Optical Illusion - auditioning two options

Well, I haven't completed the project yet, but have arrived at a pivot point... I need to decide if I want to use the other two pieces of dyed fabric, or leave the design as is.  I made the passe-partout from black fabric, used some scraps of fabric to cover the inside of the frame, then stitched the pleated piece to the back of the canvas (actually, twill in my case... I used undyed twill and stretched it over some stretcher bars I had on hand).
Below is the pleated piece with the passe-partout draped over the stretcher bars.

In this picture, I laid the 2 other pieces over the bars and under the passe-partout... the fabrics have not been quilted yet.  My dilemma is that I feel like the 3D effect is lost when I put the two pieces on top.  So I am going to study these pictures a little before deciding how I will proceed.

I must confess that I am not happy with the passe-partout, and may need to do a little more work to get the opening to fit over the stretcher bars better... the opening appears to be too large, so I may need to make another one that has a smaller opening, or maybe use a contrasting fabric to make an inner border.  But I am fascinated with this project... it is very different than anything I have worked on before, and I think it has given me a lot to  think about, and I'm sure I will try this again!

Optical Illusion - a less successful try

It seems that April is an especially busy month for everybody. I have to apologize Nienke for not being able to try out her excellent tutorials - but I'll do it, definitely, later on. For the meantime I would like to show an another try towards optical illusions, though a much less successful one - but we also learn from our mistakes, don't we?

Some years ago I tried to create an optical illusion by piecing stripes together. As I didn't take photos during the process, i can only show the half-finished results, which I abandoned, when the constructional mistake became apparent. 

I pieced the yellow and yellow-and-light-green stripes between the dark green ones. I wanted those the stay orthogonally to the surface so reinforced them with a thin but stiff interface. The interface increased the thickness of the stripes which created a "tightened" effect between the dark green stripes there, where I haven't placed the yellow stripes in-between.

Conclusion: if we want to play with dimensionality, we need to use end-to-end stripes, like Nienke did. So as soon as i'll have time, i would like to try out her technique and  i'm really curious to see the results.

Optical Illusion - work in progress

I've been trying to find time this month to try Nienke's Optical Illusion technique, and finally got some fabric dyed yesterday.  I didn't take any pictures of the 4 squares, but I just finished fusing two of  the merged squares onto my background:

I didn't mean to use such similar colors to Nienke's example, but I had the dyes mixed for another project and decided to use them here as well.  So far, I'm really enjoying how this is coming out!  I hope to get the stitching done today, and then get a start on the next step tomorrow.  I may not be done before the end of the month, but I'll post again just to let you know how I'm doing.  I already know I want to do some more with this technique... very interesting!  Thanks for the tutorial, Nienke!