Step 17. Break it down

Different people do things differently. Go figure.

When I have a project to do or a day to plan, I need to break it down into tiny steps. Other people don't do that - they jump right in and manage to do a bunch of things at once. That's great for them, but it's not how I work best. 

I know it's popular to multi-task and it seems like most people like to work that way, but that style feels like chaos to me. Focusing on one task is much more comfortable for me, and finishing one step motivates me want to keep on moving to the next. 

A border design of an ancient Roman mosaic I saw at the Met inspired me to draw it. I worked at it step-by-step this week, mostly in the early morning (thank you for helping me wake up early, Andy Traub).

Colored pencil on paper, inspired by Roman mosaic at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

I'm not finished yet. The next step I want to do is adding a dark background, which is a new thing for me. I half-expect that I'll ruin the drawing in the process, but that's okay. I'm more interested in trying to add background color than I am in saving this drawing. 

Step 12. Moving along

I'm moving along with the stitchery project. The quote I'm stitching, "What's the good word" is something my mom always said as a greeting. My mom passed away a couple of months ago, and I made this project for myself in her memory. I decided to make a duplicate to give to my sister.

Since I made the design myself and didn't purchase something ready-to-stitch, I had to get the pattern on the fabric. To do that, I first made it on regular paper and then taped it to transfer paper. My transfer paper has been in my sewing box, unused, since Home Ec classes in junior high school, but it still works just fine.

 

In the picture, the yellow is the transfer paper. It comes in different colors, but this is what I had in my kit.

I then taped the transfer paper, with my pattern on top, to the fabric. I used a ball-point pen to trace the pattern. The pressure from the pen transfers the yellow to fabric.

Yellow on white was too faint for me to see clearly, so I used a colored pencil to trace over the yellow line on the fabric. I used a pencil to match the color of the embroidery floss, and I worked only one letter at a time so I wouldn't rub the pencil lines as I stitched.

The orange letters are filled in with French knots and the blue words are in stem stitch, which is my favorite embroidery stitch. My mom was an embroiderer and I learned the stitches from her. 

Step 11. Wake up

I'm regaining a long-lost habit of waking up early in the morning to work on creative projects. A big coffee-cup cheers to author Andy Traub, author of The Early To Rise Experience, for helping me do it.

The project I'm working on now was first inspired years ago when I saw embroidery work by artist Andrea Dezso at an exhibition at the Museum of Arts & Design. In her Lessons from my Mother, Dezso stitched sayings from her mother. I loved the pieces and they've stayed in my mind since I saw them in 2008.

When I traveled to my hometown a few months ago, I knew I wanted to stitch something on the trip. My mom taught me to embroider when I was a girl, and she certainly had many sayings to stitch, though they are quite different than the sayings Dezso had to work with. My mom had an eternally sunny personality, and saying, "What's the good word?" was how she said "How are you?"

So that's the saying I stitched in the hotel room for the days surrounding my mom's funeral on my last visit home.

I'm now working on a second piece, copying the first one, as a gift for my sister's birthday. Normally when I make a gift for someone, I'm scrambling to finish in time and pulling a few all-nighters to get the piece finished. But, I'm not doing that this time - I'm working it stitch-by-stitch in the early morning.

If my mom were here now and asked me, "What's the good word?" I would tell her about how great the mornings are and she would agree.

Step 5. Work in progress

I guess it's true. 

Sometimes a tough nut has a beautiful soft heart inside. The trick to finding the heart is figuring out how to crack the shell just right. Or, just rely on luck I suppose.

This drawing is the beginning of what I hope to be a one-page study on a variety of nuts. 

Now that I started, though, I want to try going big - Georgia O'Keefe style - with the walnut. There is so much beautiful detail going on with the hard shell and the intricate inside. I want to get all of it on paper, to get to know it as intimately as possible and show off all the sweet stuff. I need more space to do that. 

I need to learn to paint, too, since colored pencil would be tediously slow on a big piece.  

But, first things first. I'll finish what I started with the nut study.