Inspirational construction

Having got to a point where it's now essential to make decisions on the construction of the ribs and still with no wood to play with, I suddenly got inspiration from my afternoon cup of green tea.

I had been ruminating for a while on the possibility of making the ribs from free machine embroidery (FME) but hadn't worked out how to make them stand out from the main panels, so when I saw the bubbles I got the light bulb moment.

I set up my water soluble fabric in a calico mount so as not to waste any as the one I use is very expensive. As you can see I've had to extensively patch the waste pieces from my Personal Assessment Piece which took 6m!

I was looking for a gold  colour thread but somehow this one turned orange after the washing away process, totally unexpected as it was an expensive thread, so I decided to try a turquoise on the other side, to see if that worked better.

You can just see on the RHS piece that I caught up the calico frame while stitching, but as this is still in the prototype stage it didn't matter and even provided a different effect when I punched the holes through.

The little strips on the LHS are the wedges that go between the two curved shapes, I did 2 as I wanted to see which colour would work best.

In this bottom close up you can see that I've joined the edges of the ribs with an overcast stitch using hand dyed silk thread.

At this stage I didn't have another panel worked to insert next to the new rib, so I decided to sketch what I had so far to see if it might work.

In this first sketchh I'm also looking at the colour dynamics while working each side in a different colour.

As you can see from my sketchbook page I'm starting to think more about how I can refine this piece, lots of things to think about.

I have now worked a 3rd panel so I can see if the FME idea for the ribs will work.

I think they would be a great alternative to wood, but I do want to try that first before committing to a final design.

I bought some dowel rods yesterday so my next challenge will be to steam them and see if they will hold a curve.