dryad's blanket

 i finally made a start on my dryad's blanket. i am doing dijanne cevaal's online traveller's blanket course and have found it hard to get the concept right for my blanket.

i decided early on that i wanted it to be a dryad's blanket and i would have three panels - the middle is cotton muslin dyed with procion dyes and the two side panels are green silk chiffon (the truer colours are the pinned photos, the stitched photos are bit too yellow). but i struggled for ages to find a theme for the piece - it's supposed to be a repository of traveller's tales and reminiscences but i couldn't catch my story -

until yesterday when i was pinning the layers - the pieced top over black prefelt and fine black silk cotton. the pins reminded me of stars and the  it struck me that the blanket could be a map as well as a collections of trophies, amulets and scraps of memory.

so my first layer of stitching is to embroider seven silver spirals to map the Pleiades.