these are the sort of fabrics I buy for use in the pictorial applique. I use my hand-dyes etc for leaves etc in the foreground, obviously, but some of these are great fussycut in backgrounds or as elements for building your own flora. The grasses in particular are very useful, as are various stone/pebble prints. There’s one more image of wood/stone etc textures to come. If you’re trying to choose fabric to bring along to a landscape & critters workshop, use these pics as a guideline – you won’t want anything too stylised, and you’ll want to try and have all fabrics with a similar style for one project. For eg, some of my commercial prints have a drawn outline and/or look a little like botanical drawings, some are more painterly & have obvious brushstrokes while still looking acceptably realistic, some are almost photographic. I wouldn’t mix all those together in the same piece, as a rule, or not without thinking about what sort of pen & threadwork I can do to make them play nice.
I’ve never had a reject pile quite as odd as the one for the “Fire in the Head” piece (which is still a WIP, and therefore not entered into the intended comp – it kept leading me away from the “my indulgence” theme, and I decided it was really dumb to try and force my squirrelly peg into a that particular square hole). I tend not to have too many reject piles anyways, since I’m a bit miserly with goodies (hence the incredible slowness of my work – I am trying to get past this particular idiocy, honest) but this one is going to be a doozy to put to good use (I refuse to call it “re-purposing” because UGH, enough already with the craptastic bizspeak).
I didn’t like the “plain” yellow directly on the image either, so I got a wild hair to turn them a bunch of separate looooong, skinny, twisty, twirly quilts which I would then physically feed over & under & through etc the main section & each other. Thumping great pain in the bum it was, too … and in the end, I did not like. Too heavy, too solid, too … something. Neat idea, and something I might like to play with in future, but maybe something I need to be thinking about in advance rather than in an attempt to solve a colour issue. So. Six or seven metres of inch-wide flame-quilted knotty strips also on the reject pile, also seen thataway –> They’re kind of interesting, but what the bloody hell am I going to do with them? The colourful strips & scraps I can use in various ways, postcards if all else fails, but these have me stumped.
This is what I ended up doing instead. It’s very, very bright. And very, very slow. Cutting & placing umptyump little flames in the right colours twisting the right way is, surprisingly enough, not tedious, but it is hell on my back. And I kind of weird myself out when I get all bright & lairy, so I’m sitting there quietly boggling at it out the corner of my eye while I cut & fiddle & fuss. It’s actually a bit more subtle in person, but we’re talking about “a bit” that could probably be measured in nanosomethings …
I received an unexpected squishy from 
Mum managed to get some great background pieces dyed for them while we were working, despite burning herself really badly about a week ago, by using Dad as like “go go gadget arms” heh – scrunch here, pleat there, let me pour the dyes, ok squeeze there, rinse that, etc. One of the pieces she did (pictured above) is a wild technicolour bushfire, and since none of the girls pounced on it, it came home with me (shuddup!). How cute is this wee iron Lorraine brought in? I got a Clover mini iron a while back, but if I’d seen these first it’d have been a tossup … 
to the left, after stretching (photo taken by the framer). Below, framed (scuse reflections etc; this is why we wanted a good photo taken after stretching but before framing):
CHITCHAT