Karen Kamenetzky Fiber Art

Recently, I’ve been on a roll with this piece and didn’t stop to take process photos till now. Sorry.

Here’s how it looks on my design wall today. It’s about 3/4 finished.

Fundamental Change IV-in process-step 5

Deciding what color and texture to make the line defining the outside edge of the cell was a bear! I auditioned many fabrics over several days. I often feel lots of self-doubt during this kind of process. Maybe I’ll never find the right color. Maybe the original design is too flawed. Maybe I just lost whatever guided my choices in the past. I got discouraged.

Then one day on a whim, I held up this piece of yummy iridescent yellow green silk.

pt-5-detail

Bam! This was it! A totally different colorway than I had been trying. Woo hoo. I was charged up again!

Then came days of trying out lots of ways to attach this silk to create the kind of organic feeling, sinuous line I wanted. I ended up using narrow beautifully fraying strips, wrapped in thread and hand couched down with a reddish perl cotton. Thee will more added to those lines later.

I wanted the blue elements to shift from darker to light and seen to float up, jostling for space and emerging from the gap. It wasn’t easy.

I first filled the space too tightly and had to repeatedly tweak the gradation of color. I’m pretty happy with it now though more may be still added.

I’ve begun to add orange to gold french knots in the center of the blue elements. I discovered (after serveral years of ownership!) that my wonderful Janome 6500 has a french knot stitch! My fingertips are VERY happy not to be pushing needles through many layers of fused fabric.

This entry was posted on May 30, 2010 at 8:22 am and is filed under Process. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.