Coming Together

As the holiday shopping season begins its inevitable decline, I've mostly gotten my store back to pre-holiday levels. With the exception of a few collars and a couple of masks everything listed is made and ready to ship. Which of course means I have time to work on my new mask project.

Have you ever created something that you knew you never, ever wanted to remake again even at the beginning? Yeah, this piece is already one of those. My brilliant idea to start with the wire assembly completed has made things, well...complicated. Every stitch required that I do a little hand aerobics to get around the thing. Anyway, yesterdays first success was deciding on the center motif. It needed a focal design and I had originally thought I would go with a simple rounded center like a flower base, but that was not 'focal' enough so I picked one of the motifs I've been working with a lot lately and worked onto the eye portion. Here I'm just holding it trying to determine how much space it needs to attach to the forehead wire.

Once, I had that done I started working the vine pattern across the sides and top. I started before I did any math. This, like the wire thing, was probably a mistake. I did some measuring as I reached the center to try and attach correctly, but on the way back down the second side I still managed to throw symmetry out the window. I also realized about this point that pressing this piece is going to be a little troublesome. You see, my masks honestly look like a mess right off the needle. It takes an iron and steam to coax the rings and picot where they belong. I know this is not the preferred method for blocking a piece, but it works for me. In this picture I'd not quite gotten around yet, but I thought I was done for the day anyway.

I was wrong. I had one more section to work on. I finished the vine on a different section of the design that I had begun, so I made some adjustments. Sure, I could start all over with it, but I'm not gonna. Instead I decided to add a simple scallop along the bottom edge. This will eventually be embellished with black sequins filling in the space the scallops are creating. The 'not a mask' that I'm attempting to recreate covers a very large portion of the face, but I think another row on the bottom would be overkill particularly given that addition of sequins.

So what's left is to fill the space left and that task is hurting my head a bit. Working with a curved design always stretches my skills to their limit. I must keep placing the design on my face to get a sense of the actual space rather than the flat measurable space. I do have a mannequin head, but her face is just enough smaller than mine to be a poor substitute for a real head. I'm not sure I want to work too hard on these spaces as I know much of my work will be covered in the afore mentioned sequins. Then there's the spiders...but I'm getting ahead of myself. I promise to show you the 'inspiration' for this project when it is complete, but I don't want spoil the end result with a preview and there is much work left before it is what it is suppose to be.