Last weekend, BSP and I decided to go and see Quilts=Art=Quilts before it closed. I'm currently working on several pieces at once, but they were all either too big to take in the car, or I needed to a sewing machine, iron, or pin roller at the ready, none of which are conducive to working in a car!
So I decided to get a couple of hand pieces ready for the car trip.
(apologies for the varying light levels and quality of the photographs. They were taken in the car and in the hotel, at various light levels with my camera phone!)
I already had a couple of 8x10 pieces of cotton muslin that had already been fused to batting and had a coat of gesso applied. I made them a few years back in preparation for painting, before I knew that I could just apply acrylic paint directly to fabric!
As I needed to get these done lickety split (I was up in the studio at 6:30 before leaving, whipping something together quickly to take!) I decided to work with aquarelles - so having a gesso'd background was perfect.
As you can see, I just lightly stroked on some colour with the side of the aquarelle.
And then I brushed them with a large-ish watercolour paintbrush loaded with water. I had one that wasn't clean, and made that dark grey mark, which initially made me gasp; but turned out to be a happy accident. I liked it and added it to both pieces.
The watercolour dried to the touch almost immediately, which was great, because I had to pop them in the folder, into my bag, and off we went!
I had this idea for an embroidered box behind the tree. Ordinarily, I would have stitched the box first and then added the tree, but I had to go, so I applied the tree first and then started stitching.
Here, it's lighter, and you can see what my "go bag" looked like in the car. The folder on the left contained the other painted piece, some reference photos of grasses and flowers, a box containing embroidery floss, and that little blue cosmetic bag contains, snips, my needle case, etc.
Here I've added some little flowers...
And then we're back to where I am now.
Initially, I was going to embroider the leaves, but I found these little bead leaves in my stash and it seemed like fun to use them, so I popped them on.
More to come!
Happy new year. :)
Kit
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