More on the Battenburg piece

Sorry for the delay in posting.  Grrr--Blogger has NOT been playing nice with uploading pictures.  Yesterday, I was planning to post, I promise, but it kept "freezing" in the middle of uploading.  I finally got frustrated and gave up because we were getting ready to go to a friend's house for dinner.

So, when I read that my only really regular reader was waiting for another post, I felt guilty.  I had thought I would wait until tomorrow, but I decided to give it another try.  And on the third try, it worked.  I have at least one other post in the pipeline, so we'll see how that one goes.

Anyhoo, my DH was wanting me to try different areas of color instead of tiny dabs of color mixed together (my typical style).  I am trying to work on this but am having trouble.  Here's one try:

Ummm, well!  Hmmm.  Not so great.  OK, I thought, let's try to unify this piece somehow.  I've heard people talk about doing a "wash."  Why not mix half paint and half water and paint over it?  I chose gold.  Ummm, well!  It washed, all right!  I now had a gold piece, and the lace still looked lighter than the background.  It was Not A Good Thing.  Lesson learned:  Use a lot less paint when trying to do a "wash."  

I couldn't even stand to take a picture of it.

Alllllrighty, lets brush some dark blue paint over that lace so I can at least SEE the thing.  Then I ended up with a little excess purple from another project and added that.
Okeydokey.  Well, the good thing is that I can SEE it!  I think I need to work on this piece some more.  But I have learned two important things:  (1) Use a much weaker "wash," and (2) Even with a complicated lace motif, you need something in the background or it's blah.  I'm not liking the Lutradur by itself as well.  I do have a couple of subtle backgrounds in mind when I try my next lace motif piece.  So this is a valuable learning experience.  I think I can still salvage this piece, but I'm waiting for a little inspiration.

When I mention my DH talking about different large areas of color, he was referring to the photos I've shown him of the work at Stitchtherapy that I have linked at the side.  I don't know how she does that, but the effect is marvelous.  It has defined areas yet is a unified piece.  I clearly have much more to learn!  If anyone can enlighten me, I would welcome suggestions on how to achieve that kind of look.