A robin, a flamingo and a surprise painting

 

Annie

 

I accidentally made this little scene the other day of a robin perched on some dogwood and rudbekia seedheads.  I'd started out with something else in mind entirely, but I am easily distracted!

What happened is that I've been mulling over my various photos, samples, experiments and unfinished pieces to decide what things to do next, from a long and growing list!

I had decided to revisit the work I had started doing after visiting Arish Mell and I had the lime and turquoise fabric in my hand.  Then I randomly remembered that I'd seen some bright red dogwood at an open garden in the week and thought the colours would work well together, and off I went on a tangent!  

 

Here is an early stage of the stitching to show how it started with the dogwood.

 

 

These are the rudbekia seed heads I used to stitch from:

 

 

I like to add a fun detail on this sort of picture so it's not too grown up and as the bees are all asleep at the moment I went for a little robin :)  I was going to put some bright pink cyclamen on there but they didn't really go.  Sometimes it's a pain to be so unfocused but sometimes it's a good thing - I enjoyed doing some machine stitching and I also re-discovered how much I like working with matt threads as well as shiny ones.  A lot of mine are shiny but I think I might be adding a few things to my Christmas list this year!

 

I like the edge of the felt on this one.  Quite often I like a square edge but this time I cut it not long after I'd begun working it and ended up with a sort of torn paper look.

 

 

While I've been sorting out I've dug out all sorts of bits and bobs, along the way this one made me laugh! : 

 

 

Looking at it I'm not sure where I was heading (!) with that one but I kind of like it!  I found this little sketch that I did at the time

 

 

I can't remember what it was all about, maybe his head was going to appear round the other side?  I do like the style of the hand stitching on this and enjoy doing this type of work.  I'll see what else I can dig out.  I still haven't found a good way to organise all my odds and ends to make them more useful but I feel a bit torn - one side of me wants everything all organised and easy to flip through and the other side of me wants it all in piles so I can rummage and let accidental clashes of ideas happen! 

 

I did find a few useful things that might feed into my coastal pieces, here is a selection:

 

 

and I started to think about what I might do composition wise.  I quite like the idea of the abstract squares to give a feeling of the coast, and not so much the sketch that looks more like the photo.  

 

 

I did make two little pieces to try it out - one with a mosaic method and one with a collage method and I quite like them:

 

 

 

 

I'm wondering whether a grid of squares might work well, rather than one bigger picture.  Will work on it.

 

I have also been spinning some more experimental yarns.  Here is one of them:

 

 

I have no plan for these, I just enjoy the spinning really.  Although they will probably end up in some felt! I do quite like the effect of felting with wild overspun yarn and needlefelting scrim on top. Like this sample that I made a while ago:

 

 

 

On my long list of things to do is to make a giant panel in this style but that will need a little planning.  I think that's a job for a nice cosy winter's evening to sort through the millions of inspiration photos I've taken recently to pick a few to work from.

 

Before I go, I just want to share this last pic - I made a "Stay Wet" palette for my acrylic paints (baking paper layered on top of wet kitchen paper in a tupperware box), and when I went back to it after a week it had all mixed itself up and created a lovely scene!  Annoyingly much better than anything I could have painted!