This is the second piece I decided to work on. I photographed the bench on the beach at Huntington Point in 2007. I’ve always wanted to turn it into a textile piece but it needed people sitting on the bench.

A couple of summers ago I was doing the day trip thing with a friend. We stopped at the Tangled Garden near Wolfville and I people watched. There were a couple of young women sitting on chairs near a picnic table. I asked if I could rearrange their chairs and photograph them from behind. I’ve been playing around with the relative size of the gals and the bench to get the proportions in balance. I’m close. Although now that I’ve mocked up the sky, the bay, the faint line of shore in the distance (needs to be much narrower than the strip I’ve got place holding it), the rocky beach and the grass, I think the bench and the women need to be a bit larger for the image to work as I imagine it.

Next steps: add fusible web to the pieces of fabric, trim them to size; thread paint the setting, print the gals and the bench to size, fussy cut them and place them in the scene. To make the image work, I need to build the shadow cast by the women and the bench coming toward the foreground (the direction of the shadow dictated by the position of the sun on the young woman’s hat). I don’t know whether to do that with permanent markers or ink pencils – I’ll have to experiment before I decide.

Now I really need to get on with that wedding gown!