Stitching

 In the midst of our moving madness in March I began to experiment with taking my hand-stitched texture in a different direction.  I pinned together a top layer, batting, and backing, ran a couple of quilting lines across it to hold things in place and began stitching down strips of hand-dyed fabric, scrunching and wrinkling as I went. I was using three or four rows of perle cotton, # 8 or 5 on each piece, although I ultimately decided 8 was better with an occasional 12 thrown in.

I wasn't exactly sure where I was going with this, although I had originally been inspired by a photo of amazingly colorful hardened lava that I discovered in my search for volcano images for that little commission last fall. As the rows of color grew, I began to be motivated to see what the next strip of fabric would produce--and the quiet stitching was a great ballast as my world rocked and morphed around me and my definition of home shifted eastward.

Of course the texture is a big part of this piece so a photo doesn't capture it fully, but here it is:

And here is a detail that gives you some of the feel of it:

When my five-year-old granddaughter asked to see what I was doing, she looked at it and then got up and came over and kept running her hand over it--an appropriate response I thought.

My original vision included letting some of the background show, but I fell in love with the texture.  I had always planned for the stitching to show, hence the perle cotton, but I had also planned to include more stitching in some of the flat valleys, a plan I abandoned as the piece took shape. It ended up being 20 1/2 x 19 3/4".

This is my contribution to Nina's Off the Wall Friday, so you might want to check out the other postings on her site.