April Challenge

Sharon Boggon's April Take It Further Challenge is, "How do you see change?" Here are my first thoughts:

Mostly positive: I like change and seem to adapt well. I think it is because we moved almost every year when I was little, in Montreal. Since then, I've moved to Toronto, Bermuda, England, and now live in the South of France. But this didn't give me inspiration for stitching, so I put the question like this:

What does change mean to me? This gave:

Seasons: Spring into summer into fall into winter and starting again. I could do a number of panels to get this, or make it a circle or even a spiral - need to figure out how to do this, maybe later in the month.

Plant lifecycle: Seeds into plants into flowers into falling leaves making compost to nurture the seeds falling to make new plants. I had a look at Sharon Boggon's Take A Stitch Tuesday blog, thinking I might use new stitches, to change my habits because I keep coming back to my favourites, French Knots and Fly Stitch. Also, the TIF Challenge grew out of the TAST Challenge which I didn't do as that was in the days before I had discovered embroidery blogs. I came across the Oyster Stitch and it's been in my head ever since - I see it as seeds against the earth colours she set for the April challenge, so this looks a likely candidate.

MCEscher's Metamorphosis. I'd love to do a long runner with shapes morphing into each other. Maybe after I have a go at the seed idea.

Sayings: What goes around comes around. Plus ca change plus c'est la meme chose. Chinese whispers. I could free machine somehow. I think Chinese whispers could be really funny.

Evolution: Using that diagram of ape to man that we all seem to know. I researched this a bit thinking it was called The Ascent of Man, and found it is called "The March of Progress" by Rudy Wallinger, first published in "Early Man" 1970 Time Life book by F. Clark Howell. There have been numerous takes on this, including this one which I found amusing while sitting at the computer doing this research...

A Dinosaur: I thought I could repeat the original March of Progress motif twice and attach it to the back of a dinosaur shape, like those plates that stick up - I'll sketch the idea in a minute - to represent "standing on the shoulders of giants", a quote in a letter during Darwin's acrimonious debates with some of his peers - I'll have to find that reference, too, so I can write it up properly. It would be a visual gag on Darwin, evolution, change.

Finally, still thinking about evolution, I thought I might want to use Fibonacci progressions, as that is the way things grow in nature, so I did a paper pattern this morning to think about size and placement of objects, using 1,1,2,3,5,8,13. Rainbow's End made me remember about Fibonacci numbers in a post last week.

Here's what I found in my stash to make a start...

just need to get the threads out now...

A big thank you to Sharon for adding me to the challenge list - I just noticed it in the blog the other day - and for coming up with these wonderful ideas.