Machine embroidery tip

Sometimes you need to stand back from something and view it another way. Two ways of doing this are to 1. leave it a few days and go back with fresh 'eyes' and 2. to take a photo and then have a look at it instead. So given that a piece of machine embroidery I am working on needs accurate colours for water and sky, I decided to take a photo and placed some thread on it so that I could check the colours for suitability. (The piece is for the wall hanging and it is Catbells seen from Derwentwater.) This is the right side of the lake and I need to bring it to life with a bit of a shine so I am using Madeira embroidery thread. The left side has gone towards blue and I want to introduce a bit more green. It is never easy depicting water and the whole idea is that the lake should have movement, like ripples. So I have now 'auditioned' this thread as the Americans say! I know it seems to be a lot of trouble but you can't really unpick machine embroidery and sometimes you just have to go for it.....


The second problem is the sky, which at the moment is just painted on with silk paint, incidentally the fabric is a rough, tough calico. So this second photo should help me decide on the colours for the sky.

I need to bring a bit more tone into the composition too, but that can wait until I add some shading which is missing. So its more work on the Bernina this afternoon.

Meanwhile, I thought you might like to see a couple of photos from the felt making at Threlkeld last week. So here is a shot of some Nuno felt shown to us as an example of what could be achieved.

The photo below shows Marilyn explaining how to start treating the edges of the first felting so that they are straight.


It was a very good workshop but I could not stay to see what happened in the afternoon session, however, I did bump into Joan who said it had been very worthwhile. You can of course do so much with felt, and just to prove it, here is another picture of Marilyn's dog Holly, but this time the felted version. Isn't it cute!