Ottawa School of Art - Week 4

Apparently  over 300 embroidery stitches have been developed and perfected over hundreds of years. In this week's class and next, I'm supposed to be learning 6 or 7 of the 300.

We get to choose which ones - it all depends on the picture we have chosen to do, and how we each choose to represent the textures and objects in our drawings. I think it took longer to go through books to choose stitches than the time that we were stitching.

As this is not a "traditional" embroidery class, we tend towards non-traditional backgrounds in most cases including paper, denim, felt, even leather and canvas. There was some discussion of trying plastic or mylar to see how it would work. As my work in the past has been on paper and since some stitches don't lend themselves well to paper, I am trying out different fabrics and alternatives.

The piece I am working on will end up being a colour wheel, and will be used as a training tool for teaching colour theory in my classes and when teaching stitching on paper. And hopefully it will also make an interesting piece of wall art. To do a full colour wheel plus neutrals, I should end up doing at least 14-15 different stitches. Two done.....

Van Dyke Stitch - done on jersey which is not easy. I had never even heard of this stitch until yesterday.

Trellis Stitch - this is do much easier done on cotton. What a difference from jersey!