Surface Design Challenge Submission

This is one of the Surface Design Challenges that I received and completed a few weeks ago. The theme is flowers and everyone is to submit a post card sized section for the project. I hung the background and pinned all the submissions on to it, in order to give me a feel for what colour I wanted and where I wanted to place my submission. For some reason the dandelion came to mind and I thought of flowers at their final stage. I have not done any free motion embroidery for some time and thought that the time was now. So I drew a basic dandelion fluff pattern on tissue....sandwiched it between two layers of water soluble stabilizer, hooped it in a narrow embroidery hoop and off I went. I hope you actually are reading this because I've learned something doing this...NEVER...NEVER...use tissue. It was complete murder getting it all out. Silly me...I could have just drew it on the water soluble stabilizer and been done. Lesson well learned. I had never used water soluble stabilizer before...but of course I had it in the studio for years.

I drew the head of the dandelion with an air erase pen on fabric and painted it with Lumeire paints.

The next step was the fluff to be overlaid on top of the painted stem. I used Sulky silver embroidery thread in the top and bobbin of the machine so that it had a little glitz. I really love sparkle. I then added silver glass beads, which does not show up in this picture. In hand you can see the added depth and of course...sparkle.

I painted the leaves freestyle...not having a clue really but what the heck...caution was already out the window and the tunes were cranked...I was at home in my element and loving it.

The final step was adding the tiny seeds floating away. It's called the end and is placed as the last block. I had fun doing this one and felt so inspired just playing around with some new techniques.

Here's the background with all the submissions up till mine. Four more to go.