Dew Drop Blooms Stitchscape

 My latest completed bus project has been this little 12cm/5" hoop which started life as a quick example of layering for a workshop. I get asked a lot where my inspiration comes from and the honest answer sometimes is 'I've no idea!'. These examples are often thrown together the evening before a workshop after I've packed and realised that I have no demonstration pieces of how to layer the fabrics and I'll hurriedly grab handfuls of fabrics and see which ones I'm feeling at the time. In this case a handful of greens came out with a pale blue and I suppose subliminal inspiration came through seeing misty hill tops on the way in to Lewes on my way to work and a version of it got created in the hoop. 

It sounds very grand and arty to say things just happen, and I don't mean to sound pretentious, it's more of a trusting the process I suppose, combined with many years worth of putting fabrics together. 

There's no pre-planning on the vast majority of my hoops and as regular readers will know, I just dive right on in and cut the fabric without any drawn lines, seeing if it works or just layering what appears as a strip. 

I have a zip-lock pouch and in it I throw a near-blunt pair of scissors, a handful of likely looking matching threads, a needle and my hoop and away we go to the bus stop! Sometimes not all of the colours work exactly and they might not have been the ones I'd have chosen if I was at home with access to my thread boxes (like the rather zesty green in the middle there) but it makes you think and trial different things based on the materials at hand. 

For the wispy clouds I have covered the fabric in seed stitch using a single strand of a pale grey floss, and also a single strand of a silky DMC grey floss. I wanted something fluffy to edge it and, looking at the state of the end of the silky thread once you've finished stitching with it, experimented with fluffing up and destroying more of that thread to couch around the edges. In hindsight I wouldn't have done this first necessarily, although the fabric was fraying a bit, because the unruly silky strands then got caught up in nearly every other layer but I suppose they are like random tendrils of fog curling out to other areas of the landscape. 

I hopped around a bit filling in the layers for this piece - mainly because I didn't always have the right colours with me at the time - but that's the beauty of tacking the layers down because you don't have to work in an order. The top layer has a pale steely blue whipped back stitch around any obvious changes in the print, a large scale design with big paste flowers if I recall rightly, then edged actually in grey bullion knots, with running stitches to the top and bottom of the layer to make the grey blend in more. 

The next layer down has long straight stitches worked vertically to fill in patches of darker pattern which I was intending to look a bit pine-forest like. A slightly lighter green shade has been used to edge the fabric in french knots, drifting these down into the layer where there were gaps to sort of continue the tree/bush idea. 

The gorgeous splodge batik layer has has each 'splodge' filled with satin stitch, and I've taken these in different directions to catch the light and make it look a bit more natural. I was having a conversation with someone from the East Grinstead Embroiderers the other day about this, that the satin stitches are deliberately in different directions, because if you do them all in the same direction it creates a whole other effect, and can often look like you've done it on a canvas. Like a long stitch tapestry project maybe? I have done this once before and blogged about it (here) and even then said that I was going to try and mix it up a bit because I wasn't keen on the regimented stitches.

I have used three colours here to create a sort of ombre from light to dark which, to me, says that there is a shaft of light working it's way through that mist and shining a ray there. What does it say to you?

The fabric is edged by an old tweed effect yarn I have lying around in a basket at home.

The bottom fabric has been edged with a gorgeous baby ric-rac, only 3mm wide, and I've stitched diagonally across it to create a zig-zag effect rather than try to stitch through it. 

The batik fabric has been textured by back stitches in a single strand around every obvious shape, then dark green straight stitch stems scattered in clumps across it. I have used two strands for the majority of the stems, apart from the one clump right at the front, that is actually based off the calico backing, which I've doubled up to four strands to help make it look visibly closer. 

The stems did look a little bit odd and lonely on their own so I went back and added a single strand long fly stitch to each stem in a variegated green yarn. As the colours change across the layer, again I'm trying to bring in a sense of dark and light as that sunshine is working really hard to burn through the droplets of water in the air. 

Although they are a little bit oversized, and don't necessarily fit in with the sense of perspective, I did want to add these gorgeous pearly flower sequins. They aren't flat but have slight conical shape so they lift off the surface of the hoop and match perfectly with the silkiness of the silky DMC yarn in the clouds. I could have used beads to attach these to the fabric and then I wouldn't have had to stitch around them at all but I didn't want anything too shiny, so instead I have used a single strand of floss in a matching colour to stitch between each petal and through the centre, then used a dark steel blue to add a french knot in each centre to deepen that shape. I've used that same blue to make my traditional crosses to the bottom to match up. 

Overall, the stitch round up for this hoop includes; bullion knots, whipped back stitch, french knots, straight stitch, seed stitch, couching, satin stitch, running stitch, back stitch and fly stitch.