"Into the Wildwood" Part 2

We returned, eager and ready to get down to some serious composition..... The daunting bit... all those printed textiles and papers but now we had to cut into them. This stage took up far too much of the morning!
Luckily we had the noticeboards, so started pinning up backgrounds and playing with ideas. Using the camera to record ideas so I could refer back to them later.

I really liked the idea of putting my mushroom red painted paper behind the trees, but felt that there was too much red in this one. I also liked the sheen on the acrylic waxed paper.

I also played with using a printed strip of fabric as the horizontal interest and using torn strips of the printed fabrics as the verticals.
After much head scratching I went for a third option of the red paper horizontal and a lighter grey background.

I decided to include mushrooms even though my horizontal picked out their red colour but went for an abstract, square design.
The red strip was machine stitched to the grey fabric, but I backed this with a medium weight Lutrador to give stability. I added silver/white patches of dense stitching to the red area in the manner of the texture of the birch bark to break up the very red block of colour. The trees were machine stitched, I did them free stitched but afterwards thought I should have had the feed dogs up and taken it very slowly as my stitches were too varied and wobbly!

I added buttons to some of my "mushrooms" and some sparkly stitches in the foreground.
An interesting experiment, but not a very effective image. I had not embarked on the course to create finished pieces but to learn new ways of creating interest in textile pieces. I learned alot abot composition but realised that there was alot of detail that I could have included but didn't.
I had enough prepared materials to try a second experiment, of which, more later.