Thunder & Lightning

 

I'm nicely coasting along about three weeks behind on my blog posts, and most other things at the minute!! I don't know why it always comes as such a surprise that the end of November/beginning of December is absolutely bonkers, with the calendar stuffed full of multiple events a day, household jobs and festive jobs and work jobs coming out of your ears... it happens every year. But I think I'm beginning to see the light at the top of the Christmas tree now and I have a little more time to sit down and go through the projects I've been sneaking in. 

These, of course, are the Thunder and Lightning artist trading cards for the November Stitchscape Swap. It's another theme where I found a lot of the fabric ages ago at the beginning of the year at the Ardingly Quilt Show and have been hanging on to it for this very purpose. 

And I'll apologise in advance for the dodgy lighting - the photos were done very late at night and I could only find one of my daylight lamps so used a show lamp with a different lighting colour... it seemed fine on the camera but is very strange on the screen with the two sides!

These are very busy cards. There's lots of pattern and juxtaposition (big word!) between light and dark here and I kind of wanted it that way. Lightning is easy to portray, you just do some streaks of bright slashes across the landscape and done, but thunder is more mysterious and less obvious so I have gone with busy and slightly overwhelming prints to make it very noisy, like the thunder. I hope it kind of comes across and doesn't just look a mess. Either way, they certainly aren't calm and peaceful cards!

I don't know whether I should have made the lightning a bit bigger and bolder though? Perhaps the spikes disappear too much into my busy backgrounds. They have been made by couching on a full strand of embroidery thread, which I split into smaller strands going down. That was a bit of a faff to be honest, and I've ended up stitching single strand offshoots in gaps to fill areas out, but I think it worked relatively well. For additional sparkle, right at the last minute I added on a single strand of metallic silver thread backstitched just to one side of each of the thicker sections of lightning so that there was a sparkling element. 

I've added in splashes of dark blue into this as well to give it some colour. The top fabric layer with its splash print pattern is actually a dark blue with grey and I've not stitched this layer other than to edge it. For this I mixed up a blue and grey in the needle at once to create mottled french knots which I think have worked really nicely there. 

Underneath all of the layers I've used a pale grey fabric which represents when the whole sky lights up at the point of a flash, even if you can't see the forked lines from where you are. It illuminates the sky and turns trees and mountains into silhouettes, which is why this fabric layer was the first one to go down in the hoop, like a streak on the horizon. 

The mountain is a lovely black and silvery batik print and I've gone around all of the splodges in this with back stitch to give it some texture, then edged it with bullion knots for a fairly clean looking edge. 

In my stash I have a wonderful two-colour ric-rac in blue and white, which I've used before as waves but here I've used it to match in with the sky and be a different texture. It could be a bush, a fence, a trackway...however you'd like to interpret it. 

The flowers are woven wheel stitch in black (which naturally has picked up all the small fibres so looks quite hairy in the photos!) so they are quite puffy and fun to feel under your fingers. I've added clear little beads into the centres to just pick up some sparkle as a reflection of the lightning, almost like little eyes that the flowers are watching the light show with. I've also popped in some detached chain stitches as leaves just to give them something to sit in rather than floating aimlessly around that bottom layer. 

I think if I had another crack at these, I would use something else for the lightning that's a bit bolder or chunkier. Perhaps a shiny yarn? I don't really want anything woolly though, it needs to be something smooth and sleek and sharp. It could be combined layers of the DMC silky embroidery floss I suppose, with the slight sheen it already has in it?

Who knows, if you know of the most perfect lightning thread/yarn/material, let me know!

The stitch run down for these cards is; french knots, couching, straight stitch, back stitch, bullion knots, running stitch, detached chain stitch, woven wheel stitch and beading.