Explorations

I've discovered over and over again that I love sewing, stitching, quilting, fabric, and threads of all kinds so very much that I can't stick to one thing. I am destined to zigzag my way through the accumulation of beads, bangles, yarns, fibers, silks, cottons, knits, and wools and eventually come out of the heap better for the journey.

I'm "friends" on Facebook with a lot of fiber artists, seamstresses, and quilters who pretty much stick to either only making jackets, or certain kinds of garments or brooches, little purses... well, you get the idea. I look at their websites, their Etsy stores, and their Facebook pages and wonder how they do it. How do they keep making just one kind of garment or quilt or whatever?????? Not me. I am an explorer that travels from one continent to another without ever leaving home. You can't go anywhere that I've been in our house that doesn't trail tie-dyed threads or snippets of fabrics. I go from making purses to pillows to quilts to wall hangings to fabric jewelry to the latest -- voila! Fabric portrait!

 This is a gift I made for a dear friend who's birthday is today. He's published several books, and the writing to the left of his face is from the chapter that I was reading while working on this.

 Dan tie-dyed the embroidery floss that I used to seed-stitch his hair, and embellish the rest of his face. Dan also tie-dyed some of the fabrics, including the background piece and the binding on the edges.

The entire piece is done by hand except for machine sewing the binding on the front of it. I used a small colored photograph in a projector that blew up the image on the wall. Usually I work from black and white photos due to better determination of the values of the shading in the pictures, but this time I threw caution to the wind and sailed forward with the color depiction. I made it to my destination safely anyway.

(Also, I just finished reading a book that Ron loaned me about an exploration of Antarctica back in 1915 that has me on a roll with these exploration metaphors. Sorry... Great read though!)

So, what will I do next? Oh, something I'm just now finishing...

I've bound the edges of it, but still want to do more embellishments on it, so not ready to call it a done deal yet.

I'll keep you posted as the adventure continues...