I've had the first band here (band #4 overall) done for a while but couldn't get the scan transfered here. (I've learned all new usb drives have software added and our older computer at home does not like this software. (DIRE warnings on what would happen if we tried to install it.) So, I'm back to borrowing my hubby's drive and being extremely careful with it. My beloved little pink drive was officially declared toast today by our IT staff. I'm very sad.)I added more to #5 after I changed the plan. I used one of Laura Wasilowski's overdyed perle cottons and some silver braid from Kreinik and went wild. It was a lot of fun.
And here's the start of #6. I'm feeling a bit of time pressure so rather than finding textile paints, setting things up, painting and letting the Lugana dry, I used some fabric markers I had handy to block in the general areas of grass, trunk, leaves and sky. It's not as delicate as the painting. Then I pulled and rewove the threads and my plan worked quite well.
I should have put it on a frame but I was working with a small piece of fabric and managed okay. A frame would have been a bit easier, though. Now I've started hemming with a nun's stitch along the folded edge. I folded it because the Lugana's quite loose and I didn't trust just a plain edge stitch to hold it.
Since scanning it, I've gotten about halfway around the edge with the nun stitch. Once that's done, I have a more stable edge to work with for mounting it to a small stretcher frame if I choose to do so.
I think I'll make one big tree in front with a couple behind it. Since taking this class, I've been really looking closely at trees! I thought of a way where I could add more dimension to the front tree by bring a making a branch to the back. It has a ways to go.
We finally are having spring here. We spent Sunday at the Dunes area and saw more wildflowers than ever before (we've gone every spring for the wildflowers for about thirty years now). We saw a couple dozen Jack-in-the-Pulpits! I've never ever seen more than one or two. And thousands of spring beauties. Plus many colors of violets, phlox, toothwort, trilliums (red), hepatica, and lots of plants we don't know. Fields of Mayapples, too, just about to flower.
And Mrs. Bailey's Narcissus. The place where we walk is the Bailly Homestead. The wildflowers are all along the walk between the parking lot and the homestead. And near the very old house are Mrs. Bailly's flowers. This year the grass was full of spring beauties, too. They used to be a bit closer to the house and had bigger blooms: narcissus and hyacinth. Ages ago a docent told us that Mrs. Bailly had planted them in the 1840s. I doubt it's true, but they're still around here and there and we make a point of looking for them each year--they were abundant this year. It was glorious.
