This week’s interesting workshop was presented by Sue Stone, one of the UK’s foremost textile artists, well known for her portraits and other works using principally hand stitch.

The video, workbook and inspiration booklet were all very inspiring. The class project was designed to encourage us to search out and repurpose fabrics from used garments or other sources, including garments/textiles with a history of something significant to us. I’m always in favour of using what’s around for workshops, if at all possible, rather than buy new stuff for each one. While watching the video I remembered some old textiles I have including one or two things of Gran’s. I found one of them to be a white-on-white embroidered front panel of what had been a laundry bag – the clue being “Laundry” stitched in flowing script across the front. Hand printed in indian ink on the inside of the hem was my grandmother’s maiden name – ‘M.I. Scott’.

The first part of the project was to construct a fabric background from several printed fabrics, cut or torn into strips of varying width. These were woven together and pinned or stitched onto a backing piece about A4 size or smaller. This in itself is an interesting idea, and I asked Sue what size was the largest woven background she’s ever done – she said about 1.5m x 1.2m or so, so it is a technique that might have some potential some time.

The second part of the project was to stitch the outline of an object or a figure onto that, giving a nice ethereal effect of the figure floating against the background. I drew this figure from the memory of an early photo I have (in storage) of Gran holding me, aged about 2. The idea is to do lots of stitch along the strip borders, with some infilling stitch highlighting parts of the patterns on the print.

You can see strips of the white-on-white embroidery from Gran’s linen bag with my other fabrics. But it turned out that the rooster fabric was not colour fast, as even after just this small amount of stitching, already greeny-black colour was rubbing off onto the white fabric. Because of that and other problems, I won’t finish this piece; but I still have the drawing, and will repeat it with a different background. Or I could wash some of that rooster fabric and use it again …

This workshop was fun and some wonderful pieces were produced.

Recently the regional South and Central America and Caribbean group of SAQA revved up and is now communicating as never before on social media, particularly Facebook We were all asked to post a pic of one of our art quilts that featured some of the way we work. I chose to put up About Red, which I think particularly encapsulates my interest in lines and shapes with marks as stitch, plus of course, colour.

All the handstitching the I’ve been re-focused on since signing on for the Stitch Club workshops is starting to influence me, as I knew it would. I have even brought out for an airing my 40+ y.o. UFO, a hexagon patchwork quilt, adding some cream shapes to the border each day. It’s fine hand stitching of course, but nice to do while listening to the news which you don’t need to keep your eyes glued onto. This afternoon I’ll be listening to a one hour webinar in the Textile Talks series and it will be nice to be stitching during that, too. This week I dabbled with the following sample – I want a key element in what I have in mind to be hand stitch, and the glorious straight stitch is my favourite for its versatility.

This sample is telling me

• Colour oversewn with gold on cream looks restful, gently rich. I have many miles of gold and quite a large amount of silver thread 🙂
• Colour on cream oversewn with flourescent could be dramatic.
• Colour on black oversewn with either metallic or flourescent could be dramatic.
• I want to follow this further but need to decide if I prefer the frayed look that developed as I worked on this, or to go for a fusion adhesive backing before cutting the segments of colour.
• I love the fine gold lines but without the fabric behind the stitches they look blah on cream, but similar on black could look good.
• This type of fine metallic thread is not really strong, so to use the gold to actually quilt such a work would be best in poly thread of cream on cream, black on black, etc.
• I often work in the squares or grids that I love which are a remnant of the traditional patchwork influence in my work. Of course this basted black grid would be removed if this were a piece going on to completion.