Treeze and leaveze

First, you shred them up.  It's a great stress reducer, slicing and dicing your way through all the left over scraps and pieces.  A friend of mine calls these scraps, ORTs.  It's a real word, you know!

ort (ôrt)

noun

1. A small scrap or leaving of food after a meal is completed. Often used in the plural.
2. A scrap; a bit.

Origin: Middle English orte, food left by animals, probably from Middle Dutch : oor, out; see ud- in Indo-European roots + eten, to eat; see ed- in Indo-European roots.

Next, you rinse away the magic sheet (officially called Sulky Solvable) that you sewed all over the orts inside.  *A side note: Of course, I've been using the pre-packaged EXPENSIVE stuff and I've been complaining heartily about the steep increase in the product.  That's when I found out that you can buy the darned stuff on the bolt at Jo Ann's with your coupon, fer cryin' out loud.  The stuff I've been buying is small and narrow; on the bolt is quite a bit wider, so it would be a lot easier to use, I think!  

So, once, it's all rinsed out, this is what you have to dry on a towel before using.  They're all connected, but in some places, light and airy.  You can hardly see the threads holding it all together.  This is where I have a lot of fun with the orts.  I add pieces of onion, potato, avocado (thanks Seaside Stitchers), and carrot bags.  As long as it is natural fiber of some sort and the color is good, it often shows up inside my ortwork.  I also add threads that friends have given me, yarns and any other things that might give a nice, texture and or color.  I've even added little sticks!

Next, I started adding it to the places where I wanted to emphasize some leafy texture.  After about an hour of playing with it on the design wall, I decided it just wasn't working.  Nope, I didn't like it much because it looked too flat.  Now, that's sort of hard to do, since the ortwork is three dimensional! So I started using the last scraps of what I had left from the trunks (and there's not much!) to see if I could emphasize the trees.  Maybe, just maybe...

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I think I'm finally getting somewhere!

Work continues Tuesday, and hopefully it will be ready to quilt by the end of the week.  We'll see....we'll just see.  One never knows what those orts will do in the meantime!