Putting A Deer On It

I made a new towel for the shop.  I felt so industrious doing it, like as if I had a job or something, but in a good way.

Here we are, in progress.

Can't go wrong with a deer, right?

And here we are finished.

Coming soon to an Etsy shop near you.

And by "an Etsy shop," I mean MY Etsy shop.  And by "soon" I mean right about now.

Can we talk for a moment about making things for "the market"?  I like it.  I mean, on the one hand, it's a cold capitalist endeavor that cheapens the very fact of art.  On the other, it frees me to work with the same sorts of ideas again and again, to find their strengths and weaknesses, their nuances.  I can put that deer everywhere!  I love stitching it and it looks lovely.  But I feel like in Art-Capital-A that I have to push myself further on each piece.  I can't just, you know, put a deer on it and call it art.   But with the tea towels, I can use the same techniques multiple times.  I am truly enjoying the look of the contrasting thread with the zig-zag stitch that I'm using to appliqué the flowers to the towel.  And really, working on these pieces has pushed me further.  I'm using my machine more, stitching different types of fabric together, which requires some finesse.  Doing it en masse as I have been has taught me so much about how fabric acts, among other things.  Do you ever have those moments when you just know you're doing what you're supposed to?  Yeah, I'm having one right now.