Up in The Clouds

Having just dived into the depths of the ocean with my last piece, it seemed only fitting to soar high into the sky with my next creative endeavour!

I'm sure I'm not the only person who has looked up into that wonderful expanse of blue & just wanted to float on up there with the clouds!

Just as I'd found hair shapes from which I could conjure up jelly-fish forms, so too, did I find shapes that lent themselves to being human-like forms...dancers....or in this case a Harpist! As shown in previous blog posts, I developed each form until it worked for me.

I worked up some sample patches of strips of sky blue fabric, and then photocopied them together to see how it would look as a background.  On to this I drew a few of my designs & thought they looked GREAT as black outlines against the blue....but how would they look as WHITE against such a busy background?

Using contemporary reverse applique I created a sample piece to see whether my ideas would work.  I was VERY disappointed with the results!  In my head it looked so much better!  A friend pointed out that perhaps if I had the stronger white's against the lighter colours & the softer whites against the stronger blues...it might work better! Excellent suggestion...I put it in the creative crockpot of my mind & proceeded to develop my background instead!

Instead of patches made up of strips of fabric, I would have the strips go across the the width, visually broadening what would be another narrow piece of work.  Instead of machine stitching over the top of all those strips, I chose to kantha stitch instead. Labour intensive but the results were worth the struggle...look at the texture those stitches create!  Here's a close up...

Onto this pleasing background I started to pin my shapes, working out how many to include &  where to locate them.

Eventually I cut the number down to only three, keeping it simple (a cloud, a harp playing musician & a dancer) thus allowing the viewer plenty of visual access to the background.

I started by applying the 'cloud' shaped contemporary reverse applique 'sandwich' to the bottom section. Sadly it just did NOT work for me.   It is very seldom that I will unpick contemporary reverse applique, but I did on this occasion. It was time for a complete rethink of how I wanted the cloud, musician & dancer to look on this piece!

This is how I re-did the cloud & I am so much happier with it.

With the Dancer & the Harpist above, this made a very harmonious trio. Below is the end result, which I entitled 'Dancing With The Clouds' &  the short poem with which it belongs...

                                                If I could
                                                    I would
                                                Fly  and
                                                Float  and
                                                Twirl  and
                                                           take GIANT leaps
                                                 Of weightlessness
                                                           to DANCE
                                                           in the sky
                                                  With YOU
                                                                   Clouds.


*Please respect my ownership of the images above.