A long way from done

There was never any hope that I'd meet the Tea Towel Challenge end date of March 29, given how late I jumped in, but that's not stopping forward progress. Here's where things stand with my "tea-towel-ish" WIP:

First steps: Fused the original panel to some lightweight woven interfacing, trimmed all sides to square up and more closely center the image, and added some framing strips:

That blue-gold print has a lot of metallic detail, and introduces a little bit of contrasting color to balance what will be a mostly orange piece.

Here's the full thing at this stage. It's showing signs of not wanting to be a medallion layout. We'll see how it goes.

The orange fabric beside it is my touch-stone print for a made-fabric border that will range lighter/darker, brighter/duller, redder/yellower, without straying too far in any of those directions. I'd no idea, until a deep rummage through all sizes of scraps was done, how many orange/brown fabrics were in there!

My "made fabric" is all right angles , inspired by the grid-like motif that forms the panel background. Made like so:

1) Cut a heap of strips. These are mostly 1.5" and 1.75" wide:

2) Find strips of similar length and sew into strata:

3) Cross-cut and resew into sections like this:

4) Which get assembled into fabric like this:

5) Which will be re-cut for a pieced border when I get another slab or two like this one made.

I have a plan for that border, but it is subject to change. More pics to come...