more playing and playing

This is the kind of quilting I was trying to describe. A blend of geometric lines and organic shapes.

The piece shown is a piece of silk I dyed a couple of weeks ago after seeing Katherine Sands' blog about the difference in color between using soda ash and vinegar to fix fiber reactive dyes to silk. So I tried brushing stripes of each onto a piece of silk, then adding dye. The differences in color are hard to see, but I ended up with a nice piece of cloth anyway.

A great discussion of the importance of line in fiber art is going on in the Art and Perception blog by Jane Underwood--she does a good job of describing what I'm doing (well, she's not really talking about me, but her, but it's kind of the same thing). Line that produces texture like this is one of the main reasons I quilt most of my pieces.

When I get done quilting this piece, I am thinking of adding some touches of paint to the organic shapes, just to highlight them. And adding some hand stitching to the spaces.

At the same time, I'm trying to figure out how to capture the beauty and simpleness of yet another buckeye--this time the fruit of a bottlebrush buckeye. They're very velvety and cool colors right now as they ripen.