melts in your other colors harmoniously, but requires a general approvement, if you know what I mean.

Marsha Cochrane said...

Nice to see your works in progress Rayna. I've always had an aversion to pink so it's interesting to see how you are dealing with it. Thank you for the new word, potchked, I am going to use
that one! Happy therapy sewing.

Unknown said...

What's wrong with pink? Think of it as "light red". I love pink and think your piece is looking great.

Amy Art Quilter & Fyber Cafe said...

Thanks for the Yiddish lesson :) I never would've thought a warm golden yellow could mix with pink, why don't you like pink, it is working very well?

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