FFFC Challenge # 29

Houses, View #1

Well I am a week late with this, but considering all my school work I think I have done fairly well. Of course it isn't very big, only 12.5 x 9.75 inches. The FFFC challenge for January was to use Analogous Colors, with a composition concept of Rhythm/Movement or Tension/Energy. Working with my theme of Structures for these challenge series I went back to my first challenge images and created houses. I drew a rough sketch of what I wanted to do then went to work. These houses are tall and narrow, and because I did them free form not quite straight. Going through my stash of hand dyed fabrics I decided on a color scheme of green, blue green, blue. I pulled fabrics from light to dark with those colors, cut strips of various widths and strip pieced them together from light to dark. Then I cut the strips apart and pieced them back together to create the background. Once I had the background pieced I realized that one of the light fabrics was in a bad place, it was more or less in the middle of the work and much too light for the surrounding fabrics. If it had been at the edge it would have worked just fine, but not in the middle. It just didn't fit in. So I pulled out the shiva paint sticks and using green I darken the strip. I created templates for the houses from my sketch out of freezer paper, then cut out the house shapes and machine appliqued them down to the background. Sandwiching the top I then machine quilted in a random way the entire background with no quilting on the houses.

I realized that the painted fabric was still too bright so I pulled out the fabric inks and inked in a pattern on the fabric. I then decided that I needed to do a bit of embellishing so I added the embrioderied trees in the background and the bushes in the foreground. I also added beaded rooftops to the houses.

I am not sure how well I like this piece. I think it fullfills the design elements and works as an over all design. But I think if I had to do it over I would have pieced the background with a bit more care. Comments are welcome.