My May BJP Remembering Morocco is finally finished. It seemed to take forever. While I worked on it, I wondered why that was. I have several reasons:
1. I didn't start on it until mid-May. We got home from the trip to Spain and Morocco in early May, but I needed to get over jet lag before I operated dangerous machinery, such as needles and scissors.
2. I needed some time to process the experiences of the trip before I could begin to interpret them in beads.
3. Things got busy--Tulip Time, the grandsons, all the meetings left over from April, all the May meetings, and all the end of the year grand finale meetings and celebrations. Whew! It was a wild month!
4. I wasn't crazy about anything but the memories and the color of blue. Don't try to talk me out of it! I know what I like. And what I don't like. I'm a strong-minded woman. When I'm not crazy about it, it takes longer.
5. I had to order beads for the background and had to wait for them to arrive.
6. Beading the background to go around the swirls took much too long. And it wasn't that much fun.
Those are my excuses for tardiness.
But I finished it. At last.
Technical Details:
The foundation is Lacy's Stiff Stuff painted with watered down blue Dye-na-Flow.
This page contains the usual combination of 15/0s and 11/0s plus some hexes, cubes, charlottes, one lentil, some long tubes, and some vintage spherical beads about size 6/0.
In addition to the backstitch, I used couching and the picot stitch.
The page is 2.5 inches by 3.5 inches.
The thread is blue Nymo D.
What I Was Thinking:
I was thinking about Morocco. Our time in Morocco was a stimulating and challenging sensory, intellectual and emotional experience. There is no way I could represent all of that. The blue sky in Asilah was absolutely stunning (see photo in previous post), so that sky became my little beaded memory. It was very windy, and we had sand in our clothes and hair that evening. The beaded swirls represent the wind. The two upright columns are Moroccan doorways. I'd love to go back to Morocco. I'd even love to go back and do everything we did again.
Issues That Came Up:
Ok, this blue is my favorite color. My really, really favorite color.
The more representational the beading is, the less I like doing it. The same thing happened with the BJP from April 2009. And I made a similar comment then, although I didn't read it until I went back to put the link in this post.
And I don't like doing backgrounds, either.
But now that I'm finished, I like this page. Especially the color. And remembering Morocco.
7 comments:
Its a GREAT blue!! I can see the Morrocan architecture in your beading. Very cool!
blue is my favorite color too, so when i looked at this my senses went into overdrive...in a good way! it's luscious. not sure i would be so crazy about the wind and the sand, but i'm glad you had such a good time there.
Lovely and striking, as always! I understand all of your reasons for feeling late with this one, and predicted reason #6 because of the piece's encrustedness before. That has to take a very long time! I love the look, but I haven't achieved it myself in any of my pieces. I think it would make me late too.
Whatever it is that helps you remember a special time, that is the *right* thing! The color blue...what a lovely page :-)
Yes, I understand getting bored with backgrounds and representational work... Yup, been there too. Yet in the end, as you say, this piece is stunning! It actually makes me want to visit Morocco (never thought that before) and it makes me want to do a monochomatic piece. Thanks for sticking with it!
Robin A.
This looks very Moroccan to me although I've never been there! I love the blue. For some reason it made me think of a sunset though!
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