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!

The TIF paper mock up is going well. I started with watercolor paper and covered it with crumpled red tissue.

Then I drew a bunch of my celtic knots. I’m planning on doing these on black felt and using a variegated red thread in the middles.

Here’s the top half with a black braid around the edge and the triple spiral I did in paper and painted with metallic paints. I am planning on using copper shim for this. I haven’t distressed the lower portion as I had planned but will probably still do that.

Then I made some wonky celtic knots for the bottom portion and messed up the braid a bit. Nothing is currently glued down so I can move things about and change my mind. I also want to add some “stitching” to the background but I haven’t made my mind up about that yet. I’ll finish the paper mock up this weekend and then get down to work on the real thing!

And last, but certainly not least, here is a wonderful postcard from Annica. It is much more blue than it came out – I agree Annica, perhaps I should read the book about the camera as I am a bad photographer! Thanks so much, I love it.

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.

OK – First off, I am spending way too much time looking at other people’s blogs that are participating in the challenge. I think I’m going to have to limit my blog reading for a while. I didn’t get much further today but I did find a really cool tutorial on Celtic Knotwork. It’s here if you want to take a look.

I’m going on a car trip tomorrow to take my m-i-l home after her 7 week stay at our house so I probably won’t be able to blog until I get back. But I’ll have time in the car to further my design and work on my celtic knotwork to see what I can come up with. I’m thinking it will have a tapestry look and feel to it but not be needlepoint. I was considering using silk fused paper as the background but I think that will be too shiny. Instead, I think I’ll be felting the background with wet felting and machine felting and then add machine embroidered motifs to that with celtic knotwork and symbols. I think the main color will be a deep red for the quality I admire in people “passion for life”. I think right now I’ll also use black and copper accents but since I don’t have the full design down yet, things may change.

No “idea” book photos today but here’s my dog Symphony when she was a puppy. She’s still very inquisitive (read nosy).