Painting with Stitches

Wow!  What a day!

This workshop was a while ago now but I would like to share it with you as the technique used for creating stitched pictures is a wonderful way for those of us who cannot draw to create our own unique pieces.

First let me introduce you to Sue Dove author of Painting with Stitches.  A very talented lady with a passion for painting and embroidery, Sue creates colourful, quirky textile pictures by creating a collage in paper and oil pastels first, before turning this into a hand stitched embroidery.

Sue came up from her studio in St Ives to do a one day 'Collage and Stitch' workshop. To provide the inspiration for the final piece we began the day by tearing up magazines (very therapeutic!) to create a collage. To keep things simple, the theme was flowers.

This is how mine looked in it's first stage of construction.

The next stage was using oil pastels to fill in the background.

Having completed our 'drawing' it was now time to create the fabric version.  We began rummaging through loads of scrap fabric that Sue had brought along, chosing pieces to replicate our 'drawing'. We started by laying out the background fabrics and then adding the detail.  Once this was done we could then begin tacking the pieces in place before beginning the embroidery.

Time was running out fast and unfortunately I only managed a little embroidery on the day. Below you can see the comparison between my original 'drawing' and the stitched piece.

Sue's work is mainly embroidered by hand and I know she always has a piece in her bag to work on when she has a spare minute.  I found it quite hard on the fingers, to sew through all the layers of fabric so I'm afraid I cheated and did most of mine by machine.

You can see though, I got there in the end!  To keep all the large background pieces in place I added stitching creating the illusion of a jigsaw puzzle and to finish it all off I added a crocheted border.

I had no idea how this was going to turn out when I started although I was rather pleased with the result. It's not my usual kind of work but the process used was interesting and I would definitely use this technique again as it is a wonderfully free way of creating a picture.

We will be spending the weekend with friends when this post goes out so I shall look forward to seeing what everyone has got up to this week on Handmade Monday when I get home.