Overcoming Stitcher's Block

Hallo en alle.  Wie gehts?

I find I am immersed in all things German this week.  In addition to having a German exchange student, Dominik, here this week (he helped me re-name my blog header for today), Jim's company has also been bought by a German company and he will be traveling there for a week the day after Dominik leaves.

It's been very busy since Dominik arrived last Wednesday.  We've had many adventures and spent a day in Baltimore, New York and Washington D.C.  Phew!  Today Dominik is going with another family to the Washington Wizards NBA game so I have a day off and can catch up on a few things, like writing this blog post.

Here's a picture of Jack (far right) and his friend (far left) with 3 German students in the middle at the Top of the Rock overlooking New York City.  Dominik is on the middle left.

We're having a great time even though it's been a bit of whirlwind.  Dominik is soaking in lots of language, culture, American food and he's even been hanging out with some of the nieces.  He's an internet DJ in Germany so he knows a lot about music that is popular in Europe and the US.  I am also happy to report that he likes Cozies for warming up his bed so I am sending him back home with one.   Let Cozy Love spread to Germany!

This morning, I did find some time to work on my wall for Mrs. Rose.

Remember I wanted to find a way of bringing the wall to the foreground so the seams would drop to the background?   I considered a number of different methods such as stitching, stippling or painting the blocks...but rejected them all.  Then I thought I might use organza cut into "blocks" to stitch onto the background but I didn't have a range of gray silk organza to work with...and it still looked too flat.

That's when I got the idea to print out a concrete block wall onto organza fabric.

First, I found a concrete block picture I liked on the internet...

Then I measured the size of the rectangle blocks on my piece and re-sized the bricks on my picture in Photoshop so that they would be the same size.  I then copied and repeated my re-sized wall section until it filled an entire 8.5"x11" sheet.  I printed a test sheet on paper to make sure that the size of the blocks would fit on the piece (middle sheet below).

Next, I used this ExtravOrganza product by Jacquard to print out my blocks.  You can see that the organza is pretty transparent...



But I'm hoping that when I stitch them randomly over the wall, that I can vary the shading by which blocks I choose for each space.



I'll be back to let you know if it works.

Dominik leaves on Friday so we're trying to squeeze in everything before then.

I'll post again if I can.

Auf Wiedersehen!