Graceful Slivers

I was asked about the way in which I arrived at the "graceful slivers" in the black and white piece in the previous post. Taking tissue-like paper, I cut two horizontal lines from opposite sides of an approx. 12" x 12" piece, having them not connect. Next I pulled each of these cut lines apart at the edge. Doing this causes a buldge or pucker at the top and bottom which I corrected by slicing vertical lines which almost met the horizontal lines. I then allowed these vertical lines to relax, overlapping a bit and taped them in place. This allows the piece to lay flat, or nearly. At this point I have the shape of the line that I want to place in my fabric, so I made a pattern of that line. I layed another piece of tissue on top of the pattern I just made. With a soft pencil, I traced the outline of the line exactly, then penciled in a 1/4" seam allowance on either side of the traced line, as seen in the picture. This was my line pattern which was used to cut the white fabric for the lines. The black fabric's cut line has to match up with the white line and gets cut beyond the end of the white line to the edge of the fabric. I make markings along the seam line to match the two sides when pinning. To clarify, I cut the black fabric from end to end, even though the white is only participating in a portion of that cut line. If you click on the picture in the previous post, you will see that the white/black seam line goes from one side to the other side.

I could have used a smaller piece of paper if all I wanted was the lines, but I wanted to know how the lines looked on a 12x12 piece, which will be the size of the ultimate piece I make.

This way of making my line design on paper first is a bit of work, and I could just freehand it all, as I learned in Nancy Crow's workshop, but in this situation, I wanted to see my lines on paper before committing to fabric.