“Black, white and a colour” embroidery course, exercise #3. To get our creative juices flowing, we painted on newsprint with Indian ink, painted on fabric to recapture the feeling of newsprint, and then finally used paper in our embroidery.

The design:

The painted fabric:

Putting it all together:

And just like for the past two exercises, I wouldn’t mind making another variation of this design but with different stitches and materials, and I have several more designs that I would also like to stitch, and actually I wouldn’t mind doing the whole exercise all over again.

The teacher’s design exercises really suits me perfectly. There’s just enough guidance and constraints to push me in directions I’d never have gone before, and still enough freedom to make the design my own. I get more ideas than I know what to do with, and I’m loving the outcomes. And the teacher’s feedback and our group discussions give rise to even more ideas.

Adrian is doing homework; I am keeping him company.

He has struggled in the past with setting aside sufficient time for doing his homework, and has repeatedly ended up leaving way too much work for the last minute. He’s also been rather resistant to any kinds of suggestions for various alternative ways to schedule time for homework. After school he wants to rest; weekends he wants to game with his friends. But now he’s found a new routine, which – most importantly – involves planning ahead and figuring out how much time he will likely need to spend on homework, and making time for it. It’s way later in the evening than I would ever choose for myself, but whatever works for him!

He is much more productive and happier when he has study company. (So is Ingrid, for that matter.) I get to practice French vocabulary, learn obscure Estonian spelling rules that I had no idea about (the spelling just is that way in my head, without any rules) and hear about different types of sports injuries and how to treat them.

Meanwhile I am working on my black and white embroidery exercises. I added a layer of watered-down acrylic paint on the embroidery that wasn’t quite black enough, and I’m doing the groundwork for the next one by sponge-painting a newsprint-like pattern.

I wasn’t entirely satisfied with my last exercise for the black and white embroidery course. I touched up the shapes to make the proportions better, and that helped. The difference is perhaps subtle in a photo but obvious when I hold the piece in front of me.

The surfaces are still not as black as I would like. I preferred the appliqué look with its proper, deep black. But the teacher argued that embroidery is about stitches, and a stitched surface has more character than plain appliqué, and I can see the point. Her suggestion was to paint the surface where I want it fully black.

Had I planned for this, I could have painted those parts of the fabric before embroidering. Now I’ll have to do it after. I don’t have black fabric paint but I do have black acrylic. I’m now experimenting with watered-down acrylic paint to see how it affects the look and feel of the fabric.

Speaking of paint, our second exercise is to paint on newsprint with Indian ink and use that as a starting point for our embroidery design. I don’t think I’ve ever worked with Indian ink. One immediate learning is just how much the brush matters for this. I had one broad, thick, stiff brush and one smaller one, much softer. The thick brush held on to the ink and gave me even, smooth strokes. The soft brush gave up most of its load of paint as soon as it met paper, then ran out of ink before I even finished the stroke, and the brushstrokes came out as blobs with tails. Both brushes are from the same main street hobby store, so I guess it’s not even a matter of quality but just type of brush.

This cardigan is accumulating more and more darned patches. I wear it a few times, and then find another threadbare patch that needs some TLC. They’re very unevenly distributed, and with no thought to what would look good – they just go where the holes are appearing. I’m thinking that maybe I should add more patches elsewhere, not so much to strengthen the fabric but to make it look more cohesive. I have enough of that yarn for a heck of a lot of darning.

The embroidery course isn’t until Tuesday, but the deadline for sending in photos of our work for discussion in Tuesday’s session is tomorrow afternoon, so I’ve been working hard.

The design inspiration:

And the first, A5-sized version:

And then the same thing scaled-down to A6:

I didn’t want the downscaling to be just a straight-up copy, because where is the fun in that, so I stitched the black areas instead of using appliqué. I kind of like it because the surfaces now have both structure as well as a flow and a direction. But I also don’t like it because the speckled look does not have the same impact at all as the unbroken black.

Also I just eyeballed the scaling-down and clearly didn’t get the proportions quite right. Should clearly have used a grid. The white blank space in the middle came out too large and takes over. I’m going to broaden the black curved areas around it, to balance it out – as soon as I buy more black embroidery floss, because all this surface-filling took a lot of yarn.

It’ll be interesting to hear what the teacher and the group will have to say about this.

Catching the morning sun for some embroidery. Embroidering in sunlight feels a lot nicer than doing it in lamplight in the evening.

“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.

“Black, white and one colour” embroidery course. First part of first exercise: make patterns, black on white, using a variety of pens.

I found this very relaxing and enjoyable. Just… make marks. Of whatever kind. Then make different kinds of marks. No expectations, no rules. Like stepping back into being a child and just doodling.

I made a bunch of patterns, and could have made more, if someone hadn’t occupied my stash of paper. I took that as a sign to call it a night.

I’ve signed up for an embroidery course for this autumn, in addition to the club I attend.

The club is very much a social thing – “turn up if you want and embroider whatever you want, or don’t embroider if that’s what you feel like today”. It’s fun and pleasant, gets me out of the house, meeting new people, embroidering more than I otherwise would. But a challenge it is not.

The course sounds like it will be really interesting. Titled Svart, vitt och en färg – “black, white and one colour” – it will focus on composition and graphical design in embroidery. I was super glad to find a course with such a modern and creative approach to embroidery – so many courses focus either on techniques and stitches, or particular established, traditional embroidery styles.

Today I went shopping for all the required materials listed for the course. It was a lot. The fabrics and threads made up less than half the list; the rest was all papers and paints and pens and brushes and crafts knife and cutting board and so on. Luckily I can borrow much of the basic stuff, like pens and brushes in various sizes, from Ingrid.

Embroidery club, first session of the term. I continue on my Stockholm embroidery, which is taking an absolute eternity. I’m half-way done at most. But: still enjoying it.

Today’s photo is a close-up showing the technique I use to fill in the crowns of the trees. Random, criss-corssing small stitches, sort of like overlapping rows of very mangled herringbone stitch.