The process for “Deconstructed Seascape”

When I started my Ground series¹ in 2022 I remember feeling ambivalent about the whole process and even a bit about what I was making. And I can’t say that’s changed significantly since. I’m still struggling with the slowness of this process. I’m still struggling with the lack of paint and painting. And while I enjoy the finished projects, lots of the inbetween parts are tedious and I find myself thinking that I’m not really enjoying the process WHILE I’M DOING IT. I’m struggling with how to address that. For this piece, which I started out calling deconstructed seascape and have just kept calling it that, I tried to document it better than I have previously. So here’s notes and pictures of the process.

Notes for this project

These are my notes and my reference books for all the patterns/motifs I thought might work for this project. I went through the books and captured all the pieces I felt like conveyed a sense of water or waves or shells or sky or netting or flowers or clouds. I wanted to have several options when I started adding pieces to the work.

Beginnings

I’m not really sure when I had the realization that I could do a seascape like the landscapes in Ground but once I thought of it, I wanted to work on it very much. I had a big work day on April 2, 2025. I took multiple photos and posted them to Bluesky.

I wrote in my studio journal on 2 April:

Started work on a new crochet piece – a deconstructed seascape – and I’ve had a blast today pulling yarn together and crocheting and tea dying the base canvas. And now I’m making tassels. I wish I could bottle the feeling of the work I’m doing today. So good.

Oh to always have the feeling of starting something new! I adore the beginnings of any project.

Then on 3 April I started pulling things together out of all of the larger group of materials I went through:

On 7 April I had made a few things and ripped out a few things. I have notes in my studio notebook saying I ripped out the sand and made it smaller. Here’s the pic from that day:

What’s great about this pic is that you can see that the pieces I have done, I’ve not cut the strings yet so I can check for sizing. It doesn’t matter though, every time I block these pieces they turn out just slightly bigger than I’d really like. Grump emoji.

The middle, where I get more than a little annoyed

On 15 April I had a few more pieces done and I’d started the gray netting. I knew I wanted the gray netting to extend down past the bottom of the crocheted canvas piece. It’s doubling as both cloudy sky and fishing net. But the pattern was just enough of a tedious end/beginning repeat that I could never *quite* get it memorized so I could like watch tv or listen to a podcast. I had to continually remind myself which row I was on so I could finish one row and start the next and the two repeat rows were close enough that I had to keep checking the stitch diagram so I could remember. I think all together I had for different stitching sessions for the gray netting and I was annoyed for nearly every minute.

In my studio notes I have for 15 April “rearranged seascape” and for 16 April I have “worked on painting watercolor circles for the seascape.”

The (mostly) good stuff from the middle

I had some travel at the end of April and the beginning of May so the middle for this project is probably a lot longer because I traveled for almost two weeks and came home with covid. I isolated away from my studio (and my family!) for another week. With another few days/week after that trying to get caught up from travel and oh! also my youngest kiddo graduated from high school during May. So there’s lots of good, valid, and mostly lovely reasons why I was perpetually away from the studio for so long. But I was still grumpy about not having studio time.

By 17 May I have all of the individual crocheted pieces finished and I wet blocked them. (Wet blocking is where you submerge/wash a crochet piece and then pin it out so it will dry to a certain shape.) I posted these pics to Bluesky with this text: “There are parts of fiber work I love & parts I don’t. Pinning damp wool is not a sensory love. But beautifully shaped, dry pieces are a true joy, so I have to keep my eye on the results & power through.”

See? Grumpy.

Getting on to the end

On 21 May I was trying to figure out how to make this look *kinda* like seaweed:

So I phoned a friend (ok I texted with her because she’s both an elder millennial and an introvert and refuses to answer a phone call) and we brainstormed what seaweed should look like. And the answer that we arrived at was just chain stitch it and cluster up that fat yarn! Thanks, Jessica!

It’s a group effort

Also that day, I had a great conversation with my friend Elaine about what this piece needed and didn’t need. I tied up the bright pink in the bottom right because it was visually distracting.

Why was that bright pink there, you ask? Great question! Thanks for asking! It was there because the base piece for Deconstructed Seascape had started its life as this piece:

But when I was making A Sort of Homecoming I decided I needed a bigger base and so crocheted the bigger piece. The base that became Deconstructed Seascape was just hanging out with that bit of yellow and pink on it waiting to be picked up and used. I like that the pink is still there though because that tiny bit of color ties it to this other work. I also like it because so much abstract work is about layers of paint peeking through other layers of paint or collage. It adds depth and history and I like that very much.

Elaine and I also brainstormed what other paper pieces I might need to make to go on the seascape and after playing with things I had loose on my desk we got something I was really happy with.

You might be able to spot that circle with the yellow and the rust from this photo:

Both the small circles on the right and the new bigger circle on the left took a tea bath before making it back to the piece. I also like that the element of collage, the adding and removing of things remains. Even in this much different fiber practice I’m still collaging like it’s all paper. I also like how this circle piece that was originally watercolor practice, made it to this fiber piece. Nothing is wasted, everything is used.

What’s left to do

I still have to permanently attach the yellow circle and the three blue circles. Right now they are up there with double-sided tape and a paperclip. I’m thinking about how to attach them. One of the things I like about these pieces is fastening them together with clothespins and safety pins. It creates a feeling of impermanence and transition. It calls to mind both clothing construction/repair and laundry. All the good “traditional” women’s work I love to highlight. But I need to either sew these circles on or glue them. I’m leaning toward glue because I don’t want to have puncture holes in them. Those three blue circles function as a nod to both Japanese glass floats and the moon and I think stabbing holes in them takes away from that.

I also need to trim the strings. I won’t cut them off or hide them, just artistically trim them and let them flutter in the breeze.

Some takeaways

Writing this post has let me see all the things that have gone well in this process! The early materials gathering stage and researching patterns was particularly fun.

I took all of those notes in my daily bullet journal which was fine at the time but I’ve cycled out of that notebook and have to keep reaching for it to check my notes. They should more rightly be in my studio notebook. Or I should start a new notebook and call it something groundbreaking like “Projects.” Dontcha just love how every *revelation* from me is about ANOTHER notebook?

While I felt very frustrated in the middle because I wasn’t working on it for a month, now that I see it all laid out I realize that actual time spent working on this project wasn’t that long. Man, perception is everything isn’t it?

I’ve now done these deconstructed landscape pieces both using up scraps I have on hand or from other projects and this one where I made most the pieces with intention. I can’t decide which way I like better. They both feel very slow to me. I had a great conversation with Rachael at lunch this week and she says that the internet has distorted our idea of how long things take. I think she’s absolutely right. And I have to keep reminding myself that these things take as long as they take and enjoy that time along the way.

The stuff that’s always at the end

Have you changed directions in your work and still have big feels about it? I’d love to hear about it! Email me or start a conversation by leaving a comment on this post! If you’d like to keep up with what I’m working on, I’d love to have you as a newsletter subscriber. I include blog posts from here, cool things I find online, and pictures of my dogs. Sign up here.

1. If you go look at the Ground series linked above, there are a bunch of broken links to Instagram. I’m not on IG any longer and I haven’t yet fixed those links, and probably won’t if I’m being honest. ↩︎