regional seminar photos and TIF

Here are a couple of photos of one of my pieces from last week's regional seminar. They explain why my drawn thread piece on change for the April TIF is, well, changing!

They are of my class "Perfect Forest" with Catherine Jordan. She was a wonderful teacher and had lovely samples and ideas to share. Once we got past the pulling and reweaving of linen threads (the entire morning!) the class was loads of fun.

The first picture is my booklet cover, signed by the instructor. Her image on it is pretty small but her piece is very delicate and simply lovely.

The second tree is mine. Catherine hand painted linen for each of us with "green leaves," "tree trunks" and "grass." You can see the large area of pulled thread we made.

I think you can also get a little sense of the feeling of depth that we were able to give to the project. It will be enhanced when the piece is mounted over a painted background (we learned how to do that, too, in our class).

So now I want to make my last band for this month's TIF a tree. My bands were originally designed that the threads are pulled the length of the open area (few threads to pull and reweave) and I could probably do a forest of tiny trees. But I'd rather do one long one so I've been trying to think of ways to manage it. I think I have a solution.

Normally I would pull out one thread completely, clip the next in half and reweave each half in the space left by the withdrawn thread. The little threads that would be left across the width of my narrow bands would not be long enough to reweave on each side if I cut and pulled like ususal.

But if I cut two adjacent threads on the very edge of the open area, snipping one on one edge and the other on the opposite edge, and pulled out the short stubs from the background where I cut, then I think I should have enough thread left to reweave to the edge. A lot of pulling and reweaving though. I think I'm in for a tedious weekend!