I’m back from Wyoming and here are some “idea book” photos of what I worked on in the car. I’m continuing on my idea admiration of qualities. As I was working through the design process, I started with the idea of the celtic knots being scattered over the surface and having a celtic chain around the edge with 3 triple spirals. I came up with the phrase “In admiration of all women who live a life filled with passion and grace.” I’m not sure where the grace came from but I looked it up and it means “the quality or state of being considerate or thoughtful”. I admire those qualities. “To grace” means to adorn or embellish – who knew??

Then I decided I needed to simplify my design. Thus I cut down the triple spirals to one as to have one point of emphasis. I thought perhaps the celtic knots could be of varying sizes and perhaps to do FME around the celtic knots. Then since I had just read a short book from the library on sashiko, I thought it would be nice to do that kind of pattern based on triangles around the celtic knots. Then I could graph the whole design out and it would be very neat and tidy.

NOT. I’m not really the neat and tidy kind of girl. So then I was thinking that the bottom portion of the design could appear to be deteriorating moving up to a more perfect design on top. The bottom portion would signify the chaos of life and working towards the top through a life of passion and grace. That’s where the design is currently. I also read the book in my previous post by Beaney and Littlejohn. It was all about designing for embroidery. It suggested that a paper mock up be made in the correct size to check to make sure the design worked the way you want it to before committing to stitch. So that’s what I’ve started since I’ve gotten home. I made the background part but it didn’t photograph well tonight. Will try for another photo in better light. I also have another full page of notes in my “idea book” about how to achieve deterioration of the symbols but I didn’t take a photo of that page as not to bore anyone to death.

The other thing that I did on the car trip was to practice on my celtic symbols and designs. This was fun! Once you’ve got the basics figured out, it’s pretty easy. The bottom right hand corner is the celtic knot that I will use.

Here’s a close up. Now I just have to get it down to the right size and see if I can manage to FME the outline on to black felt. So that’s the progress I’ve made over the last several days. I haven’t even started stitching and others in the challenge are already finished. But I’m really enjoying the journey – it is certainly different than how I have worked in the past.