Working through the ugly

At the early stages of any new piece of work I go through a stage of hating what I am doing and would like to consign the piece to the scrap bag. If I have learned anything during the past few years of crafting it is to carry on working through this stage. Very often the worse it looks at the beginning of a project, the better it ends up. I hope this piece of work based on the grids I've been drawing doesn't prove me wrong. My challenge to myself is to have a layer 'floating' almost free of the background. I think I am trying to control the layers too much.

   

I have printed the base fabric with a wavy grid design and hand and machine stitched it onto a layer of soft batting. I really liked it at this stage, I have loosely cut out grids in various sheers and nets, some of which I've stiffened and I'm currently attaching them to the background.

I've also spent some time formatting a lot of painted papers that I've made over the years, It's lovely to see them as a cohesive 'whole', rather than being tucked away in boxes and not seeing the light of day.

I love this way of layering up the pages, Dionne Swifts workshop has really made me rethink my sketchbooks.

I thought that I was a bit random in my choices of workshops and practice but I'm starting to see connections at last, maybe I'll know where all this is heading sometime soon. I would really like to concentrate on just one area, the problem is, I love it all!