Another little something

I seem to be dabbling away at lots of little somethings these days. But at least I'm doing something. I showed the beginning of this and told the story behind it here. But I knew that it wasn't finished. It needed something, but I didn't know quite what. Some kind of caption, I thought, and finally managed to decide that it would be "Say cheese!" Yet another curious thing adults demand, without explaining why. - I seem to have gone through my childhood completely baffled by all sorts of strange, unexplained adult behaviour, which is probably why I tend to go at great lengths to explain things to the children in my life. My cousin has a fond memory of a conversation I had with his first-born when she was about one year old, and I tried to explain to her what it meant when her parents said they were going skiing on their winter holidays. My explanation was apparently complete down to the description of the wooden sticks that they would fasten on to their feet and that white thing that covers the ground and that we call "s-n-o-w". The sweet little girl was sitting on my lap with a deep frown of concentration as if she were really trying to understand it all. Well, I'm still the one she comes to fourteen years later when she wants things explained to her, so I must have been doing something right!
Anyway, back to the subject. I stitched the letters on black felt using my sewing machine, and cut them into tiles which I stitched to the background with a running stitch. It just didn't look right. The tiles were too big and overwhelming next to the sketch. I tried adding some black blanket stitch around the edge to counterbalance it, but no, that wasn't enough. I added some shisha mirrors in the top left corner with black perle cotton, thinking that you would occasionally catch flashes of light in the mirrors like the one's you get thrown in your face in a photo booth. I liked the effect, but the black tiles were still too big. I contemplated removing them and making new ones, but having used a sturdy perle cotton to attach them, I realized that there would be holes in the background fabric, so that was not a good idea. Eventually I came up with adding some decorative stitches in green to blur the edges of the black a bit.

It took a while, but the time I used was really what I needed for it to evolve into what it wanted to be.

By the way - I wanted the blanket stitch around the edge to be a bit uneven and random looking. I didn't realize how hard that was! My hand and needle only wanted to make even stitches, and I had to pull them out and start again several times before I got the hang of it!

Now off for another little project: hosing down the balcony to try to get rid of the mossy patches a mostly rainy summer has left- how exciting...