Art Every Day, Tuesday, Sept 10, 2013

Good Afternoon,

Here is today's new piece and it's a bit over the top! I began with wanting to do something with some silk carrier rods, so I grabbed a handful of violet ones and then chose a red violet/brown hand dye to play as backdrop along with a pale violet bamboo felt for a base.

I pulled the rods into thin layers and ripped each one in half to yield a bunch of pieces that were about 2 1/2" long by an inch or so wide.  I laid them out, slightly overlapping in a gentle "S" curve along the left hand side of the piece and stitched them down the center to stabilize them. Then I quilted the holy hell out of the background with a really messy overlapping circular design.  I finished off the quilting by sewing around the felt a couple of times with a wavy line.

Then, the over the top fun part started. I found this weird knitted silver wire tube stuff that I had and stuffed three silk cocoons down into it, inadvertently ripping it as I did so. I stitched that down between each cocoon and on the ends.  Then I ran some lengths of deep red wire under the wire tube stuff and twisted the ends of the wires into swirls and stitched those down with may machine too and viola!, this fabulous little thing emerged. Makes me think of a big, fuzzy caterpillar with it's weird sophistication and lovely color.

Well, that's all for today,

Till tomorrow,

Heather