It’s finally finished! The front at least – I am planning on making a backing but didn’t have time to get that done. I’ll finish it up tomorrow. But it is still January here in Montana, although the February challenge is already been posted (more on that later). You can see most of my processes on previous posts. I hand stitched the celtic knots and machine stitched the central copper motif to the felted background. I did use heat, black acrylic paint and cranberry alcohol ink on the copper.

This is a closeup of the central copper piece. But you can’t see much of the distressing somehow. It disappeared in the shine of the metal. It shows better above. The triple spiral stands for female power through transition and growth and the celtic knots stand for the never ending cycle of life.

This lower portion is meant to show the chaos of what life is really like with hanging threads and distorted knots. As you move up the piece, the chaos is made more orderly by the passionate woman who is determined to continue to strive towards perfection.

First off, I keep forgetting to say this – To all of you who have left comments here that I haven’t been able to personally respond to due to “noreplyblogger”, thanks so much! I really appreciate that people are taking a look at what I’m doing and I appreciate all the positive comments.

Now for the Woo Hoo! A little while ago Lynda, had made a comment on the Calendar Girls blog that she had some extra postcards of sunflowers and if someone wanted one, to let her know. I really enjoy her work and was expecting one or two postcards but I got six! And they are all wonderful. On the back of each, she explains her techniques and she does such wonderful experiments. Aren’t they all gorgeous? Thanks Lynda, I love them all.

And it really should have been Woo Hoo times two. Because I finally got all my celtic knots completed. Here are a couple of photos of the imperfect (not that the last set was perfect) knots. I left lots of threads hanging as I thought I would like that effect on the finished piece. I also heated my copper circle and did a few other techniques to tone down the bright, shiny copper penny look. I’ve got all the components now and just have to put the whole thing together. I’ve decided to not show any more developments until the piece is completed. Hopefully it will be done by the end of the month. Mainly hand stitching to go but I wanted to leave a bit of surprise for anyone that has been following the whole process. So coming soon…

This is what we woke up to this morning. It’s at least 8 inches of snow and maybe closer to a foot in places. This is our front patio after I had made a little path to get to the tractor.

Here’s the back patio with lots of snow on the picnic table.

Here’s DH on the tractor going down the driveway to start plowing.

Ta Da! Here’s the patio three hours later and the sun even came out for a moment.

The snow piles are getting so high it’s hard to pile up any more.

Here’s the back deck and the snow is getting higher than the deck. It’s about 8-14″ off the ground normally.

So I didn’t get much sewing on knots done today. My back won’t hold up to much more strain at this point. But I did start on the center Celtic triple spiral in copper. Here is it with the other elements surrounding it. It’s much too bright.

Here’s a closeup.

So then I decided to experiment with alcohol inks and Lumiere paint to see how I wanted to tone down the brightness. I haven’t used the alcohol inks before and I’m not sure what I was expecting but I wasn’t too impressed.

I had about decided to go with the last choice although tone down the cranberry a bit. Then I remembered that copper changes color with heat. I may have to torch it and see what happens. What fun!