Pent up need to make art...

After a couple of days of being able only to think about making stuff and plan, and feel bored by my vanished energy, and various physical woes, things are looking up today, and I did some work on several fronts.

Here's the state of the chrysanthemum today, not far from completed.  More shading to happen.  I ended up shading it more heavily than I'd planned, but I think it was a good change of plan.

And here's the upcoming series, in larval form.  

At first I had a few line drawings which I thought I'd scan and print on silk. Then I decided I may as well trace as scan.  Then I thought how about instead of silk, using that soluble Vilene fabric for this, and I ended up tracing one drawing onto Vilene, after stretching it, then transferred it, with net sandwiching it, to a hoop.  There I'll do the stitching, with with any luck securing the net, and when I wash out the Vilene, there will be a very airy lacy stitched design on net.  If this works, I plan on a couple more. That way it will be a small series.  At least that's the plan.

I think the doorway series is done now, with three small and one large.  The large one is not far from done, see its current state. There will be Dorset buttons around that archway, mostly stitched now, but since they're white, I'm planning to dye them.

So that's the other thing I did in the studio: study how to go about using my red onion skins to dye some D buttons.  And booking a couple of natural dyeing books from the libe, which I expect I've studied before, every spring I seem to get into this, and digging out an old lidded pot that I can dedicate to dyeing. 

For onionskins it doesn't matter, since they're not toxic, but with other plant dyes it pays not to mix them with food.  Onionskins are good to start with because they don't need a mordant, and the less fuss the better, I think.  Incidentally, there's hardly any smell of onion from them now.

Tomorrow will be my dyeing day...