I have made a good start to this new year by not making any resolutions. I don’t like to voluntarily put myself in a position where I can fail; life throws plenty of those situations at you anyway. So I will continue as I have always done, happy and content in my own little world. My essential needs are catered for; my wants are few and far between and I am healthy and love life.
Over Christmas and New Year I continued to work on my Jacobean quilt when there was space. The shapes on the top panel have been appliquéd and this is how part of it looks.
Jacobean Top panel
There is still a lot of detail to add yet but I am pleased with my endeavours so far. It is draped on a door in our bedroom so that I can mentally appraise it when I wake up and I can make decisions on how it needs to be developed. This thinking time is an essential part of my creative process.
In the mean time, I have started to work on the negative panels. Rather than just sew the foreground fabric to the background fabric as I have done above, I need to challenge and develop my skills. So, what I have decided to do on these panels is to enhance the flowers and leaves with the decorative stitches on my sewing machine. I feel that doing it like this imitates the way the shapes were sewn with wools in original crewel worked hangings. It also allows me to use the stitches that, thus far, have been redundant on my machine! I am experimenting with fabrics, stitches and methods and here are my first attempts.
Stitched inserts
Stitched inserts: detail
As I am playing around with the decorative stitches, it has occurred to me that I can save a lot of time if I can refer to samples of all my stitches. So, before I go any further with my experimentation, I intend to make a little booklet of the stitches. Here are the first couple of pages, well defined and labelled for easy reference.
Decorative stitches 1
Decorative stitches 2
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