Creativity and project progress
First, I just have to share this thesaurus entry from thesaurus.com. It's about creativity.
"Main Entry: fantasy
Part of Speech: noun
Definition: imagination
Synonyms: Atlantis*, air castle, apparition, appearance, bubble*, bugbear, chimera, conceiving, creativity, daydream, delusion, dream, envisioning, externalizing, fabrication, fairyland*, fancy, fancying, fantasia, figment*, flight, fool's paradise*, hallucination, head trip*, illusion, imaginativeness, imagining, invention, mind trip*, mirage, nightmare, objectifying, originality, pipe, pipe dream, rainbow*, reverie, trip, utopia, vagary, vision, vision
Antonyms: reality, real world, fact, actuality
Notes: fantasy is imagination unrestricted by reality; phantasm is a ghostly appearing figure or something existing in perception only"
I have started stitching on Autumn Crow. I painted the cloth last week and put the design on over the weekend. I stitched the border on Sunday and Monday, and now I'm outlining leaves. The cloth painting came out great although it doesn't photograph well because the paint has gold in it. When I first painted the cloth, the color was too solid, so I rinsed it while the point was still wet. Then I blow dryed the cloth part way, leaving some sections wetter than others, and I repainted it. This gave me the look I was after, sort of mottled green and gold with darker areas like the forest floor with sun shining through the leaves and branches. I am very happy with my results!
I did have to make a couple of changes in my stitch plan. First, I decided after stitching the outlines of the yellow and orange leaves that they needed to change positions because the orange just looked too close in color to the red. I pulled out those outlines and re-did them, but the orange still wasn't right. I pulled that out again an re-did it with this very bright orange I have (DMC Medici wool #8940). It looks rather garish, nearly neon, on its own, but against the green background it's perfect! It's really interesting--the threads look different stitched on the background than they do when I just hold them against it.
I should be ready to start my low relief stitches tonight or tomorrow. Probably tomorrow. I'm having too much fun looking at all sorts of different stitches and trying to decide which I want to use. Last night, I went to the library and checked out Stitches: New Approaches by Jan Beaney. Oh yum! I'm rather broken hearted that the pictures aren't in color. They are amazing even in black and white, but I would just love to see them in full, glorious, vibrant color. Still, this book will have to go in my permanent collection. That and her book Stitch Magic, which I can't find at the local libraries. I don't know if that one has color photos or not, but I've heard it's pretty magnificent and talks about layering stitches on top of each other which is a new obsession of mine, so I must read the book! Anyhow, I'm going to spend some time with the book and some online stitch dictionaries and my class handouts and decide what stitches I want to play with. I want to at least be at the point of starting to put beads on by the time class ends next Tuesday.