Step 2. Working out the design

(bit of Apologies if you have been waiting with bated breathe for my next installment on how not to make an Art Quilt. I had a great but exhausting time at the Festival of Quilts, plus a holiday, so have been a bit lax with the blogging)
So now this is where I sketched and sketched and refined the design until I was totally happy with it... ..or maybe NOT!!!
I painted the background fabric and without doing any sampling (big mistake) I went straight into getting my tree design onto the background.
I decided to paint some interfacing and cut out the tree from that. In my head I was hoping to stitch it down with some simple hand stitches that would be representational of the stitches I had seen on lots of baskets and other crafts like this.

I fused the interfacing onto the background fabric and began stitching.

Thankfully before I got too far I knew this wasn't going to work.
One, because the stitching was tearing through the interfacing and two, because I knew that I needed to reverse the light and dark. The white tree just wasn't working for me.

So....the interfacing became a mask and I painted out the background with a layer of white.

All seems well but there was some residual glue from the interfacing left on the background fabric. 

I decided to wash it out, and this would have been fine if I had done a proper job of heat fixing the white paint!

I was in too much of a rush again. 

Needless to say when the fabric came out of the machine a whole section of the white had gone and the interfacing that I had removed was too much of a tangled mess to re-use.

This is what it looked like before I washed it. I was too upset to take photo afterwards.

Oh dear!!