The first elephant

When I think of Asian elephants I think of India.  This is where, with exception of the circus or the zoo, I have had my most personal experiences of elephants.  For me. their presence is so intertwined with the life of the inhabitants that it is impossible to think of them separately.  

The resounding images that stay with me of India is the beautiful colours of the sari's of the women.  The use of gold stitching, beads and bright colours in their clothing as they would float like beautiful birds in the midst of rubbish and that dull colour of a mass of humans.  Even doing hard manual labour, the women looked beautiful.

 

One of the hotels we stayed in was the home of a Maharajah.  He and his family lived on the top floor and the lower floors were rented out as a hotel.  All the walls had the most amazing painting.  Again lots of gold.  (We only had electricity for a few hours a day so never had good light to take photos.)

All those bells on the elephants .  I have used colonial knots to try and represent these.  As to the shape, I loosely used the design off the curtains in one of the bedrooms.

 

I used a batik base with a sheer printed fabric over the top of it and then stitched this with gold thread.  I appliqued the design onto the sheer fabric first then layered it onto the batik.

I stitched the outline using a metallic thread and then outlined the piece using colonial knots and some back stitch.  ( I used crotchet thread to do this.)  So this weeks design. 

The Bollywood elephant.