Circles

Managed to start a little stitching last night, but after a long couple of days at work I didn't have the concentration needed to spend a lot of time.  Still it's a start and hopefully with another couple of hours work the centre will be done and I get this this prairie piece done :)

Centres

After a few lovely days away in St Ives (what a brilliant place for artistic inspiration!) I'm back again and starting to play on the machine again.

Last night I spent a bit of time messing around with ideas for the centre of my prairie point piece.  Haven't gotten very far yet but I think I've decided which plan I want to go with - though it will be with a further modification or two.  Hopefully I'll get some time after work tonight to get started.

Been Busy

Have finally managed to make a start on the stitching for the resolved piece.  I've spent about three hours at the machine today. And this is what I have to show for my time.

Lots of lovely stitched stripes in primary and secondary colours waiting to be turned in to prairie points.

I still have some way to go before I have a finished piece though as I haven't quite decided what I'm going to do with the central circle panel yet, I keep chnaging my mind!  Actually it may be a while before anything else gets done, I'm away for a few days at the end of next week and am busy for the next few evenings so unless Old Father Time decides to grant me a few extra hours in the day, things may go quiet here for a while.  I'll be back as soon as I can. 

Almost ready

I'm almost ready to start the stitching for my resolved piece.  For the coloured prairie points I've decided to use the simple stripe pattern of stitching that I used in sample 2 of the chapter.  But before I went in full steam ahead I wanted to play with the idea of using colour fabric for the background.

I stitched up a quick sample using some calico which I'd part coloured with a water colour pencil.  Having done this I now know that I much prefer the look of the stitching against the plain fabric.

I have one more quick sample piece that I want to make before getting stuck in.  If I go ahead with the idea above I will need to have light, medium and dark shades of 6 different threads, so that's 18 altogether.  So before I go with this I'm going to investigate the possibility of using a variegated thread which will cut the number needed back to 6.  It'll just depend which I like the best, I have a feeling I might be sticking with the original plan but I do think it's a thought worth investigating.....

Still thinking

I still haven't started stitching on my prairie points piece. My design has gone through a few different changes as things have popped in to my head while I've been working

At the moment I'm thinking about going with something like this which is in effect a prairie point colour wheel........

I've done a paper mock up.  I need to now try and explore the stitching options and also have a think about what to do with the centre panel.  I like the spiral idea in the first picture but not sure how it would work with a design using so many different colours.

So there is a little way to go and more thinking to be done before work can really start on stitching.  Hopefully I can get cracking over the weekend it would be nice to be well on the way to having a finished piece by the time Sunday evening rolls around.  We'll see though, I have a stinking cold at the moment and can't seem to concentrate on anything for too long before I need to give my poor brain a break.  This makes fo slow going :(

Developing Ideas

Over the last couple of days I've been started to think about possible ideas for my prairie points resolved sample.  First off I started with some images from the Millennium wall in my town.

Most of the images from the wall featuring triangles are of buildings of one type or another.  So I started to think about some kind of colourful street scene.

With prairie points making up the roof line.  I got as far as mocking the idea up in paper, but it really wasn't satisfying me as a design idea.  I don't really think that it's 'creative' enough.  Although I think it would make a pretty piece at it's basic it's still just a line of prairie points.

So now I'm off on another tack.  I'm finding this idea a lot more pleasing but it still needs some tweaking, so we'll see where it goes.

Confirmation of my madness

OK so I know it's been a week since I posted here which is a bit slack, but 'real' life has been really busy and I haven't had too much time to blog.  That doesn't mean that I've been totally idle though, as I've been busy stitching away on my prairie points experimenting with a couple of different types of fabric.  I won't put all the details here yet, you'll get to see all when I manage to finish the chapter and post the pictures of all my work book pages.

I know you all think I'm pretty loopy anyway and I wish I could prove you wrong but I'm sure what I'm about to say will surely only serve as confirmation of my madness.  All the while I've been stitching these points I've had this song rattling round in my head

I just haven't been able to get it out, substitute 'coconuts' for 'prairie points' and you'll see what I mean.  

I had some bits of stitched fabric left over from all of my stitching samples and figured I'd make one last sample as a bit of fun.

 

I stitched a band of fabric with some of those lyrics and then added some of my left over points.  Now I know it's a whole mess of different colours and as a sample doesn't really hold together that well, but I wanted to have a little play with the idea of layering the points and also using points of various sizes in the same piece.

I'm happy that I took the time to play with these ideas and now feel ready to move on and start developing ideas for the first resolved piece of the course.  Wish me luck!

Stitching a Rainbow

The last couple of evenings I've been working on a new prairie sample inspired by this beautiful rainbow that appeared in the sky during a rain shower at the weekend

I don't think it's amazingly clear in this second shot but it arched right over the whole street, amazingly beautiful.

My sample didn't go exactly to plan.  I wanted to attempt to make large prairies but I made the mistake of selecting a wide zig zag stitch which started to pull in the fabric.  The calico strip shrunk to about half the size, and this in turn made the stitched strip very thick and difficult to turn into neat points.  I may have failed in my goals with this one, but I still love the rainbow inspired theme.