Current works-in-progress

Working title of the one above is 'Drained' - mainly because that is how I felt/feel. It has text embroidered onto it, which you can't see in the pic, but which I may add in here sometime. I think the function of this piece was just to do a brain-drain, just to get everything out that was stuck in there, so I could flow again. I'm not sure it will ever be for public consumption. The embroidered letters are so skew and mal-sized, I've considered ditching it several times, but kept working. This is one of those that has to be done, not because it has much merit, but so the next one can come out! I had felt dry and empty for so long that I decided to go back to the colours (blues/purples) and pattern (log cabin derivative) of "Windows" and see if perhaps I could recapture something of the previous success? I was 'cashing in' on what I had previously thought out and merely reproducing it, hoping it would make something happen.

I have higher hopes for this one, currently titled "Hi-Tech Biology: Stem Cell Hopes". (Titles change over the course of working on something, depending on which direction they take!) This piece started as a fractal (a graphic representation of a mathematical function) but as I ad-libbed onto it, it became more and more biological. Below are two more pics taken closer (I've only been operating the digital camera for about a week!) although you still can't see great close-ups of the beading detail. I am currently hand-quilting this piece at tea-and lunch-times at my job and in the evenings before the TV.

I'm planning to enter this one for Innovative Threads 2007 where I hope it will stand a chance of being accepted. It is entirely handmade, unusual for me, but all the curvy pieces would just have been so difficult to manoevre on the machine. I have a lot of hope for the therapeutic stem cell technology that is being worked on so hard, especially for what it may be able to do for people with conditions and disabilities such as Diabetes, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and many others. Of course it would be even more wonderful if it were to become usable in my daughter's lifetime (she has diabetes, type 1).