Snail Spirals

I've been working on a hardanger piece for the past couple days. I originally planned for it to be a bookmark, but I think it may be a bit too wide, and I might put it in a box lid instead. We'll see how it looks after it's cut out.

I am making this up as I go along, just doodling. For some reason, it turned out with heart motifs, which is not my usual style at all. I first did the hardanger area very plain, with just woven bars and no filling stitches. I thought I wanted clean and simple, uncluttered. But when the piece was done, I thought it looked a little stark (this is half the piece- the other end is a mirror image):



So I added some filler stitching to one of the hardanger areas to see how it looked:



This is a huge improvement, and I think I sort of came up with an original filler pattern design! I mean, I'm sure that someone, somewhere has done this before, as it's just wrapped spokes worked in diagonal lines through the corners of the woven bars, but I don't think I've ever seen them worked this way, as an allover pattern.



I quite like it.