Christmas is near

I am not ready for Christmas, this is not a new dilemma for me as it happens every year. The annual Christmas dinner parties begin tomorrow and I have only just this morning managed to bring myself to buy an outfit to wear. I would rather buy more art materials, threads and fabric but I can't wear those to a formal dinner party, sadly. I am desperately trying to get into the Spirit of Christmas.

On a more positive note I have been working on two small ideas which I intend to mail to two special people I know. I started  with the smaller piece below and then created another one with slight differences. This has been a solution for using up smaller bits of fabric, left over from larger projects. This gives an indication of my working process.

 

In addition to these I have been developing the idea posted earlier (see below) and the following images are the results.

 

 

From the above idea, I  went onto another page in my sketch book and played around a bit more with the image, I liked what was happening. Although it was changing, I felt I could work with both in the future. I continued working with the second idea. I enlarged it and played around with some of the background elements from previous ideas.

 

 The image below was the result, I transferred my ideas onto Egyptian cotton which I then painted with fabric paints. My next step will be to create texture and pattern onto this surface with machine embroidery and printing. At the moment the background seems to overpower the portrait but with the pattern and texture that will change, also I will cut the size down a bit.