Progress Report 'A Scrap a Day'

It's been a while since I have given a report on my daily art project for the year, "A Scrap a Day". Since I have decided where and when I want to enter it next year, I know that I have to keep up to date and get it finished quickly after the year is over (or after I decide that it is done - which might happen, depending on how big it is getting).

 I have already shown on Instagram how I was searching for yellow scraps in Mirjam Petjacob's installation that was a part of 'Stuff for Thought', which was shown in Birmingham at Festival of Quilts for the last time and that wasn't going to be shipped back to her due to cost.

You can see that I was having fun. However, it shows one of the 'problems' with this project, too. It was also intended to make a dent in my collection of yellow scraps. This is not working, let me tell you. If you want to find a way for that, I do not recommend imitating such a project, you have to figute out a different way.

I have since incorporated a few of these Petjacbs'-scraps in the piece.

When we went on vacation, I was smart enough to forget a few things at home, amongst them the Encyclopedia of Embroidery Stitches by Mary Thomas, which I have been using to give me new ideas for stitches and that I have been working through (from back to front) almost systematically. So I searched on my computer where I might have saved the files from the online free hand embroidery class I once took with Anne Lange, but I couldn't find the files. For a few days I kept returning to my favorites, but then I figured I had to something else and searched for a 'stitch dictionary' online - this one now teaches me German names for the stitches, which Mary Thomas wasn't giving me, of course. It also doesn't have wordy descriptions but shows the making of the stitches in photos. And already it has given me a couple of more new ones that I really like. For example, so far I had not realized that 'French knot' in English and 'Colonial knot' are different stitches... I have opened this dictionary as a tab on my phone, too, and am considering working through this one systematically from now on. Except for the fact that it has 206 stitches and there aren't quite as many days left in the year. However, I might know some of the ones I can find in here...

In any case, here are a few recent additions from the days of our vacation.

Because of the problem with not-diminishing masses of scraps

I took a decision to exclude from the potential pool those scraps that are pretty much just plain strips leftover from whatever strip project I was doing. These have been banned to a corner in the thread box right now.