“Black, white and one colour” embroidery course. Step two of the first exercise. Cut out shapes from the patterns from the previous steps. Combine them with shapes in black, on an A3 piece of paper. Then frame a smaller (A5-ish) section of it, and that will be the design for an embroidered piece. An additional instruction was to not think about the embroidery aspect, but just play with the shapes and patterns.

This was such a new way for me of approaching embroidery design. Either I just make things up as I go – or I have some idea or concept of direction in mind, and tweak the details. This was in between. I am making a design before embroidering, but with no direction to aim for. Just whatever comes out.

Like yesterday’s pattern-drawing, this was a lot of fun. Playing around with paper and scissors and glue, and producing random things of no particular importance.

Some patterns that I liked in their original shape turned out to be mostly useless for this, because cutting them up would lose the whole thing that made them interesting. I still like them, so I might use them for an embroidery design as they are, at some later time.