Explorations, Episode 4: First Practice Piece is Done. Watch Me Critique It!

Explorations, Episode 4:  First Practice Piece is Done.  Watch Me Critique It!

I've been working on this first practice piece for a week, and now I'm going to declare it done.  I'm practicing because I'm intimidated:  the pressure is ON for me to create a 30 inch by 50 inch piece, using felting and thread painting, to hang in the New England Quilting Museum, no less. I want that piece to be good.

So, I'm making scale-size practice pieces.  This one is my first.  I wanted to reassure myself of my felting and thread painting skills.

My last post followed the progress of this practice piece for the past few days.  Yesterday, I got out my electric felting machine and subjected the almost-done piece to its barbs:

I don't know whether you can tell from this picture, but a felting machine looks a lot like a sewing machine, but with no thread, and many more needles.  Those needles go down through that wool roving and compress it together with their tiny barbs.  In fact, that's what these machine quilting needles are called:  barbs.  A trip under those barbs yesterday tamed the fuzzies on this piece.

Then it was time for thread painting.  I wanted to make sure I could choose and apply the colors of thread judiciously.  So I did this little trial exercise for myself to help me choose the thread for the thread painting:

It wasn't worth the effort.  I didn't put down enough roving for this practice piece to be a fair equivalent.  Besides, it looked like I couldn't go wrong with any of the colors I had in mind. So I just went ahead and thread painted, starting with the tidal pool at the  center of the scene:

Then I thread painted the tidal creek just beyond the sand fingers, and after that the marsh grass and trees on the other side, and finally, the sky.

This is bad!

Now I'm going to critique the practice piece:

The ripples across the bottom 1/4 of the piece are too dominating.  My original image is landscape orientations, but for this show my piece must be portrait orientation.  For purposes of making this transition, I had to capture a long narrow slice of my image.  I extended an imaginary inch at the bottom and the top of the photo.  Thus the large sand ripples at the bottom are an imaginary extension and extrapolation of the actual ripples in the photo.  In my rendition, they're too dark, too big...and sort of creepily humanoid, some of them.  If this were my actual piece I would forget about extending the bottom an imaginary inch to get it to scale.  Instead, I would put both extra, needed inches on the top only and eliminate the bottom several inches, like this: 

My rendition lacks the extreme luminosity of the original.  For example, the color of the water in the tidal pool isn't bright enough.  I went over that pool with many kinds of glittery and shiny specialty threads, but it's still not as bright and reflective as the water in the photo.  Now I think I should have felted it with more white, especially at the top fingers of the pool.  That's one thing I'll change if I choose this image.

The thread painting in the sky is lame.  Surely when I do a sky in my real piece, the thread painting will be more imaginative than this:

That's all. Fini.  Finito.  You can tell me what you think, or not.  Either way, I'm glad I did this practice piece.

Onward!