Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Psychedelic Peacock

Okay, after about three full days of work, pretty much non-stop (when I wasn’t cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, driving kids around, walking the dog, or sleeping), here’s where I stand on Psychedelic Peacock. All the planning, drawing, tracing, cutting and fusing are done! It is ready to thread sketch! Well, after I get the stabilizer ready.

In the shot above, you are only seeing the middle section (about 36" in depth, since that's the width of my work table). The shot below shows a bit more of the bottom. I know that the spines look really strong right now because they are so light in value, and the background is black. But they will get partially covered up with a lot of brightly colored thread, so I think they will recede significantly in the next step.

I am liking it a lot, and I usually end up liking my pieces much more when I’ve done a lot of free-motion stitching on them, so I’m excited to move on to the next step. But it may be challenging, because I don’t have a long-arm or mid-arm machine and this is a big piece (48" square), and it is pretty stiff, due to the fact that there are large areas of fusible adhesive in it, and there will be interfacing behind the whole thing.  Wish me luck!

I actually made it about 52" square to start. The heavy thread sketching I do tends to shrink pieces up a bit, and I can always crop it down a few inches at the end, if need be.