just doodling around

A little hand work to doodle around with during the Olympics. Not good during skating, but perfectly acceptable for some other sports. The leaves were made a while ago in an Alice Vander Vennen fibre collage class. Although I did play with some of Alice's colour combinations, I went way off track with this one, so much so that Alice was actually surprised at the way the leaves turned out (definitely not her style or colour scheme). I spent hours, collaging bits of upholstery material, ribbon and vintage lace into one large piece, and then horrified everyone, by free hand cutting my leaves. Then I slashed each leaf in half and rejoined them with another mis-matched leaf part. I did this with a free motion ladder stitch (my apologies to people who, actually do this by hand, because the result is much more elegant). Yes, I went off on a tangent!!!! However, I did redeem myself close to the end of the class. I have three more, leaf collage pieces, assembled and ready to stitch. These ones are individually backed with creamy St. Armand watercolour paper and will include sheer fabric, small stones, text and perhaps a bit of metal. Now all I need to do, is figure out how to attach the fabrics to the paper. These lovely collages were all taped and bundled, until yesterday, when I opened them up for the first time since the class (I think it was a year ago, last October). I'm still waiting for a little more inspiration, but am definitely closer to the finish line!

As for these little leaves, I'm not quite sure what I will do with them. Perhaps a wide narrow piece, but am still not fully invested in that layout. For now, I'll just continue to doodle.....By the way, I'm sure that I have more leaves lying about somewhere, just waiting to be discovered in some future workroom adventure!!