Leaf stitching

Leaf stitching

Free motion stitching with either the stitch regulator or the "pogo" stick is a relatively quick way of practising  thread drawing and different designs. The feed dogs get dropped and the needle pressure dropped to "zero" enabling easy movement around the bonded tissue and felt. I make up multiple bonded pieces at a time and keep them handy. They are approximately 15 x 20 cm rectangles. When opportunities  to stitch arise, no matter how short, it's great to threadplay on smaller pieces. The stitched leaves were created using two embroidery threads together - some with two similar greens, others by combining a medium with a darker shade, and finally mixing a dark olive green with a brown umber tone.  Finishing the piece with gold thread in broken lines did not work for me (that was my contribution to the exercise) and another lesson in the "less is more" bucket.

Bay leaves ...

The leaf design was based on bay leaves from our tree - one fresh and lemony green new, the other aged and olive tough. They were scanned through the printer then resized a few times, copied and reverse imaged, pasted etc until the page to be printed was filled. There is such beauty in repetition - both of shape and colour.
I now wish I had a photo of my father's hankies - one washing day all 200 of them it seemed were lined up in groups of two or three like Tibetan flags ... on a single length of line. The power of repetition.