Combining ingredients

I have recently been working on a group of images which have been bubbling away in my subconscious for some considerable time. 

I find it fascinating how one project hitting the buffers can jolt another one to the front of my mind.  In this case a fiddly long-winded process of stitching together silks (which of course were shredding wafts of threads everywhere) looked all wrong to me when I finished.  And so, as I wanted to save the elements I had printed onto some silk, I had a deal of unpicking to do.

I was unwilling to prolong negative feelings, so put off the unpicking that day, turning instead to my limbo design files. Now I have four archival inkjet prints on A3+ Bockingford watercolour paper chosen for its texture.  Although these images were never intended for stitch, I still want a textured surface.

The base of all of these images is taken from scans of monotype ghost prints.  The figures are all part of my vocabulary of drawings over many years, some of which I have used several times before in different contexts.
Meanwhile I have also done all the unpicking necessary of the aborted/abhorred silk project, and have reconfigured the elements I had originally wanted to keep simple anyway.  I have materials such as dupion silk left over from my knitwear days, and my conscience keeps telling me I should not waste it, so from time to time I try to dream up ways of using it.  As yet such contrived projects have never turned out well. 

I think it is possibly because so far my thinking about using particular materials has been technique-driven design, whereas I seem to be much more satisfied being image-driven.