The Scribble Series

Thank you all for your lovely comments on Split Infinitives! It's lovely to hear such encouraging words, especially as I felt like I was just stumbling around, making this.

Kristin, your comment about how to piece this together was just what was going on in my head and what stalled me on this for a long time. I have a definite preference for piecing things together, and I have a funny thing about raw edges. They look perfectly wonderful in other people's work. But whenever I have exposed raw edges in my own, this voice in my head (sounding suspiciously like a cross between my high school sewing teacher and my mother) tells me "Messy! Sloppy! Messy!" And I then want to fiddle and trim and no matter what I do, I'm not satisfied.

I suppose I need to set myself the project of making some little experiments with wildly exposed edges to get myself over the trauma!

So it was interesting that what I wanted to reflect on this piece was this sort of look:



This is when they were slapped up on my wall, with threads dangling wildly. In any event, I did end up just smacking these squiggly pieces down and stitching around the edges. In retrospect, I think I should have maybe done LESS quilting around the squiggly bits ... but I was driven to smooth out the bumps and flatten the edges popping up. Knowing when to stop is sometimes the hardest thing, yes?

This was the second in the scribble series (I've not quilted the first one yet) but I found that piecing sort of killed the spontaneity of the scribble:



Do you see what I mean? It's like energy contained, so the liveliness is lost. Hm, which may give rise to a name for this and a reason to go further with it...

So I think my next experiment with these scribbles (ooh! A series!) will try to incorporate the split squiggles and dangling threads. I'm thinking to pre-quilt the background and then hand stitch the split squiggles directly on. We'll see.

Anyway, thanks for the grand encouragement!