Untitled, Part 8

Untitled, Part 8

Finally a title has emerged!! Unfortunately, I am not sharing it with you yet. Ha ha! Sorry!

This stage requires me to deal with a giant mess of tangled embroidery floss. I did not take a photo of the giant pile, but this is what it looked like after I pulled the threads out carefully, one by one. Wahhhh, so tedious and not fun!

I learned to wind yarn around my hand to make skeins back when I was a weaver.  So, I tidied these up the same way.

And, then stored them in color coded boxes, a yellow box for the warm tones, and a blue box for the cool tones. And while this pile of thread looked like a lot to me at the time, I think I purchased embroidery floss at least 4 more times because I never got enough, and a future step required even more and more floss.

Now, I am all set to begin the cut work. I usually cut a small section at a time, 8 to 10 circles, to prevent my hands from getting tired from using the scissors too much. Here I am with some, working out on my deck on a beautiful morning. (Yes, all 1000+ circles were cut with hand held scissors.)

Making thread selections for the hand stitching of the cut holes.

I also discovered that having the blocks in narrow strips, only 2 motifs wide, helped with thread management.  I could attach my thread choices to each block and have work that could go anywhere with me. So I carefully cut all the bigger pieces down.

When I got to the blue ones, there were so many.  Over 700 of these to do.  I wanted to maximize diversity of thread colors with the thread from the satin stitching, the color of the batik, and the color of the background.  So, I made thread color choices in mass.

Here is a sample after stitching.

All the holes...

And, after many months of work, the completed stacks of nearly ready blocks.

I am thinking that it doesn't look like much yet, but in my head, so much wonderfulness, it's hard to contain!