Phew - thanks for your patience! Yesterday evening I made the last finishing stitches on "Connection" ;-))
After the theme was named, I knew immediately I wanted to do something about the emerging connection between the 6 of us. Finding the idea took me a while ... how about doing 6 different figures?
The first picture shows the six different figures, already ironed on white fabric. Five of the six were cut from my own hand-dyed fabrics, just for the dark purple I used a print. Now - how do I connect them ? Off to my yarn stash - and yes ! I found a beautiful colour combination. And started to do loops of yarn - by handstitching. Pretyy soon I realized - no way I get this finished the way I want to do it in time! Hand-couching takes so much time ... but I love the look of it.
After the hand-couching was done, I did small-scale stippling, from the outside in, added some more areas of stippling inside. For the finishing touches, I did one line of zig-zag on the outside first to stabilize the edges. As I did not like the plain white edge, I stepped yarn on top of the zig zag.
To me, this first challenge was truly about connecting. The six figures stand alone on background, but the yarn ties them together. That is exactly what I hope to become true for us, too!
