A Cold and Barren Place/ Winter's Details

January got an early start because I knew I would be flying back to Maryland on Jan 2nd and then Wayne would be coming back from Iraq on the 5th. With 6 weeks of mail, a husband home, and a vacation to spend time together I knew that I would have 2-3 weeks where I would have little or no time to work on my page. I got a decent start on it while I was still in Iowa and then didn't get back to it for at least a couple of weeks.

January started with 2 large stones to go with the picture of the pile of rocks. I put them in first because I wanted to know where I was putting them for the design but realized as I worked that maybe it would have been better to pencil them in and add them at the end. They are a bit heavy and made the page a bit awkward to work on.




I chose the background fabric because it looked like ice cracking on a pond to me, I chose to accentuate that by outlining the edges of the patterns with the Sulky Sliver thread that I used on December's page.

Like the previous months January has cord branches to be couched down. I like that in most of these pieces that the cord branches join the parts of the page together, they help move the eye around the piece.

I used very small star shaped sequins for my flowers and surprisingly enough Wayne was suggesting I use more of them. He liked the way they looked. Wayne is always reminding me that "More is not always Better." I used the wrap around beaded border that I had used for my July page picking up the gold/amber and blue colors of the page. Having a solidly beaded border works really well with a page that doesn't have a lot of other beads on it.