Applique Handwork for a Road Trip (Part 2)

There was a slight change of plans for our road trip.  At the last minute I went by plane, rather than by car.  I was actually quite bummed that I would not get all that nice time to do hand sewing.  So I ended up taking just one project with me, as well as some crocheting.  

First of all, I went to my LQS (Local Quilt Shop) to buy some Perle Cotton in ecru to do my stitching.  They come in those cute little balls, all wound so precisely.  Well, that was until my kitties found it!  It happened just a few minutes after I got home.  So I took this photo and emailed it to Marva, my LQS owner, because I thought it was so funny!  She ended up putting it on Facebook, which I found amusing.  

 Those cats had gotten an awful lot of thread removed from the ball!  So the next thing was to re-wind the thread onto the ball. 

No, it's' definitely not the neat little ball that it originally was!

So here's the project.  I had a piece of tan-colored silk, kind of a very light cafe au lait color.  It's quite a few years old.  I acquired it by going to a class that was teaching us how to use traditional Japanese shibori dyeing. That's when natural plants are used to naturally dye fabric.  And the dye patterns are determined by how the fabric gets folded, pleated, or otherwise manipulated.  It's been so long since the class that I can't remember exactly what I did with my fabric. But it has some little random circles on it.  Some of the circles are square-ish shaped.

I paired it with this tan/red floral fabric for the backing.  I sewed the fabrics right sides together, but left the ends open.  My idea is to do some sashiko-type stitching in a random, free-form all-over design to hold the two fabrics together to be a scarf.

Here is some of the stitching.  It's quite fun to just go wherever I feel like with my stitches!  This photo shows the end of the scarf where I started the sewing.  You can see some of the pink basting threads in the photo.  I needed to keep the two fabrics stabilized, so they wouldn't shift around on me as I was handling it and stitching it.

And here's how it looks on the back.

I'm starting and stopping each thread by pulling the small knot through to the wrong side of the backing fabric, so they are all buried between the fabrics.