First composition

Well, it's been a nutty week, but I did finally manage to get back to working on things this evening.  Since my last post, I decided to keep things pretty simple and explore the black-white world in fabrics.  I pulled some fabrics and picked on a few that I would try playing with ...

1.  Cream with gold scrolly things
2.  Cream with black vines and brown leaves
3.  Birch tree stem motif (unfaded and faded)
4.  Black/grey with different gold scrolly things
5.  Oriental with mixed white, grey, black gold

Somewhere in the week of percolating, I gravitated to a simple 2 bar motif.  I think that was partly because of the design of the bed quilt I mentioned last week, and partly because it keeps the composition and construction simple.  

When I started up tonight, I went back to the fabrics to look at them.  I really like the bottom oriental fabric (5).  I am still trying to figure out how to includee this one in a composition, but it's really active and I'm not yet sure how to deal with that.  I also like the cream with gold scollies (1), but I don't have much of it, so had to leave it behind for now (maybe I can use it in some small motif?).  That left the black (4) and the cream (2) for basic square backgrounds, and use the  birch trees (3) for the motif fabric.  I liked how these fabrics work together, so I was ready to move on to trying a composition.

I didn't really want the angles to be sqaure on the 2-bar motif.  I tried to noodle around with angled piecing based on a technique I learned a few years back.  I couldn't quite remember what I needed to do to achieve the effect I wanted, so I eventually just cut pieces the size and shape I was interested in and laid them on squares of cream and black.  That was a lot easier, and a reminder to stay simple.  After playing around a bit, here's what I came up with ...

I still have to fuse the fabrics together, but I like what happened for now.  At this point, I am going to leave this one and try to work on another form of balance.  I have a super crazy week coming up, so I doubt I'll get there for another week.

But in the couple of evenings I'll be home, I hope that I can take a bit of time to stare at what I've done and at the fabrics that are awaiting the next composition.  Taking a little time to play with ideas in the evenings seemed to help me this past week when I finally had some time to focus on the assignment.

Here's hoping everyone has a moment to think about their own compositions!