Walls and Tussocks

One of the things I find happens very often to me – as regular readers will have noticed! – is that there’s a lot of rethinking that happens.

This is partly because rather than being trained to create a design in detail from the start, I have worked it out all very painfully for myself, with different levels of success for each project. And I’ve only been doing it for twenty years. I’m much better than I was, but I am sure that my visual imagination would be much more detailed had I started at the age of sixteen, say!

So, for example, when I first stitched outlines for the blocks, and hadn’t stitched the blocks, it looked very much too dark and out of balance, so I lost confidence, took out the outlines, and worked the blocks without them. Now that Aethelflaed is in place, darker and more emphatic than she might have been, the walls need a little more definition to stand up to her. But not too much, so this time I’m using essentially a mid tone of pinky plum. I think that’s going to work.

I’m also returning to the grass. You may recall that I had a thought as I was doing the early stages of the grass, thinking that it might be a good idea to increase the scale of the tussocks as I came forward. This is one of those elements which is a departure from classical opus anglicanum, as far as I know, but it is a way for me to explore some of the outer reaches of filament silk.

As I’ve said before, I’m not doing a reconstruction, I’m doing a thing which tries to tell a story using a blend of old and new design sensibilities, something that will be definitely a modern piece, but which has echoes.

How well this will work when all four of the Medieval Movers And Shakers are done and displayed together, I don’t know.

How well I will balance old style and new style, images, stories and echoes, I don’t know.

But it’s going to be fun finding out!