Tackling Random Head On

Following our trip to Amsterdam, I had three free days before resuming work. The first, a bright sunny day, was spent gardening. The remaining two days were so cold and that the overnight frost remaineded all day, thus ruling out gardening. Yippee, some stitching time. My Japanese Embroidery was put away for Christmas to make room for the tree and out of harms way. Embroidery frames, excited children, food and drink are best kept apart!

In fact I had tidied away most of my embroidery things but never fear, I had kept my Japanese Embroidery easily to hand to whip out and stitch when ever the opportunity presented itself.

The flowers each have a center bead of either red or blue that is surrounded by a ring of either gold or silver beads. The six petals are beaded in one of four colours; red, blue, light taupe or dark taupe. The idea is to combine these elements randomly, and to arrange them in a random fashion. As previously stated, I am not really a 'random' type of girl, so I devised a plan to assist me in my quest for randomness. I put one bead for every flower into three small zip lock bags. In the first bag I put a mixture of the red and blue center beads; in the second, gold and silver beads, with slightly more gold than silver; and in the third bag a mixture of the four petal colours.

© JEC/Carol-Anne Conway

For each flower, I select one bead from each bag and use those colours, no cheating. Sometimes the same combination comes out for adjacent flowers, but whatever comes out, I use. I have an area that seems to have too much taupe (the light and dark are not that different from each other) but I trust that when all the flowers are worked, things will have balanced themselves.

Between the flowers, the background is filled with moss green seed beads and black tri-cut beads. I have begun to add some of the green beads and I think that the design is beginning to look a bit lost; perhaps it will sharpen up when the black beads are added!

© JEC/Carol-Anne Conway

The original fabric supplied for this Phase is a floral print in the colours of the beads, with metallic gold highlights. That fabric is no longer available and the design is now supplied on a plain red fabric. From what I have done so far, I think it looks much better on the original fabric. There is a picture of the design worked on the original fabric here.

Happy Stitching