Photo Friday : Looking At Details

I thought it might be interesting to look at a detail from a larger quilt, instead of looking at a whole quilt...though in fact, this might be a piece in its own right...or at least, could be with a fairly minor change to the stitching (any thoughts?).  It is a detail of 'Flying Circus', a whole cloth, made from Evolon, which I showed you in full here.   For convenience, though, I'm showing it at the bottom of this post.  Remember you can click on the image for a closer look; try not to be distracted by the rather obvious cat hair...another use for a photograph of your work! The detail, though, encapsulates for me the strength of this piece, and particularly the quilting.  I used machine stitch to delineate what I thought were the 'features' of the piece; here, they are two strange flying beings...angels, perhaps?  More likely trapeze artists, given the context... but I still think the one on the left is an angel.

It's interesting to consider the different effects that the hand stitching has.  The larger stitches, to me, are air; the smaller, tightly grouped stitches, the ground.  To be honest, none of that occurred to me at the time; it wasn't until I found the flying angels, and the horse (elsewhere in the quilt), that I realised that this was a 'flying circus'; no reference to Monty Python at all...I'm not particularly fond of their humor.

I think it's really useful to look at parts of a piece of work, as well as the whole; it can inform you of what's really going on in the piece.  I know I've found this particular exercise enlightening...I hope you do, too.