More work on my final hand-stitch piece this week. I have made myself a swatch board with all the different colours of painted paper in my design, together with notes of how I mixed the colours. This was very useful when I went to the shop to buy the embroidery cottons I needed to sew the stitches.
As we are not allowed to use Brusho to colour our fabric for the final piece (because it is not light-fast) I now have to work out how to achieve these colours using acrylic paints.
Getting the colours right was not too hard but painting the fabric so that it didn't streak too much was. These samples are on cotton, linen and evenweave canvas. I have decided to use linen for the background and leaves and evenweave for the blackwork flower heads.
I have also been creating stitch samples to try out the different stitches and techniques. You just have to do enough to prove to yourself that you like or don't like the effect you are getting.
The bit I still have to focus on is getting the birch trees right. Although I like the stitch sample on the right, the black is too strong so I need to have another go with more muted greys.
This weekend a few of us from college went to the Art and Craft Show as Owlesbury - a village the far side of Winchester. Our class support from college, Alison, was demonstrating the use of her embellishing machine. This is a machine with 12 barbed needles and no thread. It rapidly meshes the fibres of the threads and fabrics together in a kind of machine needle felt.
I bought one of her cards - see left.
There was lots of other textile art on display.
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| These pieces are by Caroline Bell, a degree student at Eastleigh College. She obviously admires Angie Lewin as much as I do as the left, top and right hand pieces are very similar to prints in the book I am using to inspire my final piece. |
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Quilt inspired by Matisse by Sue Chapman, a lecturer at Eastleigh College
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