Journey: A new project

All journeys start somewhere - this one started with the fabric. It wasn't always this colour - it used to be off white but with the help of some brown Dylon fabric paint it is now this lovely shade.

I made it by first diluting some brown Dylon paint with some water and then dripping it on a piece of 32ct 7 1/2" wide band. The band was washed first and scrunched up while still wet and spread out onto a plastic bag. I had added some black to the brown towards the end of the amount I'd diluted to make a darker brown as well. The fact that the fabric was wet and the paint adding more dampness meant that some of the creases ended up lying in a puddle of colour which caused all of the lovely marks. What you see above is actually the back of the fabric - the front turned out to be so boring I decided to use the side I wasn't looking at while painting it.

The next part of the journey was deciding which colours to use - and which threads as I have a sizeable collection. I decided the continuation point of my colour scheme was the linen DMC threads which arrived in the post today (they are the skeins to the top right). I'd known previously that the DMC floche (on the gigantic yellowish home made floss card at the top of the fabric in the middle), the Sajou thread right above it, and the Vaupel & Heilenbeck right above that were colours I wanted to use. Today I dug out a whole load of my Jodyri threads (both cottons and silks) and added some DMC rayon silks, perle #5, DMC Color Variations, Cosmo and some GAST threads to the mix. I'm not sure if I'll use them all but this is my starting point.

My journey so far has not been so easy I've been playing with ideas and even tried some stitches on another bit of fabric but I wasn't happy so I set it aside and let things simmer. Hopefully this is it!

By now you are probably wondering why I am talking about journeys. It's easy really - I'm doing a project with another member of deviantArt where one of us does a visual representation of the theme and the other writes a short story, prose, or poem of no more than 1000 words. As you can tell I'm the one doing the visual representation - and in our case we agreed I'd start with my embroidery. We made a plan together and now I need to get what's inside my head onto fabric. I decided to use surface embroidery this time instead of my more usual cross stitch as that's easier for me to create from scratch as I'm terrible at drawing.

I know what I need to make, and what I want to make - now to get started! I shall be blogging this journey every day I work on this project, I will, of course, still be doing my SAL's and they shall continue to be part of my weekly WIP Wednesday post. See you tomorrow!