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.