I know I haven't blogged in many months. Not that I have not been doing things, but you know how life gets in the way. In any case this is a piece that I made in a mini workshop that my friend and I decided to do together. She worked on her piece and I worked on mine. They're totally different. I will have to get her to send me a photo of her work in progress so I can show you the difference. We kind of modelled the sessions (over 3 days) by working in the morning, having lunch, coming back and working in the afternoon. She has a huge dining room and we each set up a workspace at each end on which we worked. It was great!

I decided to use scraps from my scrap bin only and I managed to do that--except for the border which is the piece hanging down. It was a great learning experience. As it turned out the background fabrics all read as medium and when I started designing the flowers I discovered that the fabric that I thought would work absolutely just vanished into the background. So out came the little red filmy thing that I used to determine values and I had to make sure what I was selecting read as a light. The composition is supposed to represent a dilapidated garden fence with nasturtium flowers and leaves hanging from it. The leaves have also proved to be a challenge. I'm doing to texturize them before applying them to the background by sewing very tiny pin tucks up and down and diagonally to represent the veins in the nasturtium leaf.

I used the technique for the background from a video I'd send of Ellen Lindner's work when she was interviewed by Bonnie McCaffrey. You kind of scrunch up your pieces into the open blades of a scissors and then cut. I leaves a jagged edge which I liked a lot. All of the fabrics, as I said, came from my stash. I may change the placement of two of the flowers (the orange and the yellow) but am not sure yet.

I'm writing this blog from the picasa set up which appeared after I'd uploaded my photo. I have no idea what it will look like. 'Til later, Sally