Landscape in the Cotton Reels

It's beautiful weather here today but I have spent quite a lot of  it inside in front of my PC. Next weekend is my 'Taking Textiles Further' course and I wanted to get some design work done so that I could discuss it with our tutor Janet Edmonds. There are only 3 of these weekends a year and the next one will probably not be until November, so you need to make the most of the opportunity.

In a previous post I showed how I was exploring the cotton reels in the landscape. Today I was exploring, landscapes in cotton reels! Firstly, I took a few cotton reels and randomly through them down on the some paper, took a photograph and traced round the outline of the reels.  I placed the tracing over some of my landscape photographs and thought it had potential, so continued to work with the idea digitally. Here's some of my results:
 

Photograph of a local Field

Bluebell wood

The images I was looking forward to using the most were of Dutch bulb fields but they didn't quite live up to my expectations.



Dutch bulb field

 So I made a pattern with it to see if that improved things.... but I don't think they did.

 

Conversely, I was surprised by how this image of a snowy road worked. It needs some tweaking but I feel it has potential.





 

Snowy road



So what next? Now that I'm clearer about what type of images make stronger designs, I will look through my landscape images again, just as soon as my (now) square eyes are back to normal. I would also like to explore different arrangements for my reels but still keep it simple and of course the different arrangements of reels will reveal different parts of the landscape. Eventually, I would like to stitch a piece, where the stitching in the trunk of the cotton reel is inspired by a landscape.