challenge woe

or how to fuck up a perfectly good piece of textile art in one easy step....

the next challenge for the arts quilts around the world group is due t be posted on the group blog on thursday.

uncharacteristically i actually  finished my piece a week early. it was  i was happy with it - it fitted the theme of doing sometihing different perfectly and i had tried out a few new techniques - i used sheet music, scrap booking vellum, some paper i had painted a couple of years ago and painted fusible web on a black coton background. all fused together and then some minimal stitching. i sprayed the whole thing with watered down ink and let it mature for a bit.

and then i decided that as some of the components were paper and vellum and already peeling at the edges, that i should seal the piece.  this was a huge mistake. the ink ran. and ran. and ran. instead of layers of colour the whole thing was now black. even kind dog admitted that the piece was only good now as a background.

so i thought of a few options to salvage the wreckage and nearly, nearly left it at that.

but somehow my malign anti-creative demon niggled away at me - perhaps it could be improved by dragging a sea sponge with black gesso across it? so i did. and i made it much much worse. at least before the gessoing you could see some variation in colour underneath the ink smears.

so then i threw caution to the winds and just ran the whole thing under the kitchen tap. and now it's blue.... hopefully when it dries it won't be a uniform blue but still....

the real challenge will be to be able to post something laster this week that is not a complete disaster - wish me luck.