Week 1 - Printing, Collage and Stitching

In September 2011 I chose to take redundancy after 24 years working at the same company. This is the blog of how I am spending my gap year being more creative.


I started a part-time City and Guilds Level 2 Embroidery course at Eastleigh College on Monday. What fun! We were given 'found objects' (cardboard, sticks, combs etc) and a tray of black and white paint and made repeating patterns with the objects on brown paper.

Then we ripped them up to create an imaginary landscape. I had made mostly geometric patterns so mine had to be a cityscape.

We used strips of card to isolate an interesting part of our landscape.

We were given a piece of hessian and lots of lovely yarns and threads to use, including strips of black bin-liner! Homework was to interpret our selected part of the landscape in stitch.

Here is the finished piece. I enjoyed the challenge of interpreting the different painted elements but I'm not sure it is greater than the sum of its parts. Stitches used: straight, runnings, stem, blanket, stab, split, satin and couching.