Having looked closely at my own work and the work of others who inspire me it was time to start working with my own inspiration. While I had looked at the shapes of the windows in St Ives I started to consider other shapes and how they relate to each other.
I started by making tracings from my photographs, concentrating on the main shapes.
One of the exercises was to work in watercolour and I made the sketches above exploring the colours I associate with St ives.
From working with sketches I moved on to working with fabric and have spent several days making improvisationally pieced units which are currently languishing on my equally improvised design wall. The image below combines and compares two working layouts, neither of which resemble the sketches above but have been informed by them.
Excuse the weird shape at the bottom, it's not part of the design it's a door stop. I have played around with incorporating definite house shapes using the white of the cottages that you see in St Ives but somehow felt the starkness of the white was too much. The arrangement on the left, such as it is, has more of the feel I am after but there is a long way to go with the design. It's neither one thing nor the other at the moment. I have had to give this quilt a title before it's finished and went for 'Higgledy Piggledy' as I felt this describes the many rooves and alleyways in St Ives but I don't achieved that think I've achieved that atmosphere yet.
This course is about working in a series and while I may have gone off at a bit of a tangent working through this piece (because I need it to fulfill a brief for a challenge) I do have a lot of inspiration to take me forward with this series.
