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Pandagirl’s 4th Quarter Challenge

Pandagirl’s 4th Quarter Challenge

I decided to take a little different direction with the Suprematist Challenge.  Ruth had used offcuts for her background.  I decided to use scraps for my shapes.

Zed had mentioned texture which is always my preference in creating most anything. So, I dumped out one of my bags of samples and scraps and started to cut shapes.

Sorry for the pic on my kitchen table, but I couldn’t help but start to organize them and wanted to save my tentative design.

Then I realized I’d better find a background. So, I used a piece of felt I made for a class with Fiona Duthie to layout designs. I pinned the pieces after I moved them around a bit.

Since most of the pieces had already been felted, I had to sew them to the background.  For most all I used a very, very fine black rayon thread.  For the lighter green pieces, I changed to a light green thread.  But I don’t think I had to.  It was felted on black prefelt ad probably wouldn’t have shown much anyway.

The pieces varied a lot in texture and materials used from nuno, throwsters waste, ribbon, silk hankies, locks, and some decorate fabrics.

It was also interesting that the pieces not only had lots of textures, but dimension.  Some of the shapes got a little distorted with the sewing.

The back was a negative of the front which looked like a puzzle to me.

Here are a couple of closeups:

Sorry my photo skills aren’t the best.

Depending on which way you turn the picture, you get a different feel.  This is the one I like the best.

Have you finished your challenge piece yet?  If I have time I may try using prefelt.

Shaping up the Crochet

Shaping up the Crochet

Now that I’ve learned the crochet basics, I’ve challenged myself to follow instructions to learn to make shapes.

I guess I’m really thinking spring because I first tried flowers using two different methods.  I like the yellow one better since the hole is less noticeable.

A little fancier flower which wasn’t as hard as I thought.

Then a circle.

Feeling more confident I did a triangle motif. Since I’m using medium weight yarn it ended up larger than I expected and kind of floppy.  I may try again with a smaller hook and tighter yarn.

Of course, I needed to try  a heart.

And my favorite shape an octagon.

By accident in making an octagon,  I made a nonagon (a nine sided polygon) which I didn’t know existed.   There is a cool animation of how a nonogon is calculated here. It’s not perfectly balanced, but I like it.

All of these were made with combinations of the basic stitches.  It was interesting re-learning how to follow instructions to create these shapes.  I thought the videos would be better, but found I kept referring to written instruction. Probably because I could reread instead of rewinding. That is if the written instructions are accurate which in a couple cases they weren’t.  I did a lot of tearing out and redoing, but that’s how we learn.

Have you tried something new recently?

 

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