One of my activities for the C&G course has been causing me pain. I was to take a shape and use it to create a design with bonded appliqué. At the same time I was to think about the colours I was using. In a previous activity I took photos of shapes around the house. I was really supposed to use one of these shapes but I wasn’t coming up with any inspiration.
I still hadn’t any idea what I was going to do for this exercise when I saw a photo in a magazine of an elephant in India wearing ceremonial garments. Part of the design on the robe was using the paisley motif. So I thought I would use that for my shape. Then I had the idea to use one of the pieces from the previous modules as my background fabric. I thought of the piece with the curved piecing. When I pulled it out I saw the 4 petalled motif on one of the fabrics and realised that this should be my shape. So I traced the shape off the fabric and made templates of the larger and smaller shape. As for the colours I picked out the gold of the printed design to use for the shapes. I cut them from some hand dyed fabric scraps that I had. The red one was originally going to be green, but that didn’t work so it became red!
As the motifs are quite small I used a narrow zig-zag stitch for the outline. I have used other decorative stitches on my machine on projects but they would have been too wide here. I originally outlined the yellow shape with the red centre with red stitching, but didn’t like that effect either so I ripped it out and replaced it with yellow.
It was quite a tortuous path to get to this result but I like the finished result and like the fact that I was able to do something more with the curved piecing sample.
