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Our class days were spent dying fabrics and canvas and stamping leaves on fabrics using rubber stamps and fresh real leaves.  Piles of colored materials accumulated at everyone's table site. Thursday, we cleaned up all the paint mess, covered the tables with white tablecloths and moved on to a multitude of ways to make leaves and other decorative bits using fusing, bonding, dissolvable stabilizer (Solvy), machine stitching, hand stitching and wrapping, etc.  Thursday afternoon and Friday, we began to look at all our stuff and select things to put together in a small collage. We all had a lot more than we needed for one piece, so a great deal of sorting and choosing was required.

I wasn't happy with the dye results on any of my pieces, but I had a gorgeous piece of chiffon with flowing brown patterns on dark blue-greens and brown with touches of reddish brown and yellow-green.  When I used this as an overlay on a somewhat gaudy pink/yellow/green/blue piece of congress cloth it looked wonderful. I then spent a lot of time turning the chiffon and the congress cloth various ways looking for the best combination of dyed patterns. I finally basted outlines around a 4 X 6 area and manipulated other bits and pieces from my collection of materials.  

It still needed something, and just as we broke for lunch, the piece of nylon Shibori rope, now colored from two dyeing jobs, fell across the developing collage and WOW; its frayed knot was just the right touch!  Back in Nebraska, I fine tuned the placement of the main elements, embellished the arrangement with some hand stitching and added little touches of wrapped strings, wrapped objects and beads.  The nylon knot inspired my table neighbors to name the piece "The End of my Rope".  I changed this to "Knot at the end of my Rope".  

This was my first choice class in 1999 because I wanted to explore the techniques offered, find out if I had any creative abilities and stretch them if I did.