pondering

Sometimes art requires a lot of pondering. For me anyway. I find myself thinking about a particular piece and how to best execute it: in the shower, while cooking dinner, weeding, cleaning or even while reading (yes it just pops into my head mid sentence!). What I am saying is - it doesn't always just come to me while I am working on it. And I have learned to let myself do that pondering too. I learned to let all my materials just sit out on my worktable, while I work on something else or do something else, and stew. Do you let it stew?
So that's what I have been doing over these last few weeks in between all the beginning of the school year activities. Pondering my next home portrait. And here's where it brought me for now:

the plan

First I pondered all the photographs and monopolized the computer. I finally did come up with the layout that I want, which will become my stitching guide. I did the tracing paper overlay so I could test all my ephemera choices.

not the plan

Among all the garden photographs I immediately fell in love with this picture of the container garden. I worked really hard on trying to fit it into my layout, but it just didn't want to play nicely with others. Perhaps it is just very strong on its own. Then I had a brilliant idea of having all my ephemera in the pattern that these planters make. I printed the photograph and made lines on the tracing paper to simplify it. It didn't work. I realized that if all my patterned choices where laid out in another pattern, it would become too distracting. Never mind...

first layout

Then I started playing around with my multitude of ephemera. Oh the choices! What would work best????

another layout

I wanted to try and make the hand dyed fabric into the garden...

we have a winner!

I decided that pattern play and mostly paper is going to be my best choice. All these patterns just play so well with each other that I just had to let them do it.

ready?

So now I need to pin my guide without letting anything move and then get stitching. And if when I tear off my guide and see it didn't work at all? Well luckily I still have a lot more material to work with!