My Experiment with Extreme Texture

 I finally got some time this week to play with Judith’s techniques for Extreme Texture.  I confess I didn’t have any idea of what I would do other than try the different methods she described.

First off, I auditioned several pieces of fabric I had in my stash.  I finally settled on this one:

This was a good size, and it had some interesting patterns… kind of reminds me of being under water.

Next, I did some of the puffs:

 

After creating several of them, I could see where scrunching was going to make the piece even more interesting:

I scrunched, then pressed the piece.  Then I cut the batting and pinned the fabric to hold the scrunches in place.  Next was the stitching:

I used white thread, which doesn’t show up as well as I would like, but I have some ideas about what to do later to enhance the stitching.  From the very first puff I stitched around, I envisioned dancing jellyfish or sea anemones, so the working title is “Dance of the Jellyfish”!  I’ll see if my finished piece looks like what I have in mind.

Once I finished stitching around the puffs, I set to thinking about how I wanted to use cord.  My vision is to have seaweed floating somewhere in the composition.  I dug through my stash and found some cheesecloth and cotton cord, and tried dyeing them.  However, I think I got a little impatient and rinsed them too soon.  The cord came out very pale, and the cheesecloth came out more blue than green.  So I switched gears:  dark green netting and undyed cord that I zigzagged in place:

 

 Here’s the cord – I zigzagged twice – once to anchor the cord, the next time to cover more thoroughly with a closer stitch.  

 

Next, I ripped some pieces of the netting, pressed them into clumps, and hand stitched to anchor them onto the piece around the ‘stem’ created by the cord:

I have lots more I need to do to this piece before I’ll call it ‘done’, but I wanted to share what I have completed so far.  More to come!