I've been working steadily on a few large pieces that I'm not willing to show you yet, in fact I wasn't even ready to show my crit group.  Sometimes I find myself working on something that is not cropped, in the middle of stitching and kind of ugly, and I know it will be ok, but it's still kind of ugly right now, so it remains unseen.

I did feel like I needed a break from the large work though, and started thinking about my SAQA auction piece for this year.  I miss the monthly challenges of the 12's, the chance to experiment a little, so I gave my self permission to mess around with some of my small precious pieces of black that discharges to white.

I started with a narrow piece that couldn't really be used for anything else, and looked at black on white, then white on black.  I used soy wax resist on the left using a Kitska, which is used in making Ukrainian easter eggs and makes a very thin line. On the right,  I tried making thin lines with pure bleach using the same method.

For my SAQA auction submission, I stitched a piece of fabric with wool felt underneath to shrink it up for texture, then tried using soy wax to make marks.  This method does not make crisp marks, because the soy wax stays on top of the textured piece when making these thin marks, so I get a lot of greyed areas, but I also get the wonderful black lines marching across it. This will have a little hand stitching added in.

On this piece I made the bleach marks first, then stitched it to the wool felt and shrunk it.  A totally different look.  This piece is only about 10 inches wide, too narrow for the auction,  but I will use it for something else.

Both of these pieces seem slightly tilted to me, which is typical, I think I look at life a little tilted.