Creating a Focal Point

This little wallhanging collage is another challenge. Now that its starting to look like a Halloween Village, working on it is almost addictive. 

Yesterday, I started adding windows and doors and steps, along with little characters cut from Halloween fabrics. The pattern book gives many suggestions for the steps to take, but it is up to the individual to envision them.

This next step involves creating a focal point in the collage and then having your eye travel around the village from it. Whenever I select fabrics, I know that one of them has to be the focal or focus fabric around which the quilt is built.

For whatever reason, I have always experienced visions or imagery for my days both as I fall asleep at night or when I begin to wake in the mornings. I got into the habit of programming my sleep so that my body would heal to the very cells and inner core and that I could wake refreshed. 

This little Village is evolving with each scrap of fabric I layer on it. Some are glued in place, like all the choices I have made in my life; and some are simply there as potential.

The pattern book says to draw an imaginary tic-tac-toe grid over the piece and where the lines intersect is a good place for the focal points. This act takes the work out of the flow of intuition and places it more into logic and reason.

I honestly believe that when I am new or learning a process that I need both parts of my consciousness and subconscious to get the work done. Its not enough for me to quilt by the seat of my pants. Its too much for me to live unconsciously.

Its interesting that the pattern suggests laying out all the pieces for the collage process and that finding and placing a focal point is the last step in the process. It rather pushes the quilt-maker back into it, before allowing the next step to take place. 

I want to find the story in this collage. Already, I am dreaming or envisioning it as a "witch town" but filling it with fabric ghosts that peer over rooftops or around house corners. There is a folklore to all places we live in from our current neighborhoods and homes to where we grew up or places we visit. Does my little village have a story? A focal point? Do I?