lotsa color and joy

I am fighting another cold/sinus infection. 😞  My words all feel like alphabet soup, so I will try to use them sparingly.  

I finished a few pieces that are available on my Etsy.  Lots of joy went into making each of these, and now I'm out of thread, tea, and oomph. 😆 Thankfully the only thing I'm good for right now is drinking tea and doing some questionable online shopping (I have a vague memory of buying more thread on Black Friday).

Please enjoy!

This collage is made out of 100% tea bags and tags.  It was weirdly tough to measure the petals, but I really enjoyed cutting out the petal strips, putting them in a box, shaking the box up, laying them out, and matching them up together.  Sometimes I cut as I go.  Other times I cut up everything at the beginning and put all the different pieces in different boxes.  I did a rough sketch and then cut up everything I needed for this piece.  I did need to lay out all the petals again, because I measured wrong the first time.  But I'm glad I stuck with it, because the piece turned out very nicely. 

I decided to go very crazy and colorful with this flower.  I used a lot of multicolor thread and also mixed up other threads based mostly on rash, impulsive feelings of happiness. 😄  I did sketch out the flower and a color-coded map so I wouldn't go too crazy.  So there is a map under that craziness that says, "orange" or "go crazy here." And it's written in permanent ink because I was feeling pretty confident when I drew this.  I love my washable fabric markers, but I constantly have to redraw lines that have been smudged.  Because this piece filled the whole hoop, it needed the permanent marker or I would have been the one with crazy written on my face.  

I did about half of this zen piece on a roadtrip I'll blog about once my brain is less foggy, and the other half on Thanksgiving.  Sometimes I hunker down and do nothing but sew.  I'm not sure if the sense of urgency is due to a concern that I'm going to forget the completed picture in my head or if I just completely lose track of time and surroundings.  Probably both.