I rarely carefully draw out a design in advance – as I’ve said before, I go from thumbnail sketches to making any samples I need to.

On monday I couldn’t resist tackling an idea to start using some of the seductive leather scraps about which I posted recently. Importantly though, I also needed some time to think about a couple of emerging aspects of this work:

• The two wide horizontal stripes were the first pieces sewn down,
• after which I attached the arches, arcs, partial circles – however you see them.
• My feeling that those first two horizontal stripes really were too thick was confirmed once the solid ‘semi’ circles were in place.
• So I did a couple of runs of widest/longest machine zig-zag basting, (lower left corner) and started cutting and removing a mid section to make two narrower strips that will be more harmonious with the rest.
• The two circular rings pinned up are a possibility I’m considering – if I use them in a patterning segment I think they’ll be smaller and finer.

So this is both improv and slow stitch – two hot button terms in the textile art at present, each bearing auras of mindfulness and virtue signalling. It’s way too early to be certain how this will all look when it’s fnished, but that’s normal for the way I work. At an expected 1.8m x 0.9m it’s a fairly large piece for me, so I know there’s a lot more stitching to work through, but I have several more audio books waiting for my enjoyment, because once design problems are sorted, I listen as I stitch through to completion. Still, there’s a pandemic on, and I have plenty of time.

I normally get to the binding or facing stage at least before seriously starting out on another work, even if I have an idea ready to go. The only excuse I have for currently having three works under way at the same time is that there’s a pandemic on, and here at home I need a change of activity+focus every now and then. That bag of new leather scraps has been calling me, though, telling me it is time to quit the sample making and just start!

I know that the leather is going to be great for another motif I have in mind – the coffin. The pandemic stories are piling up horribly.

Against a red background representing danger, the circular shapes of black leather are held in place with stemmed french knots in a luminescent green. Those stitches really pop out, almost pulsate, though the drama isn’t apparent in this pic.

I’m happy with the effect, and can’t wait to start on the next. Or perhaps I should go back to the little landscapes for a while. On that piece there are still a few more little Aussie motifs to embroider onto some of them, and something needs to be done about the sea areas between them all.

Despite what I wrote in a recent post, that idea has been sidelined for the moment. I realised I was trying to put two ideas together that weren’t going well, they were blocking my way forward and I was stuck. I unpicked what I’d done so far, reviewed my thumbnail drawings, cleared away fabrics, got out others, tidied my work table and got ready to make a fresh start again the next morning.

Intending to use lines of arcs as in several previous works, I auditioned some sheer fabrics, stitching them with metallic thread onto the black background. They were hard to photograph:

I selected the right end one, which looks best with the duller gold I stitched it with. I pre-applique with machine basting, and although in this image it was a straight line, now with curvy shapes I’m using the longest stitch set on the widest zig-zag, which is easily pulled out once the edge stitching’s all done. Pulling the top thread from the stitching is a breeze using Gutermann’s Skala – one of those multi filament threads many call bobbin thread. I always use it for machine pieced patchwork and have done for decades. The seam is as strong as anything else, the stitching is so fine the seam lies ultra flat, and as I say, and it’s quick and easy to undo any seam that needs to be redone.

This work will be1.8mw x 0.9mh, so there’s a lot of sewing to be done while I think about how I’ll quilt it, and whether to use batting or just a third layer of fabric between front and back.

Though I’ve become pretty speedy with the hand applique, it occurred to me perhaps this wasn’t the smartest technique to use in a big piece, and yet I felt compelled to. I found myself recalling an exhibition of the layered textile art of Nena Bardaro I visited here in 2017. She’d used fairly sheer fabrics in her quite large appliqued works, and I began wondering if she’d stitched the raw edges down or whether they’d been finely turned under… When I read that post, I felt really silly to have fogotten the most fascinating technical detail of those works – her ‘stitches’ were lots and lots of tiny melt marks made with non-specified heat tool that fused those nylon fabrics together. I feel a bit better – that must have been almost as time consuming, obsessive perhaps, as what I’m doing right now.