It grows!

It's green and it's growing...! I have set a deadline of 6 Nov (and seem to be steadying as far as concentration goes - each pattern piece is different, so I have to figure out how to join each piece anew) as I like to take along my most recent art to my psychologist appointments in the next big town (PE). I go only about once a month, and want this completed by then. (That little trip now costs about R300 in petrol there and back, btw, apart from the actual cost, part of the reason it's only once a month or sometimes every 6 weeks) But I find the art useful for showing what's on my mind at the time.

This was originally inspired by Windows Media Player (believe it or not, since it's ended up being quite organic) - WMP has a swirling pattern as the music plays, called "smoke or water", which competely captivated me. When I started drawing it, it evolved (a lot!) and now looks very unlike how it began, but that's fine. It's also similar to the swirling patterns I often see in my head and in dreams (you could call it artistic inspiration, or you could just say it's the cocktail of medicines firing all sorts of neurons in my brain! Either way, I am going to use it!!)

Detail shots:
I've hand-pieced this with (almost) an English paper piecing method except that I only pin around the pieces of one of each ajoining seam and don't baste. Basting is just... like stuffing a tomato - life's too short! My fingers are pricked to shreds, ouch, ouch and ouch again. Now that's suffering for your art. I'm now at work and hitting keys on the keyboard hurts (and it would be one of those silly admin data-capture days today, of all times). The next one like this WILL be sewn together by machine, if only to have some intact skin left on my fingertips...

What a challenge it has been to keep this piece flat! Ironing will help at the end and fortunately the quilting process, hides mountains and valleys of unflat flaws!

A "principle" or tip I leaned in a workshop with Sally Scott on Afro-American patchwork is to put just tiny bits of an unexpected colour in a piece, which somehow gives it a bit of "zing" and unexpectedness, that adds that "look-again-and-find-something-new-each-time-you-look" quality. I LOVE this when looking at art - that you don't just look and go "okay, I've seen it", but that you're drawn back several times.

And now I'd better get some work done.... {skulks off}

"Some say I'm a visionary, others say I'm, just seeing things..."