Themes and Variations

Ptichka took a look at my valentines last night. She noticed that I only have two designs this year. We work in very different ways. She likes to hammer out half a gazillion designs and then make one of each, if she's lucky. I like to come up with one or two designs and then make endless variations on them until I feel that all possibilities have been exhausted. We always joke that we should go into the hand-made card business together. Ptichka would design everything and I would be the production monkey who cut out paper hearts until my eyes crossed. I'm sure this difference is in part due to the different ways we think. Ptichka is very good at visualizing things (she's a pro when it comes to fitting all the boxes into the back of a uHaul). while I'm not. I need to lay things out and actually see them before I can do anything. I can only visualize things that I've already done. It makes life interesting and sometimes messy.

To the left is the second of my valentine designs. (The first can be seen in this post.) Birds and heart-shaped feathers and stars sewn in silk thread. Here, my backing is some paper from St. Armand. The body is from scrapbooking paper and the feathers and wings are out of raspberry unryu.



These are the rest of the variations on the bird design.


An old calendar page, an engineering manual, silk thread.


Chiyogami (yuzen), an engineering manual, silk thread.


Chiyogami (yuzen), Nepalese paper, acrylic paints.


Nepalese paper, chiyogami (yuzen), acrylic paints.

As you can tell, I'm into pink and green and brown at the moment. I love all three of those colours together. Yum!