New Florals

I've been busy finishing up a few projects. First of all, I've always planned to do a blue poppy. For that reason, and in order to test my "Sunkissed Poppy" pattern, below, I decided to try the pattern in blues. 

After everything but the centre of the poppy was built, I took a photograph, and printed it four times on one full sheet of photo paper. Then I got out my Prismacolour Artist Pencils to try different backgrounds and centres.  I settled on a dark blue background because I found that the chartreuse green competed for attention with the poppy. I knew I wanted orange (the complement of blue) somewhere in the centre of the poppy. 

In the end I decided on using orange for the largest piece of the centre. As you can see in the experiments above, I used dark blue artist pencil to mimic stitching on the orange. So I think the orange in the final version (below) will be toned down a bit once I stitch on the piece. I used 11 values of blue on this piece, from the very palest blue to a deep navy.

After that was finished, I decided to finish off this peony, that has been on my design wall for about a year and a half. I am hoping to offer some new floral patterns for my In Full Bloom class and will probably publish this pattern in the new year and have it for sale on my website.

In the mean time, my five day Dye Happy class starts at Wabi Sabi on Friday, January 9.  Additional dates are January 16, February 27, March 20 and April 10. Click on Dye Happy to be taken through a series of posts showing what we have done in previous classes. Email me at equehl@hotmail if you are interested in joining us.