Stitch Club: paint and stitch

Series: Stitch Club #2

Stitch Club from TextileArtist.org
Workshop: Water Ways with Paint and Stitch
Host: Monique Day-Wilde website – Instagram
Aim: Experiment with watery paint on fabric and add stitching in response to the paint.

I have to restrain myself with workshops like this. When a class starts with “paint some background material” (or collage papers or card backgrounds or…) it’s really easy to get carried away and end up adding so much to my already not-small stash. Luckily my lack of space for drying papers and fabrics is self-limiting! Even so I made more painted fabrics than I needed; I’m sure they’ll come in useful at some point.

I ended up embroidering two pieces in response to this workshop. This one is the first I started and is the least successful of the two, mainly because of the amount of contrast and general fussiness in the painted fabric. I do like the vaguely floral emblems I created, they just don’t stand out as well as they might.

I think if I was going to stitch on this type of pattern again, I would create garlands of small flowers that would flow along with the background design. Either that, or paint solid circles to place the larger elements on.

I stitched this in a hoop, but decided to mount it on a square of foam board. I don’t plan on displaying it anywhere, but it was a good opportunity to practise this mounting technique.