diary of a collage

People ask where my ideas come from. Often they begin with a photo and a feeling. Here I began with an old photo of two girls - it gave me a feeling of being lost, of searching. So I pulled out fabrics I had printed, and picked out one with text and birds to balance it.
A bit of bright red fell out. I liked that and let it stay. I added more hand-printed fabric.: text, texture, and, blurred, an image of a woman:
The bird piece now felt like too much fuzziness. Something needs to be readable. I swapped it out for a cleaner image. I added a quote, as punctuation:
Now to fill in the blanks. I want the viewer's eye to move around the picture. More warm colors come, and I move the red dash to pull the eye down to and back up from the bottom corner:


I paint a little, stitch, and some old lace and a few transparent bits to smooth transitions. The diagonal in the middle happened when I pressed the piece, but I liked it. I backed the piece Indonesian fabric. The edges, which I meant to cut off, look good. They were just long enough so I brought around as a frame. It is done. It goes to the Cambridge Artist's Coop later this week: