Counterchange

I've been feeling really poorly this week - some kind of lurgy which has given me aches all over, a spinning headache and a very fluctuating temperature. This afternoon has been the first time I've felt almost human for a bit; most days I've been sleeping on and off as exhaustion took hold during the day. To add insult to injury, I also have the return of my tooth problems from last year, so am on Penicillin. This has the unpleasant side effect of making my morning cup of tea -  and most other things for that matter - taste like earwax! Yuk.

Today should have been my next City and Guilds at Barbara's, but I felt too poorly to go. However, I've brightened enough to try out the beginnings of a little counterchange with scraps of fabric. This moves on from my repeating patterns last week, to using fabric and appliqué for pattern making. Counterchange is where the same image or motif is repeated in the reverse colours - in this case a lime green furnishing fabric (a remnant bin find from somewhere or other) and a rather nice deep maroon shot silk (a recycled charity shop shirt). Neither colour comes quite true in the picture, but they're rather hard to capture. Here I'm using the most simple form of counterchange, a chequerboard pattern of alternating squares.

I've switched the orientation of the deep red silk in each row, so that there's a subtle change in the tone of these squares, along with the more obvious contrasts between the red and lime green. Again, the photograph doesn't quite capture this. I intend using subtle running stitch to stitch the silk down and hope that the red squares don't fray too much; I've tried to strip away the warp and weft threads on the edges with masking tape, before pinning them down, but I guess there will be more bits to clear off by the time the stitching is done.