Finally!!! I thought I would never find the time to finish this, but today the weather was threatening and the first sprinkles sent us in out of the back yard early on, so today became a day to finish projects. I had four house projects on my list, and finishing this was the third. One more to go . . .
My original piece was blocks of color for sky, tree, and meadow. I laid a piece of sheer silk chiffon underneath the Aqua Bond sandwich and stitched a tiny bit on the machine (enough to hold the silk in place), but did the majority of stitching by hand-- 98.99%, actually. It was obsessively stitched, covered almost without letting the ground show through! When I had exhausted the stitch possibilities and felt that every tiny bit of fabric and thread/yarn/soy silk was thoroughly attached, I added beads to the meadow grass. So there are straight stitches for grass and sky, and french knots for the little meadow flowers and the tree. The tree trunk was a series of closely-spaced outline stitches in differing shades of grey.
The tree was quite a dilemma. The foliage began life as a lot of random straight stitches over the darker green scrim and yarn, then I made the straight stitches into seed stitches. It was still awful. Next I added more straight stitches to fill in the spaces between the fat seed seed stitches, but the more I stitched the more I saw it was simply a mess that could not be salvaged! So, as a last-ditch effort to pull something from all the time I'd spent on this project, I put french knots on top of everything. I also used rayon thread for the tree foliage, which is a bear to sew. I remember saying "Dear me!" several times as the thread tangled and twisted back on itself. But when it was finished, I really, really liked it.
In this photo the piece is lying in the bottom of my kitchen sink. I couldn't wait for it to dry to photograph it. When I rinsed it out, there was no discoloration in the water, so nothing faded. And not one little piece of scrim or gibblet of thread floated free, either. Whew! I poured the water from the first rinse, when the Aqua Bond was strongest, over the strawberry plants. Don't gag-- I read that algae and kelp are used as fertilizer in European countries!
It may not be completely Aqua-Bond free, and if it is a bit stiff when it dries, I'll just rinse it again until it has a soft hand.
Now, how much fun is that?
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