Embroidered Collage

I'm amazed at the results when the project was so intimidating! 

I've completed my pages in Cece's calendar for July.  When I first received this one I was just agog at the gorgeous work in it.  Everyone's work in this round robin has been great so far, but this one seemed to have more than it's share of "good art days".  And it was a theme I was unsure about to boot.  Cece gracefully included some pictures and bits, which did help, though, and the original calendar was Klimt, so it had a richness all it's own.

I just glared at it until after vacation, then I seriously took to going through the bits and all my paper resources, looking at the pictures in the July section as well.  The scenery made me think of travelling and I knew I had maps and other journey related pieces.  I could use a gypsy picture to jsut do a generic beautiful spread...  As I was scanning some of my quote and definition pages I realized that a general theme of time , which I still had some stuff for, and predicting the future would fit in nicely.  The themes helped immensely as I moved forward.

I worked the pages in layers, first putting down the base color or paper and a couple elements I knew I'd want to only be partially showing through.  I went back over the next day, working primarily with my fluid acrylics and adding some more collage elements.  That was when I put the wagon on the first spread.  I also used partial bits of stamps and three different pigment inks on the third spread.  It just didn't look like it had enough to bring it together and I didn't want to do a full color wash.  As it turned out I didn't wait long enough before covering the design with acrylic medium and a lot of the lines smeared, but it looked good anyway.

The next day I added color to the first and third spreads with marker and colored pencil.  There's a HUGE difference in how sophisticated that first page looked, which is what I'd been hoping for, but had been a little worried about at first, seeing how simplistic the wagon looked when it was just paper.

The second spread took a little more work because I wanted to use stitching to embellish it.  The red rectangle on the right was done as a separate piece, to make it easier to attach and embellish the earring, and stitched on later.  The ribbon came from my stash and was a matter of sorting through what I had in my hands with the unfinished page in front of me, just sort of letting my mind drift through possibilities.  To finish it off I stitched the pages together, having deliberately left blank spreads in between for that purpose. 

I'm very happy with my results.  I feel that I really pulled together some of the things I've been thinking and learning about with this set of pages.