I could have carried on stitching these little ATCs forever! There are so many little details that could have been added, the options were fairly endless. I could have attempted walkers in the field, rows of electricity pylons, lily pads or reeds in the water, clouds in the sky, a tractor!! I did try a boat in the water on one of them but I couldn't get the shape right so I pulled it out again.
These are just so joyful and I love that each one is different. The shapes were all randomly cut out and placed on each card then tacked down but the cards are the same in that they include those same fabrics, albeit in different quantities and compositions, and each fabric has been treated the same way.
The water has been edged, at least on one side per card, in baby ric-rac which I've stitched over rather than through. It's perhaps the most startling choice out of everything on the card but I was using it to try and make a sort of shingle bank or beach and have stitched it down with a pale beige so that the lighter cream is broken up a bit. The water itself has been stitched with rows of single strand running stitch and a glittery whip stitch added in a super skinny metallic thread that I found in The Mother's stash and borrowed for the occasion. The benefit of this broken whip stitch is that it creates movement and direction so hopefully the water looks more like it is moving, as well as slightly shiny.
Jetties have been added with just a few close straight stitches (not really neat enough for a true satin stitch) which I think really makes it look more watery for some reason.
The green layers have been embellished with seed stitch for the plain green, single strand back stitch in two colours following the lines of the striped fabric, back stitch again in two strands following the darker green batik fabric lines, and satin stitch over the spots in the spotted batik fabric. I've used a piece of green felt in each to add a little bit of height and to intimate at a hill with trees over the top in mixed colour acrylic yarn french knots. These are much bigger than other french knot tree lines I've made so hopefully they look like big mature oaks or something. I've also added a sprinkle in the centre of fields as well to help blend layers together.
My two yellow layers have had french knots following the pattern underneath for the linear spotted one, and single strand whipped back stitch on the stripy fabric. Single strand, one twist french knots have been added over the top of that in red to represent poppies in the wheat field.
For edgings I've got two different colours of string in a sandy gold and brighter green which have been couched down, then I've got one proper edging in french knots and two others in bullion knots for different textured hedge lines and field boundaries.
Finally, to finish, I've added sheep in one of the fields on each with two strand, two twist white french knot bodies and one strand, two twist black french knot heads. I think these are so cute!!!
Around the water areas I've also added little fly stitch birds in a dark blue/grey. I was worried these would be a bit lost or look strange because the angle of them is the same as if I were making a landscape piece where you look at it from the perspective of the ground but I think they still work and look like they're flying.
These cards are just so photograph-able! Every time you pick one up you can see new angles and pick up on little details, and they're also great fun to try and put together like a strange jigsaw. You can see in the bottom photo of this blog post how I've tried to put them together to make the water flow through all four cards as if they were segments of the same image. They're like those toys which you can twist and turn to make different pictures by moving one thing at a time, or a kaleidoscope maybe?
It took much longer than I thought to stitch these though - I naively thought that because all of the bits were so little it would be done in no time but actually that wasn't the case and I had to stop in the end because I needed the Waterlily cards in the same hoop to swap around. One day I really will have to count how long it takes me to make a Stitchscape themed thing.
So the stitch run down for these cards is; seed stitch, french knots, back stitch, whipped back stitch, whipped running stitch, satin stitch, fly stitch and couching. Not a huge number of stitches but in this case there's lots of emphasis on size and weight of line to try and bring things higher or lower than each other and create some depth in the landscape. It's a different challenge from my usual Stitchscape angle and I'd love to try a proper hoop piece like this as well (once I've finished all of my other projects and priorities!!).
No comments:
Post a Comment