From Final Product to Beginning Image

 Here is a detail from a piece in my new series based on a day's paddling in October with my Gratitude Girls buddies. After paddling and carrying our boats from Polliwog Pond to Follensby Clear Pond to Horseshoe Pond, we reached Little Polliwog Pond. Karen had told us it was the Place of the Magical Bog, and she did not exaggerate! We spent a couple of hours there exploring the pitcher plants, autumn-hued waterlily and watershield leaves, ripe wild cranberries, and the brilliant marsh vegetation set off by the dark spruce forest on the barely-drier borders.

The photo at the right shows the process, described backwards from the finished piece. I printed my edited and cropped photo on cotton fabric (with its freezer paper carrier sheet). Then I tore the fabric into strips of varying widths and fused them to my stabilized background fabric one by one. With dark blue thread, I stitched the strips down. The orange fabric and the printed pitcher plant image were added, and I did some free motion stitching on the image to emphasize the plant shapes.

You can see that the original photo for this piece was not great. I cropped and used the "contrast" and "saturation" functions in my photo editing program, Paint.Net, to turn it into a more colorful and interesting image.

I'm working on several more pieces based on my photos and memories of that beautiful Autumn day on the water. Next photo: