cloudy with a chance of great

i'm happy to say that i have completed the little series project that i was obsessing over for the past few weeks.
it all started with this beautiful silver embroidery thread.


i saw it and i had to have it, though i didnt know exactly what i was going to do with it. and then i came up with an idea and tried it out with little success and much frustration. this stuff is not really so easy to work with. it cannot easily be split into single strands, which is what i had intened on doing with it....
and then that little saying popped into my head, "every cloud has a silver lining."
and that is how it started. i had already been really into cross-stitch, and was working on all-black silhouettes, which is the style of cross-stitch that got me hooked in the beginning. so i thought, hmmm, a black cloud silhouette with a silver lining. okay.
and here it was.


well, i knew it wasnt exactly as great as i had intended, but i saw the potential and the idea was growing.
and then i conceded that cross-stitch didnt HAVE to be all-black silhouettes. and so i mixed it up. i got embroidery floss in varying shades of grey.




i was increasingly happier with the shape and execution of each cloud that i did. after a bunch of single clouds of varying colors using the same size embroidery hoop, i moved onto little groupings of same-colored clouds. and by this time, i was obsessed. i wanted to make more and more and more and more.
eventually, i was limited by the number of embroidery hoops that i had. and that was probably a good thing, because really, i would have kept going until i had a whole wall-full.
the last one that i did was this white cloud.


i liked the idea of barely being able to see the white stitches on the white fabric. (and, once i get more hoops, i will do one that doesnt have any filler at all - just the silver lining). but then i got excited by the idea of giving the cloud a little bit of dimension through shading. it worked. i was pleased.

i wanted to hang these floating all over a wall. i framed them within their embroidery hoops, painting the smaller, cheap hoops black (i tried white and it just didnt look good at all), and leaving the quality, vintage hoops as they were.


um, and this is just because i am a geek:


i finished the clouds yesterday. and then last night i was making the dough for a tart that i am making for a dinner party tonight (mmmm, pear-ginger tart....). well the tart dough called for egg yolks. so i had left over egg whites. and what can one make from egg whites? meringues. oh, i do love meringues. anyway, while i was piping the puffs onto the parchment, i was struck with the idea -- hey! clouds! light, fluffy, white -- just like meringues -- and so i stopped making standard swirly meringues and made cloud-shaped ones instead. what a sweet little stroke of serendipity.