It feels like forever since I’ve spent a full day in the studio. I had piles of stuff to put away from my recent class and then a bit of final homework to finish up. I worked today on matting some pieces and getting a couple of pieces ready to stretch around a board so the piece can be surface mounted. I don’t have the matt board to go behind these and I’ll need to get that first before I can stretch them. But I needed measurements for the corrects size of the matting. I also went out and purchased more gray scale paper, mounting tape, a canvas and more gesso.

 Here is my print to stitch lichen in it’s matting. That orange really pops against the black, doesn’t it?

 This is another print to stitch piece. I was surprised that this light gray was the best color matting for this piece. The black just kind of sucked the color out of it. One of the things we worked on in class this time is deciding what value matting to use with each piece.

 This is a closer view of the stitched piece from above.

 Next I worked on getting my Kantha bird ready to be stretched over a board. After figuring out the cropping of the piece in class, then I needed to measure and figure out the right size board for underneath. I can’t get these stretched and stitched yet because I need the mat board that will go behind it. I will attach the stretched bird piece right to the mat. But now I know what size I need.

 This is another one that needs to be stretched. I have very little extra fabric around the edges and this might need to be cut down just slightly more so that the edges don’t show. You can see a little white around the top edge.

The other thing that I did was cut the gray scale paper into croppers. I now have a range of croppers from black to white with three grays in between. These will come in handy as they are much bigger than my former croppers and I’ll be able to cover much more with these. I use croppers all the time to assess how a piece is coming along and to see what else it needs. It is amazing what that little bit of framing does to focus your attention on what needs fixing in a composition.