September 24: Starting a New Piece

Back on April 19th I wrote about a fiber art piece I had underway.  Well, I did finish it and here is how it turned out.  It was inspired by seeing lilac blossoms falling off in the wind and snow during a late spring snowstorm earlier this year and it used chunks of fabrics I had painted and then cut into smaller shapes. 

I pieced the background, quilted it, and then fused, or glued, the confetti blossoms on top. 

Here's two details.

 

I liked working with my painted fabrics and have quite a few, so I decided to use some in another piece.  Today I spent a few hours figuring out what fabrics to combine with the painted ones.  This step is called "making a fabric pull." 

I laid out all the chunks I'd cut and saw that I had already started to border them with white and off white fabrics.  But I'd used a lot of white in the first piece and wanted to do something different.  Could I combine them with either hand-dyed or commercial printed fabrics?  Maybe something that reflected our beautiful fall colors? 

  

I looked through my collection of fabrics and gave them a trial run with the hand painted chunks.  I did this for quite a while, probably "auditioning" about ten different fabrics.   Here's one. 

I did find a purple batik that got me all excited and set it aside to see if anything else worked with it.  

After I 'd looked through my collection of commercial fabrics I moved on to the ones in the drawer I had marked "special" and remembered that the last time I had done any dying I had made an array of greens, trying to gradate the colors from light to dark.  

I tried the darker ones on the design wall with some strips of the purple, and it made me smile!

I had my fabric pull! The colors are interesting and cheerful, and I'm looking forward to working with them as I figure out my next step.