A new piece of work finally finished

For all the reasons mentioned in my previous post, it's been ages since I finished a piece of work but finally I have and hopefully there'll be a couple of others finished soon. As you can see I'm still being inspired by the Atacama Desert and think I will be for sometime to come. I loved it!  

I don't usually like to cut things up (cowardly me?) but found it easy to cut this one, probably because I didn't have a fixed image of the end piece in mind and therefore wasn't worrying I would ruin the thing I was trying to create. The blues in the piece represent the big blue desert sky and the underground water supply whilst the other colours represent those created by the minerals in hard salty landscape. 

The piece is made up of layers, the top layer is paper laminatation that I created from one of my designs....

...which I bonded onto a simply printed piece of fabric which just happened to have running stitch going around the edge like a frame. The under stitching is very difficult to see in the final piece but I liked the effect  this created and would like to experiment more with this technique although I'm not sure how motivated I'll be to stitch knowing that it will be covered up by another layer.

The layered fabric was then cut into squares and rectangles and moved around until I achieved a composition that I was happy with. Each cut piece was then layered on black fabric with black thread couched along the edge to neaten it.

Not all the pieces were stitched but I rubbed white screen ink on those that were to emphasis the stitching and to represent the crusty salty surface of the desert. These were then applied to a mono printed background and additional stitching added to represent the pathways linking the elements of the desert together. 

Stitching the pieces to the background should have been the easiest task, but it took ages with lots of unpicking and re-positioning until I was happy....funny how the tasks you think will be quick and easy often take much longer than you think..